'Tis laughing Health, with an unhindered fountain Of joy upbubbling from her being's core, Whose lavish life embraces vale or mountain, And drains delight at every opened door. MARY B. DODGE. AN ENGLISH EASTER. It may be said of the English as is said of the council of war in Sheridan's farce of _The Critic_ by one of the spectators of the rehearsal, that when they _do_ agree their unanimity is wonderful. They differ among themselves greatly just now as regards the machinations of Russia, the derelictions of Turkey, the propriety of locking up the Reverend Arthur Tooth for his Romanizing excesses, the histrionic merits of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters; but neither just now nor at any other time do they fail to conform to those social observances on which Respectability has set her seal. England is a country of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with her being so interesting to foreign observers. The English individual character is very positive, very independent, very much made up according to its own sentiment of things, very prone to startling eccentricities; and yet at the same time it has beyond any other this peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no other country, I imagine, are so many people to be found doing the same thing in the same way at the same time--using the same slang, wearing the same hats and cravats, collecting the same china-plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis or of "polo," flocking into the same skating-rinks. The monotony of this spectacle would soon become oppressive if the foreign observer were not conscious of this latent capacity in the performers for the free play of character; he finds a good deal of entertainment in wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity of the individual with this perpetual tribute to custom. Of course in all civilized societies the tribute to custom is being constantly paid; if it is less observable in America than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because individual independence is greater, but because custom is more sparsely established. Where we have customs people certainly follow them; but for five American customs there are fifty English. I am very far from having discovered the secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes of that explosive personal force in the English character which is compressed and corked down by social conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my vision. The most striking example, to foreign eyes, of the power of custom in England is of course the universal church-going. In the sight of all England getting up from its tea and toast of a Sunday morning and brushing its hat and drawing on its gloves and taking its wife on its arm and making its offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respectability's,