Seven English Cities eBook

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No error of the Englishman’s latest invader is commoner than the notion, which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American, tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly conditions.  The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with us, may become a sort of American.  But that is the affair of a possible future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort of Bostonian.  He does not even speak the American language, whatever outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own.  It may be said, rather too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King, or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to prevail.  The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no case does he spell American.  He prefers, as far as he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said “geole,” the Conquered print “gaol,” which the American invader must pronounce “jail,” not “gayol.”

The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned principle, but a passion induced by the general volition.  Whatever it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies.  A few years ago—­say, fifteen or twenty—­it was scarcely known in its present form.  It was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired.  I should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment for “the free peoples of antiquity” rather than from the Commonwealth.  Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen’s subjects when the Prince of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as prime among the civic virtues and duties.  The notion took the general fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar.  One of the vulgar lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, “Oh yes, but you know that it is only your people