gnificance of the English language. Not all Englishmen
speak good English, but when they do, they beggar eulogy.

[IMAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR]

George Silsbee was likewise of our party; he was an American of the
Brahman type, a child of Cambridge and Boston, a man of means, and an
indefatigable traveller. He had the delicate health and physique of the
American student of those days, when out-door life and games made no
part of our scholastic curricula. He may have been forty years old,
slight and frail, with a thin, clean-shaven face and pallid complexion,
but full of mind and sensibility. We do not heed travellers now, and I
am inclined to think they are less worth heeding than they used to be.
It is so easy to see the world in these latter days that few persons see
it to any purpose even when they go through the motions of doing so. But
to hear George Bradford or Silsbee talk of England, France, and Italy,
in the fifties, was a liberal education, and I used sometimes to stare
fascinated at the boots of these wayfarers, admiring them for the
wondrous places in which they had trodden. Silsbee travelled with his
artistic and historic consciousness all on board, and had so much to say
that he never was able to say it all.

But to my father himself were accorded the honors of the captain's
table, and for him were fired the salutes of cannon which thundered us
out of Boston Harbor and into Halifax. These compliments, however, were
paid to him not as a man of letters, but as a political representative
of his country, and, let a man be as renowned as he will on his personal
account, he will still find it convenient, in order to secure smooth and
agreeable conditions on his way through the world, to supplement that
distinction with recommendations from the State Department. Respect for
rank is the last infirmity even of noble republican minds, and it oils
the wheels of the progress of those who possess it. An American widow
of my later acquaintance, a lady of two marriageable daughters and small
social pretensions in her own country, toured Europe with success
and distinction, getting all the best accommodations and profoundest
obeisances by the simple device of placing the word "Lady" before her
modest signature in the hotel registers. She was a lady, of course, and
had a right so to style herself, and if snobbish persons chose to read
into the word more than it literally meant, that