That this judgment of the rank and file is not uncharitable we had proof in the demeanor and talk of the visitors.
“James!” cried a wife to her heedless husband, when abreast of the tomb of Henry III. “You don’t look at nothink you parss. Don’t you see this is the tomb of ’Enry Thirteenth?”
“’Enry or ’Arry!” growled her lord without taking his hands from his pocket—“Wot do I care for _he_?”
None of the comments, we overheard, upon the treasures of this grandest of burial-places amused us more than the talk of a respectable-looking man with his bright-eyed ten-year old son over the memorial to Sir John Franklin. Beneath a fine bust of the hero-explorer is a bas-relief of the Erebus and Terror locked in the ice.
“See the vessels in the rocks, Pa!” cried the boy. “Or—is it ice?”
“I don’t rightly know, Charley. Don’t touch!”
“I wont, Pa! I just want to read what this is on the ship. E, R, E, B, U, S!—_E. R. Bruce!_ Is he buried here, do you ’spose?”
“In course he is, me lard! They wouldn’t never put h’another man’s name h’upon ’is tombstone—would they?”
It is obviously unfair, say some of those for whom I am writing, to gauge the intelligence and breeding of a great nation by the manners of the lower classes. Should I retort that upon such data, as collected by British tourists in a flying trip through our country, is founded the popular English belief that we are vulgar in manner and speech, superficial in education and crude in thought, I should be told that these are the impressions and opinions of a bygone period,—belong to a generation that read Mrs. Trollope’s and Marryatt’s “Travels,” and Boz’s “American Notes;” that the Briton of to-day harbors neither prejudice nor contempt for us; appreciates all that is praiseworthy in us as individuals and a people; is charitable to our faults. There are Americans resident abroad who will assert this. Some, because having made friends of enlightened English men and women, true and noble, they see the masses through the veil of affectionate regard they have for the few. Others, flattered in every fibre of their petty natures by the notice of those who arrogate superiority of race and training, affect to despise their own land and kind; would rather be Anglicized curs beneath the tables of the nobility than independent citizens of a free and growing country. We know both classes. We met them every day and everywhere for two years. America can justify herself against such children as those I have last described.