relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull,
and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue
something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you
in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the
lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the
head and shoulders.

Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English
youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and
gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of
future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct.
I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys
of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once
more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance
chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider
extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South
seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to
games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily
transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in
mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser
and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more
immersed in present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing,
English boys are younger for their age. Sabbath observance makes a
series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of
Scotch boyhood - days of great stillness and solitude for the
rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the
intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and
senses prey upon and test each other. The typical English Sunday,
with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads
perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of the Scot