By what inconceivable error, does
it happen, then, that the American of fiction and drama--English,
Continental, and American to boot--is always represented as outdoing
John Bull himself in Anglo-Saxon phlegm? In the courts of ethnology, I
shall be told, "what the caricaturist says is not evidence;" but no
caricature could ever have gained such world-wide acceptance without a
substratum of truth to support it. The probabilities of the case are
greatly against the development of any special "vivacity" of
temperament, for though there has no doubt been a large Keltic admixture
in the Anglo-Saxon stock, there has been a large Teutonic infusion
(German and Scandinavian) to counterbalance it. Simply as a matter of
observation, the differences between English and Italian manners hit you
in the eye, while the differences between American and English manners
are really microscopic; and manners, I take it, are the outward and
visible signs of temperament. A Scotchman by birth, a Londoner by habit,
I walk the streets of New York undetected, to the best of my belief,
until I begin to speak; in Rome, on the contrary, every one recognises
me at a glance as an "Inglese," unless they mistake me for an
"Americano.
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