Popular education was ingrafted upon the policy of
both states at about the same period, and in both it has had the same
result, making of the farming-class a body of energetic, thrifty,
intelligent, and aspiring people. Scotland and New England alike owe
some of their best as well as their least attractive traits to bitter
climate and a parsimonious soil; and the rural population of either is
pushed into emigration by the scanty harvests at home. It is not a
little singular that the Yankee and the canny Scot should each stand as
a butt for the wit of his neighbors, while each has a shrewdness all his
own. The Scotch, it is true, are said to be unusually impervious to a
joke, while our Down-Easters are perhaps the most recondite and
many-sided of American humorists. And, though many of the conditions of
the two regions are alike, the temperaments of the two races are of
course largely dissimilar. The most salient distinction, perhaps, is
that of the Scotch being a musical and dancing nation; something from
which the New-Englanders are fatally far removed. As if to link him with
his Puritan ancestry and stamp him beyond mistake as a Pilgrim and not a
Covenanter, Hawthorne was by nature formed with little ear for music. It
seems strange that a man who could inform the verses on "Moonlight,"
just quoted, with so delicate a melody, and never admitted an ill-timed
strain or jarring cadence into his pure, symphonious prose, should
scarcely be able to distinguish one tune from another.
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