On the other hand, his few personal
intimacies concerned him alone, and the chance that made him
almost a Yorkshireman was one that must have started under the
Heptarchy.
More than any other county in England, Yorkshire retained a
sort of social independence of London. Scotland itself was hardly
more distinct. The Yorkshire type had always been the strongest
of the British strains; the Norwegian and the Dane were a
different race from the Saxon. Even Lancashire had not the mass
and the cultivation of the West Riding. London could never quite
absorb Yorkshire, which, in its turn had no great love for London
and freely showed it. To a certain degree, evident enough to
Yorkshiremen, Yorkshire was not English -- or was all England, as
they might choose to express it. This must have been the reason
why young Adams was drawn there rather than elsewhere. Monckton
Milnes alone took the trouble to draw him, and possibly Milnes
was the only man in England with whom Henry Adams, at that
moment, had a chance of calling out such an un-English effort.
Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any region south of the Humber
contained a considerable house where a young American would have
been sought as a friend. Eccentricity alone did not account for
it. Monckton Milnes was a singular type, but his distant cousin,
James Milnes Gaskell, was another, quite as marked, in an
opposite sense.
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