but we should be required to confess the precise faults that, according
to the notions of this quarter of the world, we are morally, logically,
and politically bound to possess. This he would not admit, for what man
is ever willing to confess that his own opinions are prejudiced?

I mention this little incident, because its spirit, in my deliberate
judgment, forms the _rule_, in the case of the feeling of all British
subjects, and I am sorry to say the subjects of most other European
countries; and the mawkish sentiment and honeyed words that sometimes
appear in toasts, tavern dinners, and public speeches, the exception. I
may be wrong, as well as another, but this, I repeat for the twentieth
time, is the result of my own observations; you know under what
opportunities these observations have been made, and how far they are
likely to be influenced by personal considerations.

In the evening I accompanied a gentleman, whose acquaintance I had made
at Rome, to the country-house of a family that I had also had the
pleasure of meeting during their winter's residence in that town. We
passed out by the gate of Savoy, and walked a mile or two, among
country-houses and pleasant alleys of trees, to a dwelling not unlike
one of our own, on the Island of Manhattan, though furnished with more
taste and comfort than it is usual to meet in America. M. and Mad. N----
were engaged to pass the evening at the house of a connexion near by,
and they frankly proposed that we should be of the party. Of course we
assented, leaving them to be the judges of what was proper.

At this second dwelling, a stone's throw from the other, we found a
small party of sensible and well-bred people, who received me as a
stranger, with marked politeness, but with great simplicity. I was
struck with the repast, which was exactly like what a country tea is, or
perhaps I ought to say, used to be, in respectable families, at home,
who have not, or had not, much of the habits of the world. We all sat
round a large table, and, among other good things that were served, was
an excellent fruit tart! I could almost fancy myself in New England,
where I remember a judge of a supreme court once gave me _custards_, at
a similar entertainment. The family we had gone to see, were perhaps a
little too elegant for such a set-out, for I had seen them in Rome with
_mi-lordi_ and _monsignori_, at their six o'clock dinners; but the quiet
good sense with which everybody dropped