red with a baronetcy,--a splendid
recompense for his great literary industry.

This, and much other information, adapted to our rude plantation in the
New-England wilderness, did Sir Joseph patronizingly impart. And it was
good to meet a man with a sense of corporeal identity so honest and
satisfactory. A cynic might have said that his mind moved in rather
narrow limits. But then within those limits he was so ruddy and jubilant
that I could not but remember something Shakspeare says about the ease
of being bounded in a nutshell and yet counting one's self king of
infinite space,--were it not for bad dreams. These "bad dreams" had
never retarded the British digestion of Sir Joseph Barley. No American
citizen could, by any possibility, be so shut in measureless content. It
is only a very few of our well-to-do women of the Mrs. Widesworth
class--ladies inclining to knitting and corpulency in the afternoon of
life--who possess the like faculty of warming society with the blaze of
an ecstatic egotism. Well, there are moments--why not confess it? for is
not man body as well as soul?--when it is a relief to get away from our
mystics, system-mongers, and peerers into the future, and claim a
brotherhood after the flesh with your average Briton, who looks out of
his comfortable present only to look into his comfortable past. Yet let
this estate be temporary; for it is well to return to our thin diet,
and, instead of jolly after-dinner talk, repeat the high and aspiring
phrases of certain New-Englanders who lead the generous thought and life
of a continent. Phrases! Yes, but how many nebulous ideas, think you,
would it take to stuff out their hollowness? Nay, my objecting friend,
if the ideas are not wholly clear, nor immediately practicable, they are
seldom shallow, and never mean. If the wisdom of our true seers
sometimes seems poured out in thin dilution, it nevertheless soon
hardens to a thousand shining crystals upon men of worldly enterprise
and grasp. And why this digression? I think its suggestion lay in the
fact that Sir Joseph, being the type of the ordinary Englishman, held
and imparted a fine sunniness of temper, and a perfectly balanced
serenity,--good gifts, which, so far as my experience goes, are
possessed in full measure by only one or two exceptional Americans, and
these men of high and acknowledged genius.

"I don't understand it, upon my honor," cried our visitor, after we had
endeavored to explain to him his