University of Virginia Library

LETTER XLIII.
Prominent traits in the English character.

YOU request a description of the city
of London, a view of the administration
of the British government and its fiscal
concerns, with a character of the English
people.

An English traveller, by the aid of a
rapid tour through a country, and a
month's residence in its capital, would
render a minute account, much to the
satisfaction of his own countrymen, although
he might provoke the contempt
and derision of the nation he attempts to
describe. For my own part, I confess, I
have not the time, talents, or, what is of
equal importance, access to those sources

of information which might enable me to
give a correct statement, or form a respectable
opinion.

In lieu, therefore, of hasty descriptions,
or jejune opinions, I send the latest
edition of London and its environs, illustrated
by engravings of its principal edifices.
Two treatises on finance—one proving
to demonstration, from authentic
documents, that the fiscal concerns of the
nation were never more flourishing; that,
by the miraculous aid of the sinking fund,
the national debt is rapidly diminishing,
and after about the same lapse of years in
which the Israelites were wandering in
the wilderness, this nation will possess that
land of ministerial promise where taxes
shall no more be levied: the other proves
to equal demonstration, and from documents
as authentic, that the people are
groaning indignantly under the burthens
of fiscal oppression, and the nation on the
verge of bankruptcy.

That you may have a correct view of
the administration of government, I also
send you five ministerial and ten opposition
pamphlets; three letters to a noble
lord; two speeches on the state of the
nation, intended to be spoken in parliament;
an acrostic upon the minister;
a rebus and a charade upon a popular
leader, and a conundrum on the heir apparent.

The description of London, so far as
I have compared it, appears to me correct:
from the other publications you can
form your own opinion. I can assure
you, from writings like these the people
of England obtain their clearest view of
their national prosperity or adversity.

Of the character of the English I can
only send you a hasty sketch: I do not
profess to furnish a finished picture, but a
mere etching: indeed, I would willingly
be excused, but as you insist on the English
portrait from my pencil, reminding
you of your promise, and of the emblem

of our old club-room, with its motto sub
rosa, I will venture to delineate as it appears
to me at first view.

In drawing a national character, we
should endeavour to seize upon those
prominent features which mark all ranks,
and form the grand contour of a people.
From inattention to this obvious rule, the
English travellers are constantly producing
their wretched daubings and caricatures
of foreign nations. An English
tourist may be compared to a painter who
should attempt to paint a peacock from
merely having seen his feet and legs. It
is highly probable such an enlightened
artist would give to the beautiful bird the
body of a sheldrake, and the head of a
goose—and, when he hung his picture in
the exhibition room in Somerset-place,
his countrymen would admire it as a faithful
representation—and the whole nation,
including those who had seen the beautiful
bird, would sneer at the wretched taste of
foreigners who could praise the splendid

attendant of Juno. An English traveller
will depict a nation as rapacious and insolent,
when the groundwork of his opinion
is the overcharge of sixpence in the bill at
some paltry inn, or the rough reply of
some village magistrate to English hauteur.

I shall now attempt the English national
traits, reserving to some future letter,
or conversation, such peculiarities as
may attach to a particular class, or to
individuals, called, here, oddities, which
may be considered rather as tumours, or
excrescences, than as belonging to the
national person of Englishmen.

When uncle Toby called upon Corporal
Trim to write a list of the widow
Wadman's perfections, he directed him to
set down humanity, in capitals, as the
first; in enumerating the qualities of the
English, I set down, in capitals, vanity.

The English verily believe they are the
most enlightened people in the world;
the greatest in arts and arms; the uprightest,

the wealthiest, the wisest;—(no,
I will be candid, I believe they at times
suspect they are not the wisest people;)—
in personal beauty and courage unrivalled;
that they live under the best system of
laws ever devised by the wisdom of man;
and that, finally, they are—don't laugh,
Frank—the freest people who ever existed
in ancient or modern days!

This national vanity is conspicuous in
the conversation and writings of every
Englishman. The lower and middle
classes express it boldly, whilst the higher
have to make repeated drafts upon their
politeness in order to conceal it in company
with foreigners. But the same weakness
pervades all ranks; the vulgar believe
that one Englishman can beat three
Frenchmen: the well educated man does
not credit this, but he will hardly be
brought to confess the English were ever
worsted in fair fight with equal numbers.
He will even ridicule the national prejudice
of the vulgar; but he will read,

with self-complacency, Judge Blackstone's
insinuation that England was not completely
conquered by William the Bastard.
And, although English military
tactics are held cheap by all other nations,
and their armies have been beaten by the
militia of the North, and the husbandmen
and mechanics of South-America, and
English cannon and colours may be found
as trophies in almost every European
nation, yet, the Englishman treasures in
his memory the few military advantages
his nation has gained—magnifies them into
victories, and forgets repeated defeats.
When the national troops are discomfited
on every side his vanity is not suppressed;
he recurs to history for the battles of
Cressy and Poictiers, or to the stage for
that of Agincourt—or cheers himself with
the recital of the achievements of Marlborough—with
English victories won by
German courage, directed by the genius
of Eugene. Are you disposed to contest
the position that English military tactics
are held cheap by all other nations, I throw
down my gauntlet—let the warlike Frederick
of Prussia be the umpire, I will
address myself to him:—“Sire, will your
“majesty be pleased to inform why you
“and the other continental powers, when
“you league with the English in offen
“sive war, ever contract to find men, and
“they money?” Frederick—“The rea
“son is obvious; we had rather have one
“English guinea as an auxiliary, than ten
“English soldiers.”

A pleasant instance of English vanity is
exhibited in Sir Robert Thomas Wilson's
History of the British expedition to Egypt,
under Sir Ralph Abercrombie:—A few
days before the battle of Elhanka, fought
between the Turkish troops under the
immediate command of the Grand Vizir,
and the French under General Belliard,
the English commander in chief being
apprized of the probability of the battle,
and concluding that as the Turks were
not Englishmen they must inevitably be

beaten, despatched an officer to the Grand
Vizir, requesting him, earnestly, not to
engage until supported by the English
forces. The Grand Vizir treated the message
with the contempt it merited, engaged
the French, and gained the most
brilliant victory of the campaign, which
immediately led to the surrender of Grand
Cairo, and eventually to the success of
the expedition. Here was a check to national
vanity which the author could not
conceal; but the English consoled themselves
by ridiculing the tactics, the customs,
and even the amusements of their
gallant allies, and by insidiously intimating
that if the Grand Vizir had been
aided by five hundred English troops the
victory would have been more decisive.

But Egypt, where this inflated display
of national vanity was made, was destined,
in a few years, to exhibit to the
world the scene of its bitter mortification.
There six thousand of the flower of the
English armies were repeatedly defeated,

and, at length, disgracefully driven from
its shores—not, indeed, by the Ottoman
troops whom they had derided, but by the
arms of the very offscouring of those
Bedouin and Mamaluke freebooters who
inhabit and infest that fertile country.

But the gas which inflates the full-blown
bladder of English vanity is their government;
a government, indeed, beautiful in
theory, which Montesquieu has praised and
other writers have extolled; a government
whose civil laws are so voluminous
and intricate as to form no comprehensible
rule of action to the bulk of the people,
and whose criminal code, by the
almost uniform infliction of capital punishment,
violates the moral sense of justice,
and renders the laws of Draco, by
comparison, a system of mercy; a government
whose great object is the commercial
aggrandizement of the nation,
per fas aut nefas, and whose operation is
to divide the community into but two
sections, the rich and the poor, to render

the former wealthy beyond bound, and the
latter miserable beyond bearing; a government
whose chief magistrate can do
no wrong, but whose inferior agents are
confessedly always in error; a government
which, by a scrupulous attention to
the preservation of its ancient forms, secures
the respect and attachment of its
subjects, but, at the same time, by the
dictatorial power of its parliament, can
accommodate itself to meet all the exigences
which necessarily result from a change
of manners and opinions at home, and
from the mutable system of its foreign
relations. That a whole people should be
attached to such a government; that they
should even be vain of it, is pardonable,
if not praise-worthy—it is a minor species
of patriotism; but English vanity does
not rest here; they not only believe their
own government the most excellent, but
that all other governments are so execrable
that the subjects of them are wretched
and disgusted, and would gladly emancipate
themselves from their thraldom for
the glorious privileges of English domination—as
if these islanders possessed the
exclusive right of local prejudice. When
they captured Buenos-Ayres there was
not an Englishman doubted that it would
be followed by the voluntary submission
of all the Spanish colonies in South-America;
indeed, who among them could
doubt that those poor, ignorant, cowardly,
degraded, bigoted Spaniards would at
once throw off the yoke of national, colonial,
and ecclesiastical despotism, and prefer
the English government to that of
their mother country. Had wisdom, instead
of vanity, presided in the English
councils, they might have thought it possible
for the Spanish colonists to possess
some spice of that cardinal English virtue,
national prejudice; that they might, possibly,
view their invaders as heretics and
plunderers, or as, what is more abhorrent
in the eyes of most civilized foreigners,
Englishmen. After their shameful defeat
by Liniers, the English official despatches
acknowledge they were so viewed by the
Spanish colonists.

The English consoled themselves in
their discomfiture by gravely observing
“that the Spaniards in South-America
“were not sufficiently enlightened to enjoy
“the blessings of English government!”
Ha! ha! ha!

The English are not only vain of their
military prowess and government, but of
their climate. In this land of megrims,
hypochondria, and blue devils, where the
dense and sombre atmosphere presents,
every day, an apology for suicide, and
where the artist is obliged to import
Italian skies to render English landscape
visible, the inhabitants sit like frogs in a
fen, croaking forth the delights of mist
and mud! That a mere London cit (who,
by the way, in point of intellect and information,
is about three degrees below
our **** ***** **** *******)
should pride himself in this torpid atmosphere

is not strange; but should he have
the good fortune to emerge from his native
fog, and escape to some more genial
clime,
like the fiend in Paradise,

I well recollect a promenade in our
Mall, last September; it was one in succession
of those fine days which beautify
a New-England autumn; the sky a deep
blue, thinly spotted with light fleecy
clouds; the sun bright, but not glaring;
its heat not fervid, but cheering; and the
breeze just discernible by the rustling of
the leaves. Such a day is one of those
few common blessings which the Bostonians
have sensibility to relish. Our party

was large, and we exhibited our enjoyment
in that fine flow of spirits which
such weather is calculated to excite. But,
while we chatted and laughed, S***
W******, a young cit who had then
just escaped from the mists of London,
after making several very dolorous attempts
to be merry, quitted our party,
and, with his hat drawn over his eyes, his
hands in his pockets, and his lips pouting
a most disdainful whistle, paced the Mall
alone. I had then very little conception of
these amiable English peculiarities, and,
with genuine Yankey freedom, accosted
him:—“Sir, you seem to be lonesome—
“I guess you are not well.” Englishman—
“Sir, your execrable clear sky is insup
“portable—it makes my head ache: Sir,
“I have been in Boston three weeks, and
“have not been blessed with the sight of
“a cloud as big as a blanket.”

I was told that this sagacious cit, in the
evening, went to a smith's-shop, closed
the doors and the aperture of the chimney,

caused a fire to be made of damp earth
coal, and boasted that in the midst of
the smudge he had recruited his spirits
by a very excellent imitation of the London
atmosphere.

Indeed, these supercilious cits have
given the name of “London Smoke” to a
broadcloth of dingy hue, that the sombre
light of their capital may be known as far
as their commerce extends.

Another trait in the English character
is a contemptuous prejudice against foreigners.
The canaille of all countries will
be coarse in their abuse, and will bestow
the epithets (or what is significant of them)
of scoundrel, coward, and fool, upon those
who are the objects of it—but it is reserved
to the vulgar Englishman, in his
quarrel with a foreigner, to edge his scurrility
by annexing his national appellation
as a mark of pointed contempt—and
Dutch scoundrel, French coward, and
German thick-skull, are familiar in his

abuse. If I recollect, some English periodical
writer has noticed this.

This contemptuous prejudice against
foreigners is not confined to the vulgar;
it is possessed, in a degree, by every
Englishman. To inculcate it, seems to
be an axiom of their state policy. To diffuse
through the nation this detestable
principle, their writers, and travellers,
have formed characters, or rather caricatures,
of every nation, which are so indelibly
impressed, that an Englishman never
sees a foreigner without insensibly attaching
to him his supposed national character.

By the English the French are characterized
as volatile, superficial, and cowardly;

The Dutch as avaricious and stupid;

The Germans as heavy-moulded, insensible,
and ignorant;

The Portuguese as diabolically vindictive;

The Italians as effeminate, jealous, and
lost to every sense of sexual virtue;

The Spaniards as haughty, bigoted,
poor, and miserable;

The Russians as barbarous; and,

The Americans as knaves.

Even the Scotch, Welch, and Irish,
although integrals of the empire, are subjects
of this contemptuous character.

The Scotch are poor, parsimonious,
and craving;

The Welch poor and proud; and,

The Irish—while the Irish are content
to fight their battles, and submit to their
despotism, the English are content to
laugh at their bulls.

But you will, perhaps, say, “is this a
“just representation of English opinion?
“is there not an enlightened portion of
“the nation superior to these unmanly
“prejudices?”—I refer you to the English
writers. I will not confine you to
the theatrical. Produce me a single author
who has described or drawn the

character of a foreign nation, in whose
book may not be found some ungenerous
and odious comparisons to the disadvantage
of that people. It is true, the phrase
may be polished, and the abuse softened,
but every English writer on the subject of
foreign nations is as essentially prejudiced
as certain London cits, who visit you,
who verily believe that all nations, compared
with the English, are cowards, and
every foreigner ridiculous if he speaks
broken English.

Another distinguishing trait in the
English character, is to prefix the name
of English to every thing they consider
superlatively excellent. So far as this is
applied to horses, bulls, and bull-dogs, it
cannot be disapproved; indeed, it is wonderfully
applicable to the last, as I have
been informed the peculiar characteristic
of this English native is to seize upon
every thing in his way, and not to quit
his grasp until compelled by superior
force, although it should cause his own

destruction. But even the more exalted
qualities of the soul are distinguished, in
London, as of English manufacture; and
the cardinal virtues are exhibited, in this
city, like quack medicines with the national
patent and the seal of the inventors
accompanying them. Hence we have
English courage, English honour, English
wisdom, English integrity, and English
justice; and they might and English
hauteur, English credulity, English hypochondria,
and English cullibility.

I could readily display instances of
these, but shall refer you to English annals
for the proof of them.

Ha! ha! ha!—what a bore! and
have you, my early friend, whilst reading
this farrago, suffered yourself for a
moment to suppose that I could vent
seriously all this abuse. Whilst writing I
anticipate its perusal: I see you read a
paragraph, then turn to the subscription,
read again, and then examine the handwriting,
“to be resolved if Brutus so

“unkindly knocked or no:” Be assured,
then, if I could in serious mood asperse a
great people in this manner, I should abhor
myself, and feel degraded from the
rank of intelligent beings, and reduced to
a level with English travellers.

For if you could enjoy the opportunity
I now have—if you could converse with
the learned, associate with the polished,
and be served by the friendly, among this
people, your admiration, and, what is better,
your affection for them, would increase;
for amid all their weaknesses, and
all their follies, they have many men, and
very many women, many achievements
and many virtues, of which they may
justly be proud without the imputation of
vanity.