AN OCTOBER ABROAD 177 



creature from what he is abroad. There he is 

 " sweet, " but he sours the moment he steps ofif the 

 island. In this country he is too generally arro- 

 gant, fault-finding, and supercilious. The very 

 traits of loudness, sharpness, and unleavenedness, 

 which I complain of in our national manners, he 

 very frequently exemplifies in an exaggerated form. 



The Scotch or German element no doubt fuses 

 and mixes with ours much more readily than the 

 purely British. 



The traveler feels the past in England as of 

 course he cannot feel it here; and, along with im- 

 pressions of the present, one gets the flavor and in- 

 fluence of earlier, simpler times, which, no doubt, is 

 a potent charm, and one source of the "rose-color" 

 which some readers have found in my sketches, as 

 the absence of it is one cause of the raw, acrid, un- 

 lovely character of much there is in this country. 

 If the English are the old wine, we are the new. 

 We are not yet thoroughly leavened as a people, nor 

 have we more than begun to transmute and human- 

 ize our surroundings; and, as the digestive and as- 

 similative powers of the American are clearly less 

 than those of the Englishman, to say nothing of our 

 harsher, more violent climate, I have no idea that 

 ours can ever become the mellow land that Brit- 

 ain is. 



As for the charge of brutality that is often brought 

 against the English, and which is so successfully 

 depicted by Dickens and Thackeray, there is doubt- 

 less good ground for it, though I actually saw very 



