“My dear friend,” said Mr. Baxter, “twenty-five years ago you might have found the whole of Oxford Street crowded with figures similar to the one which has just left us. If you would see them in our days, you must seek for them in some dark corner of Drury Lane. And Puritanism in 1853 is mild and gentle compared to the Puritanism of the Round-heads; it is nothing but a natural reaction against the dissolute Cavalier spirit which has come down even to the commencement of this century. In the English character one extreme must be balanced by the other. Either merry and mad, or sober and prude; we are either drunkards or teetotallers, brawlers or peace-twaddlers. Of course, if harmonic and measured dignity, if the instinct for beauty of form, were innate in us, then, indeed, this nation would not be the persevering, hard-working, powerful John Bull which it is; or if it were, we should shame your German proverb, that the trees nowhere grow into the heavens. Good night, Doctor; and ‘au revoir.’ ”
APPENDIX.
CORRESPONDENCE.
Letter I.
Sir John to Dr. Keif.
Hyde Cottage, November 15.
My dear Doctor,
Herewith I return the proof-sheets of Part II. of the “Saunterings in and about London;” and I beg to thank you for them; although I know you sent them less for my amusement than because you wished to procure for me a sort of private view of myself and my prejudices as you call them. Never mind! an English gentleman can afford to hear the truth spoken anywhere and anyhow; and, if you promise to resign some of your Teutonic crotchets, I gladly pledge my word in return, that I will never again try to reason a Frenchman’s hind-leg straight; for, after all, that unfortunate dispute was the worst our friend could lay to my charge.