THE ENGLISH RACE.

"Men gladly hear of the power of 'blood' or 'race.' Everybody likes to know that his advantages can not be attributed to air, soil, sea; or to local wealth, as mines and quarries; nor to laws and traditions; nor to fortune -but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more per-sonal to him. We anticipate in the doctrine of Race something like that law of physiology that, wherever bone, muscle, or essential organ is found in one healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found, in or near the same place, in its congener; and we may look to find in the son every mental and moral property that existed in the ancestor. Then first we care to examine the pedigree and copy heedfully the training-what food they ate, what nursing, school, and exercise they hadwhich resulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred and Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, to exist here? What made these delicate natures? Was it the air? Was it the sea? Was it the parentage? For it is certain that these men are samples of their contemporaries."

Race-that is, in its simplest form of expression, the descent of physical and moral qualities from father to son-is an important factor in the problems of human life and action. "Race," says Emerson, "avails much, if that be true which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics and all Saxons are Protestants, that Celts love unity

of power and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence with the Jew, who for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe." But, in the strict ethnological sense of the word, there is no such thing as an English race. In its very broadest acceptation, it is a compound people, made up in quite modern times from an intermixture of races proper. Emerson says:

MIXTURES IN THE ENGLISH RACE.

"The sources from which tradition derives their stock are three. First, they are of the oldest blood in the world—the Celts or Sidonians, of whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future, for they have endurance and productiveness. They planted Britain, and gave to the seas and mountains names which are poems and imitate the pure voices of Nature. They had no violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture, and a sublime creed. They made the best popular literature of the Middle Ages, in the songs of Merlin, and the tender and delicious mythology of Arthur. But the English come mainly from the Germans, whom the Romans found it hard to conquer—say, impossible to conquer, when one remembers the long sequel; a people about whom, in the old empire, the rumor ran, 'there was never any that meddled with them that repented it not.'

Of the Norsemen, who, under the name of Danes and the like, have played a considerable part in the building up of the English race, Emerson has a good word or two to say, though with much by way of abatement:

THE NORSEMEN.

"The Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action; but they have a singular turn for homicide; their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered. Oars, scythes, harpoons, crowbars, peat-knives, and hay forks are valued by them all the more for their charming aptitude for assassination. Never was poor gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to get rid of it, as the Northman. It was a proverb of ill condition to die the death of old age.

"It took many generations to trim, comb, and perfume the first boat-load of Norse pirates into Royal Highnesses and most noble Knights of the Garter, but every sparkle of ornament dates back to the Norse boat. There will be time enough to mellow this strength into civility and religion. The children of the blind see, the children of felons have a healthy conscience; many a mean, dastardly boy is at the age of puberty transformed into a serious and generous youth."

But for the Normans, that is, the Northmen who had settled themselves in France, Emerson has a supreme aversion. He says:

THE NORMANS.

"The Normans came out of France into England worse men than they went into it one hundred and sixty years before. They had lost their own language, and learned the Romance or barbarous Latin of the Gauls, and had acquired, with the language, all the vices it had names for. The Conquest has obtained in the chronicles the name of the 'memory of sorrow.' Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike. They took everything they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by assuming for types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled."

Mr. Emerson generalizes at first pretty largely concerni g the elements which enter into the composition of the English people, but he soon limits the subject to a small circle. He says: "What we think of when we talk of English Traits' really narrows itself to a small district. It excludes Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and reduces itself at last to London, that is, to those who come and go thither. The portraits that hang on the walls of the Academy Exhibition at London, the figures in Punch's' drawings of the

public men or of the club-houses, the prints in the shop-windows, are distinctive English, and not American, nor Scotch, nor Irish; but it is a very restricted nationality. As you go north into the manufacturing and agricultural districts, and to the population that never travels, as you go into Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the world's Englishman is no longer found. In Scotland there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners. In Ireland are the same soil and climate as in England, but less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence, small tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race." One might thus almost say that the title of the book should have been "London Traits," instead of "English Traits." Bearing this in mind, we shall present a few of these traits as they presented themselves to the eye and fancy of Emerson :

BODILY TRAITS OF THE ENGLISH.

"The English at the present day have great vigor of body and endurance. Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English, taken at random out of the street, would weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet I am told the skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy, and handsome; at least the whole bust is well formed, and