and retarding.' Nationally we were boasters, or, as we say nowadays, 'boosters.' 'The worst of it is,' he continues, 'that this tall talk and self-glorification meets with hardly any rebuke from sane criticism over there.' He cites some examples; and then he adds that, 'the new West promises to beat in the game of brag even the stout champions I have been quoting.'
Now, no Englishman will ever fathom the mystery of Uncle Sam's boasting. No outsider can ever know, as we all know, how often, out of the depths of self-distrust and self-contempt and cutting self-criticism, he has whistled to keep his courage up in the dark, and has smiled reassuringly while his heart was breaking. Still, if you look into the literature of the period, you find that there is much warrant for Arnold's strictures, though not always precisely where he found it. The little boasts of men like Lowell and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Brander Matthews are only Yankee whistling, the turning of the trodden worm, a decent pride in the presence of 'a certain condescension in foreigners.' Lowell knew a man, he says, who thought Cambridge the best spot on the habitable globe. 'Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless He never did.' I myself am fond of declaring that the campus of the
