AMERICA TO-DAY
and do, read and understand him as Colonel Newcome read Caesar—"with a translation, sir, with a translation." The width of outlook which I have noted as characteristic of literary New York is deliberately aimed at in the university system, and most successfully attained. The average young man of parts turned out by an American university has a many-sided interest in, and comprehension of, European literature and the intellectual movement of the world, which may go far to compensate for his possible or even probable inexpertness in Greek aorists and Latin elegiacs.
The academic and literary New Yorker, I am well aware, is not "the American." But who is "the American"? I turn to Mr. G. W. Steevens, and find that "the American is a highly electric Anglo-Saxon. His temperament is of quicksilver. There is as much difference in vivacity and emotion between him and an Englishman as there is between an Englishman and an Italian." Well, Mr. Steevens is a keener observer than I; when he wrote this he had been two months in America to my one; and he had travelled far and wide over the continent. I am not rash enough, then, to contradict him; but I must own that I have not met this " American," or anything like him, in the streets, clubs, theatres, restaurants, or public conveyances of New York. On the contrary, as I take my walks abroad between Union Square and Central Park, or hang on to the straps of an elevated train or cable car, I am all the time occu-
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