shoulders were not so broad; but Hawthorne insists
that the broad shoulders, and not the fiery soul, are the essence of
John Bull. He proceeds with amusing unconsciousness to generalise this
ingenious theory, and declares that all extraordinary Englishmen are
sick men, and therefore deviations from the type. When he meets another
remarkable Englishman in the flesh, he applies the same method. Of Leigh
Hunt, whom he describes with warm enthusiasm, he dogmatically declares,
'there was not an English trait in him from head to foot, morally,
intellectually, or physically.' And the reason is admirable. 'Beef, ale,
or stout, brandy or port-wine, entered not at all into his
constitution.' All Englishmen are made of those ingredients, and if not,
why, then, they are not Englishmen. By the same method it is easy to
show that all Englishmen are drunkards, or that they are all
teetotalers; you have only to exclude as irrelevant every case that
contradicts your theory. Hawthorne, unluckily, is by no means solitary
in his mode of reasoning. The ideal John Bull has hidden us from
ourselves as well as from our neighbours, and the race which is
distinguished above all others for the magnificent wealth of its
imaginative literature is daily told--and, what is more, tells
itself--that it is a mere lump of prosaic flesh and blood, with scarcely
soul enough to keep it from stagnation. If we were sensible we should
burn that ridiculous caricature of ourselves along with Guy Fawkes; but
meanwhile we can hardly complain if foreigners are deceived by our own
misrepresentations.

Against Hawthorne, as I have said, I feel no grudge, though a certain
regret that his sympathy with that deep vein of poetical imagination
which underlies all our 'steaks and sirloins' should have been
intercepted by this detestable lay-figure. The poetical humorist must be
allowed a certain license in dealing with facts; and poor Hawthorne, in
the uncongenial atmosphere of the Liverpool Custom-house, had doubtless
much to suffer from a thick-skinned generation. His characteristic
shyness made it a hard task for him to penetrate through our outer
rind--which, to say the truth, is often elephantine enough--to the
central core of heat; and we must not complain if he was too apt to deny
the existence of what to him was unattainable. But the problem
recurs--for everybody likes to ask utterly unanswerable
questions--whether Hawthorne would not have developed into a still