It is thus
that brick is peculiarly English in its effect: for we are brutes in
many things, and we are ignoramuses in many things, and we are destitute
of feeling in many things, but we are _not_ coxcombs. It is only by the
utmost effort, that some of our most highly gifted junior gentlemen can
attain such distinction of title; and even then the honor sits ill upon
them: they are but awkward coxcombs. Affectation[37] never was, and
never will be, a part of English character; we have too much national
pride, too much consciousness of our own dignity and power, too much
established self-satisfaction, to allow us to become ridiculous by
imitative efforts; and, as it is only by endeavoring to appear what he
is not, that a man ever can become so, properly speaking, our
true-witted Continental neighbors, who shrink from John Bull as a brute,
never laugh at him as a fool. "Il est bete, il n'est pas pourtant sot."
[Footnote 37: The nation, indeed, possesses one or two interesting
individuals, whose affectation is, as we have seen, strikingly
manifested in their lake villas: but every rule has its exceptions; and,
even on these gifted personages, the affectation sits so very awkwardly,
so like a velvet bonnet on a plowman's carroty hair, that it is
evidently a late acquisition. Thus, one proprietor of land on
Windermere, who has built unto himself a castellated mansion with round
towers, and a Swiss cottage for a stable, has yet, with that admiration
of the "neat but not gaudy," which is commonly reported to have
influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea-green, painted the
rocks at the back of his house pink, that they may look clean.
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