h one impulse to assist in singing
that famous national anthem. It was the first time in my life that I had
ever seen a body of men, or even a single man, under the active
influence of the sentiment of Loyalty; for, though we call ourselves
loyal to our country and institutions, and prove it by our readiness to
shed blood and sacrifice life in their behalf, still the principle is as
cold and hard, in an American bosom, as the steel spring that puts in
motion a powerful machinery. In the Englishman's system, a force similar
to that of our steel spring is generated by the warm throbbings of human
hearts. He clothes our bare abstraction in flesh and blood,--at present,
in the flesh and blood of a woman,--and manages to combine love, awe,
and intellectual reverence, all in one emotion, and to embody his
mother, his wife, his children, the whole idea of kindred, in a single
person, and make her the representative of his country and its laws. We
Americans smile superior, as I did at the Mayor's table; and yet, I
fancy, we lose some very agreeable titillations of the heart in
consequence of our proud perogative of caring no more about our
President than for a man of straw, or a stuffed scarecrow straddling in
a cornfield.

But, to say the truth, the spectacle struck me rather ludicrously, to
see this party of stout middle-aged and elderly gentlemen, in the
fulness of meat and drink, their ample and ruddy faces glistening with
wine, perspiration, and enthusiasm, rumbling out those strange old
stanzas from the very bottom of their hearts and stomachs, which two
organs, in the English interior arrangement, lie closer together than in
ours. The song seemed to me the rudest old ditty in the world; but I
could not wonder at its universal acceptance and indestructible
popularity, considering how inimitably it expresses the national faith
and feeling as regards the inevitable righteousness of England, the
Almighty's consequent respect and partiality for that redoubtable little
island, and His presumed readiness to strengthen its defence against the
contumacious wickedness and knavery of all other principalities or
republics. Tennyson himself, though evidently English to the very last
prejudice, could not write half so good a song for the purpose. Finding
that the entire dinner-table struck in, with voices of every pitch
between rolling thunder and the squeak of a cartwheel, and that the
strain was not of such delicacy as to be much hu