——‘Can these things be, And overcome us like a summer-cloud, Without a special wonder?’
I suspect it is peculiar to the English not to answer the letters of their friends abroad. They know you are anxious to hear, and have a surly, sullen pleasure in disappointing you. To oblige is a thing abhorrent to their imaginations; to be uneasy at not hearing from home just when one wishes, is a weakness which they cannot encourage. Any thing like a responsibility attached to their writing is a kind of restraint upon their free-will, an interference with their independence. There is a sense of superiority in not letting you know what you wish to know, and in keeping you in a state of helpless suspense. Besides, they think you are angry at their not writing, and would make them _if you could_; and they show their resentment of your impatience and ingratitude by continuing not to write.—One thing truly edifying in the accounts from England, is the number of murders and robberies with which the newspapers abound. One would suppose that the repetition of the details, week after week, and day after day, might stagger us a little as to our superlative idea of the goodness, honesty, and industry of the English people. No such thing: whereas one similar fact occurring once a year abroad fills us with astonishment, and makes us ready to _dub_ the Italians (without any further inquiry) a nation of assassins and banditti. It is not safe to live or travel among them. Is it not strange, that we should persist in drawing such wilful conclusions from such groundless premises? A murder or a street-robbery in London is a matter of course[46]: accumulate a score of these under the most aggravated circumstances one upon the back of the other, in town and country, in the course of a few weeks—they all go for nothing; they make nothing against the English character in the abstract; the force of prejudice is stronger than the weight of evidence. The process of the mind is this; and absurd as it appears, is natural enough. We say (to ourselves) we are English, _we_ are good people, and therefore the English are good people. We carry a proxy in our bosoms for the national character in general. Our own motives are ‘very stuff o’ the conscience,’ and not like those of barbarous foreigners. Besides, we know many excellent English people, and the mass of the population cannot be affected in the scale of morality by the outrages of a few ruffians, which instantly meet with the reward they merit from wholesome and excellent laws. We are not to be moved from this position, that the great body of the British public do not live by thieving and cutting the throats of their neighbours, whatever the accounts in the newspapers might lead us to suspect. The streets are lined with bakers’, butchers’, and haberdashers’ shops, instead of night-cellars and gaming-houses; and are crowded with decent, orderly, well-dressed people, instead of being rendered impassable by gangs of swindlers and pickpockets. _The exception does not make the rule._ Nothing can be more clear or proper; and yet if a single Italian commit a murder or a robbery, we immediately form an abstraction of this individual case, and because we are ignorant of the real character of the people or state of manners in a million of instances, take upon us, like true Englishmen, to fill up the blank, which is left at the mercy of our horror-struck imaginations, with bugbears and monsters of every description. We should extend to others the toleration and the suspense of judgment we claim; and I am sure we stand in need of it from those who read the important head of ‘ACCIDENTS AND OFFENCES’ in our Journals. It is true an Italian baker, some time ago, shut his wife up in an oven, where she was burnt to death; the heir of a noble family stabbed an old woman to rob her of her money; a lady of quality had her step-daughter chained to a bed of straw, and fed on bread and water till she lost her senses. This translated into vulgar English means that all the bakers’ wives in Italy are burnt by their husbands at a slow fire; that all the young nobility are common bravoes; that all the step-mothers exercise unheard-of and unrelenting cruelty on the children of a former marriage. We only want a striking frontispiece to make out a tragic volume. As the traveller advances into the country, robbers and rumours of robbers fly before him with the horizon. In Italy,