old domestic differences, in perfect good temper.  We go on in our way; they theirs, in the apparent belief that Republicanism operates remarkable changes in human nature.  Vernon tries hard to think it does.  The upper ten of our cousins are the Infernal of Paris.  The rest of them is Radical England, as far as I am acquainted with that section of my country.”—­Where we compared, they were absurd; where we contrasted, they were monstrous.  The contrast of Vernon’s letters with Willoughby’s was just as extreme.  You could hardly have taken them for relatives travelling together, or Vernon Whitford for a born and bred Englishman.  The same scenes furnished by these two pens might have been sketched in different hemispheres.  Vernon had no irony.  He had nothing of Willoughby’s epistolary creative power, which, causing his family and friends to exclaim:  “How like him that is!” conjured them across the broad Atlantic to behold and clap hands at his lordliness.

They saw him distinctly, as with the naked eye; a word, a turn of the pen, or a word unsaid, offered the picture of him in America, Japan, China, Australia, nay, the continent of Europe, holding an English review of his Maker’s grotesques.  Vernon seemed a sheepish fellow, without stature abroad, glad of a compliment, grateful for a dinner, endeavouring sadly to digest all he saw and heard.  But one was a Patterne; the other a Whitford.  One had genius; the other pottered after him with the title of student.  One was the English gentleman wherever he went; the other was a new kind of thing, nondescript, produced in England of late, and not likely to come to much good himself, or do much good to the country.

Vernon’s dancing in America was capitally described by Willoughby.  “Adieu to our cousins!” the latter wrote on his voyage to Japan.  “I may possibly have had some vogue in their ball-rooms, and in showing them an English seat on horseback:  I must resign myself if I have not been popular among them.  I could not sing their national song—­if a congery of states be a nation—­and I must confess I listened with frigid politeness to their singing of it.  A great people, no doubt.  Adieu to them.  I have had to tear old Vernon away.  He had serious thoughts of settling, means to correspond with some of them.”  On the whole, forgetting two or more “traits of insolence” on the part of his hosts, which he cited, Willoughby escaped pretty comfortably.  The President had been, consciously or not, uncivil, but one knew his origin!  Upon these interjections, placable flicks of the lionly tail addressed to Britannia the Ruler, who expected him in some mildish way to lash terga cauda in retiring, Sir Willoughby Patterne passed from a land of alien manners; and ever after he spoke of America respectfully and pensively, with a tail tucked in, as it were.  His travels were profitable to himself.  The fact is, that there are cousins who come to greatness and must be pacified, or they will prove annoying.  Heaven forefend a collision between cousins!