There Is Much Difficulty In Expressing A
Verdict Which Is Intended To Be Favorable; But Which, Though
Favorable, Shall Not Be Falsely Eulogistic; And Though True, Not
Offensive.
Who has ever traveled in foreign countries without meeting
excellent stories against the citizens of such countries?
And how
few can travel without hearing such stories against themselves! It
is impossible for me to avoid telling of a very excellent gentleman
whom I met before I had been in the United States a week, and who
asked me whether lords in England ever spoke to men who were not
lords. Nor can I omit the opening address of another gentleman to
my wife. "You like our institutions, ma'am?" "Yes, indeed," said
my wife, not with all that eagerness of assent which the occasion
perhaps required. "Ah," said he, "I never yet met the down-trodden
subject of a despot who did not hug his chains." The first
gentleman was certainly somewhat ignorant of our customs, and the
second was rather abrupt in his condemnation of the political
principles of a person whom he only first saw at that moment. It
comes to me in the way of my trade to repeat such incidents; but I
can tell stories which are quite as good against Englishmen. As,
for instance, when I was tapped on the back in one of the galleries
of Florence by a countryman of mine, and asked to show him where
stood the medical Venus. Nor is anything that one can say of the
inconveniences attendant upon travel in the United States to be
beaten by what foreigners might truly say of us. I shall never
forget the look of a Frenchman whom I found on a wet afternoon in
the best inn of a provincial town in the west of England. He was
seated on a horsehair-covered chair in the middle of a small,
dingy, ill-furnished private sitting-room. No eloquence of mine
could make intelligible to a Frenchman or an American the utter
desolation of such an apartment. The world as then seen by that
Frenchman offered him solace of no description. The air without
was heavy, dull, and thick. The street beyond the window was dark
and narrow. The room contained mahogany chairs covered with horse-
hair, a mahogany table, rickety in its legs, and a mahogany
sideboard ornamented with inverted glasses and old cruet-stands.
The Frenchman had come to the house for shelter and food, and had
been asked whether he was commercial. Whereupon he shook his head.
"Did he want a sitting-room?" Yes, he did. "He was a leetle tired
and vanted to seet." Whereupon he was presumed to have ordered a
private room, and was shown up to the Eden I have described. I
found him there at death's door. Nothing that I can say with
reference to the social habits of the Americans can tell more
against them than the story of that Frenchman's fate tells against
those of our country.
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