to me in this country.
Some years ago I took one, a gentleman who had travelled a good deal,
and who held an important position in the Queen's household--and a very
outspoken man he was--to a "private view," at which for a wonder there
was not a miscellaneous throng, but just enough people to fill the
rooms pleasantly. As we sat together after a tour, looking at the
company, I asked him to tell me the difference between the people he
saw there and those he would see on a like occasion at the Royal
Academy. He sat looking around him in silence for so long a time that I
thought he was going to pass my question unnoticed, when he said, "I
can see no difference; none at all; except that there would not be
quite so many pretty women there, and that there would be more stout
old people." The other, a lady, who also did not hesitate in her
criticisms, remarked that the chief difference in appearance between
people of the same condition here and in England was that here she
"didn't see any fat old men." _She_ said nothing about fat old women;
not, however, that she herself was either fat or old.

There is this difference among old people; although even this has been
exaggerated; and it is this which gives a certain color of truth to the
notion I have referred to. English men and women do not always grow
stout and red-faced as they grow old; but after they have passed middle
age more of them do tend to rubicundity and to protuberant rotundity of
figure than people of the same age do in "America." The cause, I am
quite sure, is simply--beer. Both the color and the rotundity come to a
large proportion of the Americans who live in England and drink English
beer, in English allowance; which, it need hardly be said, could not be
the case if there had been any essential change in the type of the
race. But among men under forty and women under thirty, the difference
either in complexion or figure is almost inappreciable.

As to the women, there are at least as many in England who are spare
and angular of figure as here, and of those who have not passed thirty
I think rather more. The London "Spectator" said some years ago, in
discussing the Banting diet, I believe, that "scragginess was more
common in England among women than stoutness"; and it is remarkable
that the French caricatures of Englishwomen always represent them as
thin, bony, and sharp-featured. In this of course there is a little
malice; but it shows the impression left