o amusing us than anything else in the book. America is
his _bete noir_. It points the moral of every sad tale. "Vulgarity,
hoydenishness, coarseness, and the contempt which accompanies these
qualities, are the effects of bad manner and manners. It may pervade a
whole nation, as it has done the Americans." What the particular "it" is
which pervades us, we cannot, and the Gentle Man, also, "true to
himself," cannot say; but there it is. A nation is exhorted to
politeness; for, "sitting with their legs over the chair-back of
another, carrying bowie-knives, cutting the furniture, and spitting in a
circle around them, are not only national faults, but absolutely sins
amongst Americans." Call a spade a spade, and speak not as in "America,
where they talk of the 'stands' of the tables, not daring to say 'legs';
and a young lady will be highly offended, if you dare to ask her to take
a leg of a fowl or a breast of a turkey. There the latter is called
'bosom'; and a mock modesty, which to us seems highly improper, has
altered some round dozen of good, sound English words, which our best
and purest girls use without so much as thinking upon them." Avoid
exaggeration, for in America "it produces a general decay of truth and a
boastful habit of exaggeration, for which the nation has grown famous,
and at which its best friends are truly grieved." (Oh!) ... "They have
asserted so long that they are the finest and best nation in the world,
and they have come out so poorly under trial, that, what with a
remembrance of the old story and the presence of the new, the English
thinker is completely puzzled.... So general was the falsification, that
the best men in the Northern States no longer credited a Government
despatch or a general's 'order';... and the sad state into which the
great nation has fallen has arisen from the spread of that vile disease,
a love of exaggeration." His profound political penetration is evinced
by the sagacious remark, that "America, the disciple of Lafayette (!)
and French doctrines, determined to propagate liberty by enslaving six
millions of brothers." His opinion of the character and career of our
late beloved President--a name almost too pure and now too sacred to be
mentioned here--is for once succinctly given,--"A cunning attorney sits
upon a chair he cannot fill, and is leading a party and country to
destruction." "With all his undoubted conceit and endurance, with his
keenness for praise and for being t