England owes much to her humorists of the new humane school. She owes, perhaps, more than she yet perceives, because the changes which they promote in manners and morals come about slowly and unmarked. It is the American revisiting the country after many years of absence who perceives the ameliorations which the satiric pencil and pen have conjointly produced; nor are those ameliorations hidden from the American who treads for the first time the fast-anchored isle. It is with a peculiar rapturous recognition that we hail every indication of that England with which English art and literature have made us acquainted--a very different country indeed from the England of politics and the newspaper. A student who found himself one fine Sunday morning in June gliding past the lovely Hampshire coast, covered with farms, lawns, and villas, gazed in silence for a long time, and could only relieve his mind at last by gasping, "Thomson's 'Seasons?'" His first glance revealed to him, what he had never before suspected, that the rural poetry of England applied in a particular manner to the land that inspired it, could have been written only there, and only there could be quite appreciated. From Chaucer to Tennyson there is not a sterling line in it which could have been what it is if it had been composed in any part of the Western continent. We have a flower which we call a daisy, a weed coarsened by our fierce sun, betraying barrenness of soil, and suggestive of careless culture. There is also to be seen in our windows and greenhouses a flower named the primrose, which, though it has its merit, has not been celebrated by poets, nor is likely to be. But the instant we see an English road-side bright with primroses and daisies, we find ourselves saying, "Yes, of course; _these_ are what the poets mean; _this_ is the daisy of Shakspeare and Burns; _here_ is Wordsworth's yellow primrose!" And we go on holding similar discourse with ourselves as often as we descry the objects, at once familiar and unknown, which in every age the poets of Great Britain have loved to sing. [Illustration: Hope--A Phrenological Illustration. (George Cruikshank, 1826.)]