HUGUENOT INFLUENCE 203 



landers, and the brown skin and dark eyes common'? 

 This subject is considered philosophically by Horace 

 Graves, of whose study, ''The Huguenot in New Eng- 

 land," we make free use in this chapter. 

 So keen an author as Hawthorne, who had full chance contrast 



Drawn by 



to observe, in his English Note Book sets forth in strong Hawthorne 

 colours the characteristics of the Englishmen who have 

 remained at home, and of those who are the product of 

 two or three centuries of life in America. ' ' We, in our 

 dry atmosphere, " he wrote in 1863, "are getting nervous, 

 haggard, dyspeptic, extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, 

 and need to be made grosser. John Bull, ou the other 

 hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short- legged, 

 heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely 

 English. In a few centuries he will be the earthiest 

 creature that the earth ever saw." 



He speaks still more candidly of the British woman, as ungaiiant but 

 contrasted with her American sister. ' ' I have heard a ^^'^ "^ 

 good deal of the tenacity with which the English ladies 

 retain their personal beauty to a late period of life ; but 

 it strikes me that an English lady of fifty is apt to become 

 a creature less refined and delicate, so far as her physique 

 goes, than anything that we western people class under 

 the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of 

 frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few 

 fat women, but massive, with solid beef and streaky tal- 

 low ; so that (though struggling manfully against the idea) 

 you inevitably think of her as made up of steaks and 

 sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. 

 When she sits down, it is on a great round space of her 

 Maker's footstool, where she looks as if nothing could 

 ever move her. Her visage is unusually grim and stern, 

 seldom positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not 

 merely by its breadth and weight of feature, but because 

 it seems to express so much well-founded self-reliance." 



Hawthorne and others attributed this great difference cumate as 

 in the men and women of the two countries to climate, ^®"^^ 



