There is something so peculiar in that stare, a concentration of the negation of intellect and intelligence in appearance of an Englishman’s face, when listening; a dull, cold look, as expressionless as the countenance of a heathen stone idol, that freezes one, and makes him feel that he is saying something foolish or impudent. Whether it is from lack of quick comprehension, or considered good form, I do not know. The English, I should judge, are not a smiling nation. They are as solid and substantial, even in the expression of their faces, as their heavy meat and drink can make them. They are slow-witted, and their jokes, except what they import, are so ponderous that they reminded me of our perfunctory religious exercises on a cold morning at school, and of our tasks in reciting the Litany, only that the jokes lacked the response, “Good Lord deliver us.” I had purchased some books for light reading in my off hours, and among them was “Pelham” by Lord Lytton. I was greatly surprised to find this passage, a severer criticism on his countrymen than I am capable of making. This was probably written on the view that a man may call himself a dog, but let another beware of saying it of him. “The English of the fashionable world make business an enjoyment, and enjoyment a business; they are born without a smile; they rove about public places like so many easterly winds—cold, sharp and cutting; or like a group of fogs on a frosty day, sent out of his hell by Boreas, for the express purpose of looking black at one another. When they ask you ‘how you do,’ you would think they were measuring the length of your coffin. They are ever, it is true, laboring to be agreeable, but they are like Sisyphus, the stone they rolled up the hill with so much toil, runs down again, and hits you a thump on the legs. They are sometimes polite, but invariably uncivil; their warmth is always artificial—their cold never. They are stiff without dignity, and cringing without manners. They offer you an affront, and call it ‘plain truth,’ they wound your feelings, and tell you it is merely to ‘speak their minds,’ at the same time, while they have neglected all the graces and charities of artifice, they have adopted all its falsehood and deceit. While they profess to abhor servility, they adulate the peerage; while they tell you they care not a rush for the minister, they move heaven and earth for an invitation from the minister’s wife. Then their amusements! The heat, the dust—the sameness—the slowness of that odious park in the morning, and the same exquisite scene repeated in the evening on the condensed stage of a rout room, where one has more heat with less air, and a narrower dungeon, with diminished possibility of escape! We wander about like the damned in the story of Vathek, and we pass our lives like the royal philosopher of Prussia in conjugating the verb, ‘je m’ennuie.’”