ABSTRACT
When I came to London first in the year 1870, I was not only young and untravelled but singularly ignorant; and I was most ignorant, curiously enough, about England and Englishmen. I belonged to a race that is even more insular than the English—though they are insular enough; and one of the first things I had to get rid of was this insularity. I had no racial resentment—that I have never had at any time of my life—but I had a good deal of racial misunderstanding. I remember still my ardent disputes with an Englishman—a fellow-journalist—on the question whether the English or the Irish were the more sentimental race; and I drew a portrait of the Englishman as I pictured him at that time—I had not left Ireland—and the portrait was of a man very wonderful in business, usually very rich, very self-indulgent, very calculating; above all, free from sentiment. Especially did I exclude from his emotions and habits the sentiment of love, and marriage for love; and when my English comrade told me that most marriages in England were made without a dowry—or, as we call it in Ireland, a “fortune,” either asked or given—I just listened with the idea that he was, so to speak, pulling my leg, with bold inventiveness not foreign to his nature.
