In the case of “The Nights,” I am exposed to that peculiar Protestant form of hypocrisy, so different from the Tartuffean original of Catholicism, and still as mighty a motor force, throughout the length and breadth of the North-American continent, as within the narrow limits of England.  There also as here it goes hand-in-hand with “Respectability” to blind judgment and good sense.

A great surgeon of our day said (or is said to have said) in addressing his students:—­ “Never forget, gentlemen, that you have to deal with an ignorant public.”  The dictum may fairly be extended from medical knowledge to general information amongst the many headed of England; and the Publisher, when rejecting a too recondite book, will repeat parrot-fashion, The English public is not a learned body.  Equally valid is the statement in the case of the Anglo-American community which is still half-educated and very far from being erudite.  The vast country has produced a few men of great and original genius, such as Emerson and Theodore Parker, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman; but the sum total is as yet too small to leaven the mighty mass which learns its rudiments at school and college and which finishes its education with the newspaper and the lecture.  When Emerson died it was said that the intellectual glory of a continent had departed; but Edgar A. Poe, the peculiar poetic glory of the States, the first Transatlantic who dared be himself and who disdained to borrow from Schiller and Byron, the outlander poet who, as Edgar Allan Poe, is now the prime favourite in France, appears to be still under ban because he separated like Byron from his spouse, and he led a manner of so-called “Bohemian” life.  Indeed the wide diffusion of letters in the States, that favourite theme for boasting and bragging over the unenlightened and analphabetic Old World, has tended only to exaggerate the defective and disagreeable side of a national character lacking geniality and bristling with prickly individuality.  This disposition of mind, whose favourable and laudable presentations are love of liberty and self-reliance, began with the beginnings of American history.  The “Fathers,” Pilgrim and Puritan, who left their country for their country’s good and their own, fled from lay tyranny and clerkly oppression only to oppress and tyrannise over others in new and distant homes.  Hardly had a century and a half elapsed before the sturdy colonists, who did not claim freedom but determined to keep it, formally revolted and fought their way to absolute independence—­not, by the by, a feat whereof to be overproud when a whole country rose unanimously against a handful of troops.  The movement, however, reacted powerfully upon the politics of Europe, which stood agape for change, and undoubtedly precipitated the great French Revolution.  As soon as the States became an empire, their democratic and republican institutions at once attracted hosts of emigrants from the Old World, thus peopling the