society in its own home; it can be judged with some approach to fairness even in America. During a long residence at Newport, R. I., I met a number of young English noblemen, first and last, at the clubs and elsewhere, and I can recall but one who was not, in point of manners, below the average of the Americans whom one encountered in the same social circle. The exception rather went to prove the rule, for it was in case of one who had not then come into his present title, who had spent his life in Holland, and had not merely a distinguished bearing, but agreeable continental manners. In the other cases, even where there was some superiority of intellect, as in case of the late Lord Amberley, the presence was often insignificant, and the manners shy and awkward, if nothing worse. Not that men of this class were habitually overbearing; that is a rare attribute, I fancy, among Englishmen of high rank; but they were apt to be gauche, inconsiderate, and by no means what an American would call high-bred, scarcely even well-bred.

Indeed, there are those who would assert that the very finest manners, while not at all sure to be developed in a republic, are scarcely compatible with anything but a republic, or a nation which has, at any rate, the republican spirit. It is very certain that conditions quite unrepublican may develop-as was the case, for instance, under the old French monarchy, or amid our southern slavery-truly fine manners; but these will never be the very finest manners, because they will not be equally applicable to all classes and conditions of men. I remember that when spending a winter in the island of Fayal, where more of the old European tradition then survived than in Europe itself, I was struck with the great courtesy of the Portuguese gentry, among whom it was the custom to uncover the head to every lady they saw, whether they knew her or not. On speaking of this fact to one of the really high-bred ladies of the American family of Dabney, then residing on that island, she said of these same youths, "They impose upon you; they are not really gentlemen; they have not even the material in them out of which gentlemen can be made." And when later I watched these same young Portuguese caracoling through the streets on horseback, and carelessly riding over a peasant woman or a child in their

solicitude to be admired by the ladies on the balcony, I saw the truth of the criticism. On the other hand, those who watched the late Mr. Charles Dabney-the head of the family just named, and our American consul for so many years at Fayal-saw fine manners that were ingrain, manners which to call princely were to flatter princes unduly; for while he could outdo the Portuguese at their own game of courtliness, he had precisely the same lofty grace for every barefoot boy who laid down his orange-basket to salute him. In the same way, I remember, I used to enjoy walking in the street behind the stately figure of the late Samuel Powel of Newport, R. L., and seeing him salute millionaires and old apple-women with precisely the same highbred courtesy. These men afforded types of the very best

American manners, a mauner which extends to the humblest those amenities that elsewhere are graduated by the trivial dis tinctions of social rank alone.

In America there are at present certain especial influences under which the average man or woman is learning those elementary rules of manners which furnish the foundation for even conventional good breeding. One of these is the public school, where from every pupil are exacted, for five or six hours a day, the minor habits of outward propriety, such as cleanliness, selfcontrol, order, reticence, mutual courtesy. Whatever else the public-school system inculcates, it certainly teaches these things, and to a far greater extent than one finds them taught in the English schools, where the old rough-and-tumble method still prevails. All recognize this source of influence; but another schooling, less obvious, takes the average American after ma turity, and exercises a mighty influence. This is the training of the lodge-room. Looking in the directory of the minor city where I reside, I find a list of nearly a hundred lodges, chapters, or circles of secret societies, mostly benevolent in their object, but all involving a certain amount of formality, decorum, and ritual; a ceremonial so elaborate that they call it technically "work." Probably the majority of adult men in the city be long to some such organization. I know men who attend one nearly every day in the week; and some of these associations are open to women also. It is difficult not to regard much of

this sort of thing as a waste of time, and not to

smile sometimes

But it must not

at the uniforms and the high-sounding titles. be forgotten that it is all one great school of manners; it is training all its pupils to courtesy. Not only is a good moral standard demanded in all these organizations, but there is a very distinct appreciation of the form in which things are to be done; and much of the habitual politeness with which Americans of all classes treat one another, in traveling and in business, comes, doubtless, from the friction and the examples of the lodge-room. Probably the trade-unions and all affiliated labor organizations work in the same direction, though with less formality of ritual.

Indeed all political activity itself tends in a way similar to this with us; for the essence of political life is order in debate and procedure, and this has developed itself in this country to an extent elsewhere unknown. When a public meeting is once organized, there is here visible an almost excessive deference to the rules of "Cushing's Manual," which are merely embod ied good manners; and nothing is rarer or more unpopular in America than a spectacle extremely common in England, that of a party meeting interrupted and captured by the opposite party. The writer has taken part in innumerable political gatherings, during exciting canvasses, in half a dozen different States of the Union, and never saw even an attempt at such a thing. Not that it is unheard of, but it is so utterly disapproved that it would surely react against the party attempting it, through the sense of propriety now engrafted on public opinion. An American audience is also far more patient with its own speakers, and rarely suppresses them by calling "Time! time!" in the way that is common in the mother-country; while, on the other hand, we adopted the principle of clôture, or the "previous question," long before the mother-country had come to it. The American who visits the House of Commons is not impressed with better legislative manners than he sees at home, but with the contrary. It is difficult to imagine a more unseemly spectacle than a row of honorable members sitting, as I have seen them in Parliament, with their hats on, their hands in their pockets, their eyes shut, and their heads wearily leaning against the wall or the bench, shouting "Divide! divide! divide!"

while an important measure is being debated. It is common to say that the ill manners of the House of Commons date from the period of Irish incursion; but those who read, forty years ago, the then famous book, "Ten Thousand a Year," can recall that the miserable little upstart, Tittlebat Titmouse, at once established himself as a source of power in Parliament by an especial talent of crowing like a cock; and the wrath excited, twenty years ago, by Sir Charles Dilke's famous motion took the form of an attack on Auberon Herbert, in which his opponents doubtless sighed for one hour of Titmouse.

A good deal of the difference between the two countries in respect to manners lies, no doubt, in the greater or less degree of sensitiveness in the national temperament. Miss Yonge, in a recent story, has an odd defense of her countrymen against the American charge of being thick-skinned. She says of one of her heroes-she or some other of the authors who wrote "Astray""His skin is of that saddle-leather kind which American books attribute to all Englishmen, though I think it is rare, really." But it is a thickness of the mental epidermis that Americans sometimes charge upon Englishmen, an obtuseness which is fatal to good manners, if it leads to an habitual disregard of the feelings of all around them, as when our very guests refuse audibly, as "nasty" or "beastly," the modest food that is set before them by their host. The late James T. Fields had a favorite anecdote of an English guest at his breakfast-table, who declined sugar with his coffee. "Never take sugar unless the coffee is very, very bad, indeed, you know." Then presently, after tasting the coffee, "May I trouble you for the sugar?' Not only is this propensity seldom hidden, but it sometimes seems to count for a virtue. I remember that when the late Captain Mayne Reid was living in Newport, R. I., he was invited to dine on Christmas Day at the house of the late Governor W. B. Lawrence, the well-known writer on international law, and made some remarks at table which were justly regarded by the whole company as exceedingly offensive. Being pretty well acquainted with him, I took the liberty to sound him on the subject, wishing to get at his side of the question. Instead of seeming in the least annoyed about it, he smiled with an air of

peculiar complacency and said, "I give you my word of honor that I have often dined at tables in England where I have felt it my duty to make remarks that were much more offensive to my host than anything I can possibly have said at Governor Lawrence's table." He measured his merit by the degree of annoyance he caused; and one is reminded of this when Mr. Froude tells us that the Haytians cry out against Sir Spencer St. John's book about them "with a degree of anger which is the surest evidence of its truth."* After all, the reasoning is defective; a man may show annoyance at being called a sheep-stealer without thereby proving that he has just been released from jail.

Another result of this apparent induration of the cuticle in Englishmen is the curious coarseness of phrase which so often annoys an American. No time can ever reconcile a cis-Atlantic ear to the heartiness with which an otherwise well-bred English lady will talk frankly of "tubbing" and of "cleaning herself." It suggests the complaint made by Lord Melbourne of certain London beauties, that they gave him too much of their natural history. I do not know any well-educated Americans, except one or two Southern lady novelists, who habitually use the word "nigger," but in English literature and speech it seems universal. Froude employs it through all his books of travel, and even so graceful a writer as the late Mrs. Ewing uses it in her pretty stories. She also has the very offensive word "stinking," and one finds and hears it everywhere. "As a rule," writes James Payn from London, in the New York "Independent," "I hate people that stink of money." So, in society, Americans are constantly placed in the absurd position of being lectured for want of refined perception by writers whose language and manners offend us at every step. The highest, the most gifted, are not free from this offensiveness of language. When I heard the most eminent of English poets say of some bad verse that it was "rot," at a time when that odious Anglicism had not yet crossed the Atlantic, it seemed to my startled imagination as if the Venus of Milo had opened her marble lips and had begun to curse and swear. The trouble is, that such phrases reach us also very rapidly, and take root *The English in the West Indies,” p. 343. Jan. 19, 1888.