The best constituted Englishman.
Sympathy.
The tenderer Natures.
The Filial Relation in England.
The Fraternal.
Cousins.
Funerals.
Neglected Tombs.
Friends and Relations.
Do the English suppress feeling, or have they no feeling to be suppressed? The true answer to this question cannot be a simple one. English usages have a tendency to prevent the expression of feeling where it exists, and therefore they are not favourable to the culture of the feelings, still these exist naturally as blades of grass will grow between the hard stones of a pavement. It must, however, be admitted that although in England a man of feeling may certainly live, the moral climate is not so favourable to him as it is to one who feels much less and is therefore hardier. The Englishman who is best constituted for life in his own country is one who has just feeling enough to keep him right in all matters of external duty, but not enough to make him very sympathetic, or to give him any painful craving for sympathy. If he is sympathetic he will offer his sympathy where it is not wanted, and be hurt by the chilling acceptance of it, and if he has the misfortune to crave for sympathy he will suffer. So it comes to pass that the tenderer natures try to harden themselves by an acquired and artificial insensibility, whilst those which are not very tender find the conditions of existence more suitable for them. I had collected a number of examples, but do not give them, because instances prove nothing, and because it would be so easy to affirm that my examples were not truly representative. I prefer to take another course, and to suggest to the reader, if he is familiar with English life, the idea of making a little investigation on his own account, by consulting his own recollections. First, as to family affections, the reader has probably met with many cases in which the paternal and filial relations were cool and rather distant, so that separation was not painful to either party. If he has observed brothers he may have seen them practically almost strangers, living far apart, in different spheres, and seldom, if ever, corresponding. He may have known cousins, even first cousins, who did not remember their relationship so far as to announce to each other the occurrences of marriages and deaths. He may have observed that a slight impediment of distance or occupation is sometimes enough to prevent a relation from coming to a funeral, and that the tombs of dead relations are sometimes left unvisited, uncared for, and untended. The reader may have noticed cases in which a difference of fortune produces a complete estrangement between very near relations, and finally he may have met with Englishmen who declared that friends were worth having because they could be selected, but that relations were a nuisance or “a mistake.”