“We’ll talk of that some other time, Mr. Slick,” said I; “it is now near two o’clock, I must retire.”
“Well, well,” said he, “I suppose it is e’en a’most time to be a movin’. But, Squire, you are a Britisher, why the plague don’t you get into the house? you know more about colony matters than the whole bilin’ of” them put together, quite as much about other things, and speak like a—”
“Come, come, Mr. Slick,” said I, rising and lighting my bed-room candle, “it is now high time to bid you good night, for you are beginning to talk Bunkum.”
CHAPTER IX. THROWING THE LAVENDER.
Mr. Slick’s character, like that of many of his countrymen, is not so easily understood as a person might suppose. We err more often than we are aware of, when we judge of others by ourselves. English tourists have all fallen into this mistake, in their, estimate of the Americans. They judge them by their own standard; they attribute effects to wrong causes, forgetting that a different tone of feeling, produced by a different social and political state from their own, must naturally produce dissimilar results.
Any person reading the last sketch containing the account, given by Mr. Slick of the House of Commons, his opinion of his own abilities as a speaker, and his aspiration after a seat in that body, for the purpose of “skinning,” as he calls it, impertinent or stupid members, could not avoid coming to the conclusion that he was a conceited block-head; and that if his countrymen talked in that absurd manner, they must be the weakest, and most vain-glorious people in the world.
That he is a vain man, cannot be denied—self-taught men are apt to be so every where; but those who understand the New England humour, will at once perceive, that he has spoken in his own name merely as a personification, and that the whole passage means after all, when transposed into that phraseology which an Englishman would use, very little more than this, that the House of Commons presented a noble field for a man of abilities as a public speaker; but that in fact, it contained very few such persons. We must not judge of words or phrases, when used by foreigners, by the sense we attribute to them, but endeavour to understand the meaning they attach to them themselves.
In Mexico, if you admire any thing, the proprietor immediately says, “Pray do me the honour to consider it yours, I shall be most happy, if you will permit me, to place it upon you, (if it be an ornament), or to send it to your hotel,” if it be of a different description. All this means in English, a present; in Mexican Spanish, a civil speech, purporting that the owner is gratified, that it meets the approbation of his visiter. A Frenchman, who heard this grandiloquent reply to his praises of a horse, astonished his friend, by thanking him in terms equally amplified, accepting it, and riding it home.
Mr. Slick would be no less amazed, if understood literally. He has used a peculiar style; here again, a stranger would be in error, in supposing the phraseology common to all Americans. It is peculiar only to a certain class of persons in a certain state of life, and in a particular section of the States. Of this class, Mr. Slick is a specimen. I do not mean to say he is not a vain man, but merely that a portion only of that, which appears so to us, is vanity, and that the rest and by far the greater portion too, is local or provincial peculiarity.