UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
"Their little hands were never made
To tear each other's eyes."
Their little hands—can it be necessary to remind them?—were made to throw dirt and stones with impunity at passers-by of a different kind. This is their usual business, and they do it with a will; though (to drop metaphor for awhile) we may concede that English reviewers—and among them the reviewer of the Spectator"—have not always been unready to do accurate justice to the genuine worth of new American writers; among much poor patchwork of comic and serious stuff, which shared their welcome and diminished its worth, they have yet found some fit word of praise for the true pathos of Bret Harte, the true passion of Joaquin Miller. But the men really and naturally dear to them are the literators of Boston; truly, and in no good sense, the school of New England—Britannia pejor; a land of dissonant reverberations and distorted reflections from our own.[1]
- ↑ Not that the British worshipper gets much tolerance for his countrymen in return. In an eloquent essay on the insolence of Englishmen towards Americans, for which doubtless there are but too good grounds, Mr. Lowell shows himself as sore as a whipped cutpurse of the days "ere carts had lost their tails" under the vulgar imputation of vulgarity. It is doubtless a very gross charge, and one often flung at Americans by English lackeys and bullies of the vulgarest order. Is there ever any ground for it discernible in the dainty culture of overbred letters which, as we hear, distinguishes New England? I remember to have read a passage from certain notes of travel in Italy pub-
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