In depictions of regional manners, it seems impossible to resist condescension. Whatever his or her degree of sympathy with the culture depicted, the observer writes as a sort of anthropologist on whom a higher knowledge has been conferred than on those described. When Timothy Dwight, from Greenfield Hill, sings how

he seeks to glorify the enchanting scene spread out before him by contrast to the more storied landscapes of the Old World. But the effect is to miniaturize the objects beneath the superiority (both spatial and intellectual) of the speaker's gaze. More often than not, furthermore, the literary anthropologist of regional manners overtly regards them as either cute or benighted, as touchingly passé or stultifyingly circumscribed.