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.
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