CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 61 



the culprit, shudderingly. &quot; Because thou art not like unto 

 Us,&quot; answers Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and there is no 

 more to be said. The god of this world may be a fallen 

 angel, but he has us there ! We were as clean, so far as 

 my observation goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and 

 physically, than the English, and therefore, of course, than 

 anybody else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong ou 

 as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, following 

 therein the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could 

 bring over no English better than Shakespeare s ; and we 

 did not stammer as they had learned to do from the 

 courtiers, who in this way nattered the Hanoverian king, a 

 foreigner among the people he had come to reign over. 

 Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas and the 

 finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them through 

 that organ by which men are led rather than leaders, though 

 some physiologists would persuade us that Nature furnishes 

 her captains with a fine handle to their faces that Oppor 

 tunity may get a good purchase on them for dragging them 

 to the front. 



This state of things was so painful that excellent people 

 were not wanting who gave their whole genius to repro 

 ducing here the original Bull, whether by gaiters, the cut 

 of their whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their tone, or 

 by an accent that was for ever tripping and falling flat over 

 the tangled roots of our common tongue. Martyrs to a 

 false ideal, it never occurred to them that nothing is more 

 hateful to gods and men than a second-rate Englishman, 

 and for the very reason that this planet never produced a 

 more splendid creature than the first-rate one, witness 

 Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that truly 

 sublime self-abnegation of those prisoners lately among the 

 bandits of Greece, where average men gave an example of 

 quiet fortitude for which all the stoicism of antiquity can 

 show no match. If we could contrive to be not too unob 

 trusively our simple selves, we should be the most delightful 

 of human beings, and the most original ; whereas, when 

 the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it always will in points 



