proves, if only he leave his conceit and prejudice at home, there to perish with the effete monarchies that bred them. He has a better civilization, a more democratic government to-day, and we have a right to expect better of him. We deserve something better than his generations of unmerited censure, cheap ridicule, and trashy burlesque. It was enough for Tom Moore to style us "That vulgar throng, so vain of dullness, so pleased of wrong.' It was enough for the learned Dr. Johnson, philosopher, sage, to call us "rascals, robbers, and pirates;" or for Mrs. Trollope to burlesque our manners; or for the great English novelist, Charles Dickens, to stoop to dub us a nation of spitters, a criticism designed by its very nature to make decent people smart, still wholly lost, we fear, on our "vulgar throng." But Mr. Kipling has decreed otherwise, thinking, perhaps, that English ridicule of Americans has become a national custom that must be religiously observed and in book form at least once every generation. How well be has accomplished his task those who have read his "American Notes" will testify. CHAPTER II. AMERICAN NOTES. And I laughed as I drove from the station, As I thought of the fools like Pagett, Who write of their "Eastern Trips", Another one into my hand.-Kipling. IPLING admits that for fourteen days and K nights he wondered why Bret Harte wrote the following beautiful lines about San Francisco, the great city of the Golden West: Serene, indifferent to fate, Thou sittest at the western gate; Thou seest the white seas fold their tents Oh, warder of two continents; Thou drawest all things small and great Mr. Kipling's criticism is, that "There is neither serenity nor indifference to be found in these parts; and evil would it be for the continents whose wardship was entrusted to so reckless a guardian." Now, that one of the "Waspish race," to which poets are said to belong, biased by hereditary prej udice, with a special "grievance" upon him, filled "neck-and-crop" with the gall of bitterness toward every American, from cab-driver to president, could see men as trees walking, and everything else equally distorted, is not to be wondered at. To him the wonders of the Yellowstone Park are as so many "sputtering mud-holes." From molehill to mountain peak he finds naught in the wide range of nature to elicit from him more than a modicum of praise. Our people, from dignitaries to "boggled-eyed urchins," our institutions, from bristling fortress to peace-loving pulpit, our manners, from those of the vile imitator of foreign snobs to those of the "sweet retiring maid" on summer outings with their mothers,—all come in for a rich share of "the amused scorn of the Briton." But he came prepared to "feed fat the ancient grudge" he owed us, and to relieve to satiety his long pent-up prejudice. He begins strangely enough, however, more like a reckless or jilted youth from whom the restraints of home had suddenly been removed, than like the disciplined and dignified editor of a military gazette. From the moment he landed in San Francisco he began to seek his own. He guzzles beer in her saloons, "wolfs" his food at her free lunch counters along with other frequenters of the bar-room, courts the company of the coarse and profane, runs with a bunco-steerer, sees the fleas and filth of the city's by-ways, falls out with her intelligent, gentlemanly hotel clerks because they are thrifty and think themselves the equal of a "bloated Brahmin," writes doggerel three parts Hindu, "elephantes," Jack-tar slang, and "Gypsy-folk bolee," and then rants about how horrible to him is the speech of the San Franciscan. Instead of her handsome residences, her beautiful park, her ocean views, "where the white seas fold their tents," the pine-clad hills, the snowcapped mountains in the dim, delusive distance, what does this man, this idol of the Anglo-Saxon world, this poet of the nineteenth century, whose heart is supposed to be filled with all that is beautiful in nature and good in man, and whose sensibilities are ever-keen to the presence of all that charms, what does he see? Her mountains in the dim distance? No! Her sandhills at his feet! Her mighty commerce streaming over the land and her ships from all the seas? No! Her noisy street cars that "riggle and twist" and jar so mightily on his delicate nerves. Mount Hamilton, that bears on her summit the mighty Lick Observatory, an eye that scans the universe with equal show in quest of other worlds? No! "Sand bunkers," "Gutter and Sixteenth"! Instead of soft music made by the gentle lappings of the Pacific as it laves the skirts of this great city by the "Western Gate," he hears nothing but the rasp of boot heels on the pavement and the ceaseless grating of the American speech on his aesthetic ear, so accustomed to better Aryan. Instead of giving his countrymen at home a just, fair and impartial idea of the city's best, most intelligent and noblest citizenship, not a line con- · cerning her great men past or present. Not a line concerning our eloquent senator, E. D. Baker, whose tomb at Laurel Hill overlooks the Pacific. On the contrary, he mingles with her ward politicians to pick up pioneer stories and catch lewd jokes, attends the Bohemian Club for the same purpose, and dubs the oratory of his entertainers "Blatherskiteism." Everywhere he seems like some pessimist, lantern in hand like Diogenes looking for an honest man, some cynic rather than art critic, looking for a mole on the neck of a Grecian beauty. And the nauseating stream about reporters and hotel clerks and servant girls, bad manners, bad accents, saloons, street fights, policemen with big pistols, Chinamen, Italians, Negroes, whom he styles "bungle-fisted fools," flows on and on, until his readers over the seas who are |