Shyness is characteristic of most people of Teutonic race.

It has been styled "the English mania," but it pervades, to a greater or less degree, all the Northern nations.

The ordinary Englishman, when he travels abroad, carries his shyness with him.

He is stiff, awkward, ungraceful, undemonstrative, and apparently unsympathetic; and though he may assume a brusqueness of manner, the shyness is there, and cannot be wholly concealed.

The naturally graceful and intensely social French cannot understand such a character; and the Englishman is their standing joke--the subject of their most ludicrous caricatures.