CONDES CESSION IN FOREIGNERS. 6 5 



democratic patent-method of seeming to settle one s honest 

 debts, for they would find it paying through the nose in the 

 long run. I am a man of the New World, and do not 

 know precisely the present fashion of May Fair, but I 

 have a kind of feeling that if an American (mutato 

 nomine, de te is always frightfully possible) were to do 

 this kind of thing under a European roof, it would induce 

 some disagreeable reflections as to the ethical results of 

 democracy. I read the other day in print the remark of 

 a British tourist who had eaten large quantities of our salt, 

 such as it is (I grant it has not the European savour), that 

 the Americans were hospitable, no doubt, but that it was 

 partly because they longed for foreign visitors to relieve 

 the tedium of their dead-level existence, and partly from 

 ostentation. What shall we do ? Shall we close our 

 doors ? Not I, for one, if I should so have forfeited the 

 friendship of L. S., most lovable of men. He somehow 

 seems to find us human at least, and so did Clough, whose 

 poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be found to have 

 been the best utterance in verse of this generation. And 

 T. H., the mere grasp of whose manly hand carries with it 

 the pledge of frankness and friendship, of an abiding 

 simplicity of nature as affecting as it is rare ! 



The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not hard 

 to bear. There was something even refreshing in it, as in 

 a north-easter to a hardy temperament. When a British 

 parson, travelling in Newfoundland while the slash of our 

 separation was still raw, after prophesying a glorious future 

 for an island that continued to dry its fish under the aegis of 

 Saint George, glances disdainfully over his spectacles in 

 parting at the U, S. A., and forebodes for them a &quot; speedy 

 relapse into barbarism,&quot; now that they have madly cut 

 themselves off from the humanising influences of Britain, I 

 smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this kind of thing 

 became by degrees an unpleasant anachronism. For mean 

 while the young giant was growing, was beginning indeed 

 to feel tight in his clothes, was obliged to let in a gore here 

 and there in Texas, in California, in New Mexico, in 



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