They are a repressed and exceedingly private people, the British.
The primary color of their dress and of their cities is gray. For nourishment, they favor sprouts, porridge and the like - boiled things unlikely to excite the nerves.If you've ever eaten breakfast in the dining room of a British resort hotel, you will recall the ambient solemnity.
"Ummm," says someone, examining his toast.
China cups and silverware make a furtive little chinking in the silence. A sneeze is a shameful event. Heads turn but only for an instant. Then attention is fixed again on the cooked tomatoes bleeding pinkishly into the unsalted eggs.
"Quite," someone whispers.
And that is what passes for conversation. The Brits on holiday could easily be mistaken for mourners at a wake.
In their secret hearts, of course, our cousins on the other side are as full of mischief, as aflame with lust and rage as any of the rest of us. But a certain sense of propriety forbids letting this be known.
As with any rule, naturally, there are exceptions.
It happens, for example, that friends from England are visiting in the city now. I had the luck to spend a couple of days with them at their home in Devon last year and had a splendid time.
They are two of the liveliest, most engaging people you could ever hope to know.
But it's the national stereotype I'm speaking of. And I stand by the generalization of the English as a reticent and undemonstrative race. Which does much, in my opinion, to explain the true function of British royalty and also the essential difference between their form of government and ours.
We Americans, by and large, are a bawdy and raucous bunch, with hardly any self-restraint at all. We're forever running around bickering, mooning, roistering, flaunting our excesses, trumpeting our scandals and behaving in most ways outrageously.
We therefore need a president, surrounded by magisterial trappings, to reign with some illusion of dignity over a rabble - ourselves - that is all but out of control. This is why we feel so let down when one of our leaders is found to be as flawed and susceptible to vice as the rest of us.
The need of the English, on the other hand, is for someone to act out the vain and unseemly urges that, through long practice, they have mastered and suppressed in themselves. And that is the role of the royal family.
The members of the crown household get themselves up in flamboyant costumes and ride in horse-drawn carriages and parade around the world to the remnants of empire, receiving the curtsies and tribute of the natives.
They fall off polo ponies and get themselves photographed au naturel on secluded beaches.
They have been known to throw everything over - kingdom, duty and all - to follow the siren song of love.
Before that they had a habit of beheading their rivals and even their wives.
Except for the royal tours and the polo, most of these are things we Americans do fairly routinely and that ordinary English men and women might do also were such ribald pleasures not so offensive to their habit of reserve.
The job of England's royal family, then, is to show their subjects that it's possible to have a little fun in life, provided your allowance is large enough you let yourself be guided by your glands.
It's hard, nasty work. But someone has to do it.