"I passed a night in Farrarville, in an apartment which, in
England, would not have been thought fit for my servant; nor
on the Continent did he ever occupy so mean a one. Wherever
I stop it is the same: walls black and filthy; bed and
furniture sordid; furniture scanty and mean, generally
broken; no mirror; no fire-irons; in short, dirt and
discomfort universally prevail; and in most private houses
the matter is not mended. The cows milked a half a mile off,
or not got up, and no milk to be had at any distance,--no
jordan;--in fact, all the old gentry are gone, and the
_nouveaux riches_, when they have the inclination, do not
know how to live. _Biscuit_, not half _cuit_; everything
animal and vegetable smeared with butter and lard. Poverty
stalking through the land, while we are engaged in political
metaphysics, and, amidst our filth and vermin, like the
Spaniard and Portuguese, look down with contempt on other
nations,--England and France especially. We hug our lousy
cloak around us, take another _chaw of tub-backer_, float
the room with nastiness, or ruin the grate and fire-irons,
where they happen not to be rusty, and try conclusions upon
constitutional points."

What truth and painting in this passage! But if we had asked this
suffering genius as to the cause of his "country's" decline, he would
have given us a mad answer indeed. He would have said, in his wild
way, that it was all Tom Jefferson's doing, sir. Tom Jefferson
abolished primogeniture in Virginia, and thus, as John Randolph
believed, destroyed the old families, the life and glory of the.
State. Tom Jefferson was unfaithful to the States' Rights and
strict-constructionist creed, of which he was the expounder and
trustee, and thus let in the "American system" of Henry Clay, with its
protective tariff, which completed the ruin of the agricultural
States. This was his simple theory of the situation. These were the
reasons why he despaired of ever again seeing, to use his own
language,

"the Nelsons, the Pages, the Byrds, and Fairfaxes, living in
their palaces, and driving their coaches and sixes, or the
good old Virginia gentlemen in the Assembly drinking their
twenty and forty bowls of rack punches, and madeira and
claret, in lieu of a knot of deputy sheriffs and hack
attorneys, each with his cruet of whiskey before him, an