se, the social extremities are
seen to be pretty far apart, but, with that possible exception, I should
think no European country can show such a gap as yawns to the eye between
the English gentleman and the English boor. The boor, of course, is the
multitude; the boor impresses himself upon the traveller. When relieved
from his presence, one can be just to him; one can remember that his
virtues--though elementary, and strictly in need of direction--are the
same, to a great extent, as those of the well-bred man. He does not
represent--though seeming to do so--a nation apart. To understand this
multitude, you must get below its insufferable manners, and learn that
very fine civic qualities can consist with a personal bearing almost
wholly repellent.

Then, as to the dogged reserve of the educated man, why, I have only to
look into myself. I, it is true, am not quite a representative
Englishman; my self-consciousness, my meditative habit of mind, rather
dim my national and social characteristics; but set me among a few
specimens of the multitude, and am I not at once aware of that
instinctive antipathy, that shrinking into myself, that something like
unto scorn, of which the Englishman is accused by foreigners who casually
meet him? Peculiar to me is the effort to overcome this first impulse--an
effort which often enough succeeds. If I know myself at all, I am not an
ungenial man; and yet I am quite sure that many people who have known me
casually would say that my fault is a lack of geniality. To show my true
self, I must be in the right mood and the right circumstances--which,
after all, is merely as much as saying that I am decidedly English.

XIX.

On my breakfast table there is a pot of honey. Not the manufactured
stuff sold under that name in shops, but honey of the hive, brought to me
by a neighbouring cottager whose bees often hum in my garden. It gives,
I confess, more pleasure to my eye than to my palate; but I like to taste
of it, because it is honey.

There is as much difference, said Johnson, between a lettered and an
unlettered man as between the living and the dead; and, in a way, it was
no extravagance. Think merely how one's view of common things is
affected by literary association. What were honey to me if I knew
nothing of Hymettus and Hybla?--if my mind had no stores of poetry, no
memories of romance? Suppose me town-pent, the name might bring with it
some pleasantness of rustic