* * * * *

The old editions of Dickens are here, and I have been re-reading
_Little Dorrit_ with keen enjoyment. There is a great deal of poor
stuff in it, but there is more that is first-rate than I thought. I
had quite forgotten Flora's enumeration of the number of times Mr. F.
proposed to her--"seven times, once in a hackney coach, once in a
boat, once in a pew, once on a donkey at Tunbridge Wells, and the rest
on his knees." But she is very admirable throughout.

I've also been reading some more of that American novelist's work,
Henry James, junior,--_The Madonna of the Future_, etc. He is not
_great_, but very clever.

Used you not to like the first-class Americans you met in China very
much? It is with great reluctance--believing Great Britons to be the
salt of the earth!!--but a lot of evidence of sorts is gradually
drawing me towards a notion that the best type of American Gentleman
is something like a generation ahead of our gentlemen in his attitude
towards women and all that concerns them. There are certain points of
view commonly taken up by Englishmen, even superior ones, which always
exasperate women, and which seem equally incomprehensible by American
men. You will guess the sort of things I mean. I do not know whether
it is more really than the _elite_ of Yankees (in which case we also
have our _ames d'elite_ in chivalry)--but I fancy as a race they seem
to be shaking off the ground-work idea of woman as the lawful
PREY of man, who must keep Mrs. Grundy at her elbow, and
_show cause why she shouldn't be insulted_. (An almost exclusively
_English_ feeling even in Great Britain, I fancy. By the bye, what odd
flash of self-knowledge of John Bull made Byron say in his will that
his daughter was not to marry an Englishman, as either Scotch or
Irishmen made better husbands?)...

July 6, 1881.

* * * * *

The Academy this year is very fine. Some truly beautiful things. But
before one picture I stood and simply laughed and shook with laughing
aloud. It is by an Italian, and called "A frightful state of things."
It is a baby left in a high chair in a sort of Highland cottage, with
his plate of "parritch" on his lap--and every beastie about the place,
geese, cocks, hens, chicks, dogs, cats, etc., etc., have invaded him,
and are trying to get some of his food. The painting is exquisite, and
it is the most indescribably funny thing you can pictu