this diary I find the following passage,
pleasantly complimentary to England:--

"The slices of bread and butter which they give you with your tea are as
thin as poppy leaves. But there is another kind of bread and butter usually
eaten with tea, which is toasted by the fire, and is incomparably good.
This is called 'toast.'"

I wonder how many people, nowadays, whose bread and butter was cut too thin
for them, would think of comparing the slices to poppy leaves? But this was
in the old days of travelling, when people did not whirl themselves past
corn-fields, that they might have more time to walk on paving-stones; and
understood that {87} poppies did not mingle their scarlet among the gold,
without some purpose of the poppy-Maker that they should be looked at.

Nevertheless, with respect to the good and polite German's
poetically-contemplated, and finely aesthetic, tea, may it not be asked
whether poppy leaves themselves, like the bread and butter, are not, if we
may venture an opinion--_too_ thin,--im-_properly_ thin? In the last
chapter, my reader was, I hope, a little anxious to know what I meant by
saying that modern philosophers did not know the meaning of the word
'proper,' and may wish to know what I mean by it myself. And this I think
it needful to explain before going farther.

2. In our English prayer-book translation, the first verse of the
ninety-third Psalm runs thus: "The Lord is King; and hath put on glorious
apparel." And although, in the future republican world, there are to be no
lords, no kings, and no glorious apparel, it will be found convenient, for
botanical purposes, to remember what such things once were; for when I said
of the poppy, in last chapter, that it was "robed in the purple of the
Caesars," the words gave, to any one who had a clear idea of a Caesar, and of
his dress, a better, and even _stricter_, account of the flower than if I
had only said, with Mr. Sowerby, "petals bright scarlet;" which might just
as well have been said of a pimpernel, or scarlet geranium;--but of neither
of these latter should I have said "robed in purple of Caesars." What I
meant was, first, that the poppy leaf {88} looks dyed through and through,
like glass, or Tyrian tissue; and not merely painted: secondly, that the
splendour of it is proud,--almost insolently so. Augustus, in his glory,
might have been clothed like one of these; and Saul; but not David, nor
Solomon; still less the teacher of Solomon, wh