a proper sentiment towards our transatlantic kinsmen. When
he points out that the dangers of such a community as the United
States include a tendency to rely too much on the machinery of
institutions; an absence of the discipline of respect; a proneness to
hardness, materialism, exaggeration, and boastfulness; a false
smartness and a false audacity,--the wise American will do well to
ponder his sayings, hard though they may sound. When, however, he goes
on to point out the "prime necessity of civilisation being
interesting," and to assert that American civilisation is lacking in
interest, we may well doubt whether on the one hand the quality of
interest is not too highly exalted, and, on the other, whether the
denial of interest to American life does not indicate an almost
insular narrowness in the conception of what is interesting. When he
finds a want of soul and delicacy in the American as compared with
John Bull, some of us must feel that if he is right the latitude of
interpretation of these terms must indeed be oceanic. When he gravely
cites the shrewd and ingenious Benjamin Franklin as the most
considerable man whom America has yet produced, we must respectfully
but firmly take exception to his standard of measurement. When he
declares that Abraham Lincoln has no claim to distinction, we feel
that the writer must have in mind distinction of a singularly
conventional and superficial nature; and we are not reassured by the
_quasi_ brutality of the remark in one of his letters, to the effect
that Lincoln's assassination brought into American history a dash of
the tragic and romantic in which it had hitherto been so sadly lacking
("_sic semper tyrannis_ is so unlike anything Yankee or English middle
class"). When he asserts that from Maine to Florida and back again all
America Hebraises, we reflect with some bewilderment that hitherto we
had believed the New Orleans creole (_e.g._) to be as far removed from
Hebraising as any type we knew of. It is strikingly characteristic of
the weak side of Mr. Arnold's outlook on America that he went to stay
with Mr. P.T. Barnum, the celebrated showman, without the least idea
that his American friends might think the choice of hosts a peculiar
one. To him, to a very large extent, Americans were all alike
middle-class, dissenting Philistines; and so far as appears on the
surface, Mr. Barnum's desire to "belong to the minority" pleased him
as much as any other sign of approval confe