period of national decadence; reminding me strongly
of some diminutive Hellenised Roman of the third century. He is an
illustration of the period of culture in which the faculty of
appreciation has obtained such a preponderance over that of production
that the latter sinks into a kind of rank sterility, and the mental
condition becomes analogous to that of a malarious bog. I learn from him
that there is an immense number of Americans exactly resembling him, and
that the city of Boston, indeed, is almost exclusively composed of them.
(He communicated this fact very proudly, as if it were greatly to the
credit of his native country; little perceiving the truly sinister
impression it made upon me.)

What strikes one in it is that it is a phenomenon to the best of my
knowledge--and you know what my knowledge is--unprecedented and unique in
the history of mankind; the arrival of a nation at an ultimate stage of
evolution without having passed through the mediate one; the passage of
the fruit, in other words, from crudity to rottenness, without the
interposition of a period of useful (and ornamental) ripeness. With the
Americans, indeed, the crudity and the rottenness are identical and
simultaneous; it is impossible to say, as in the conversation of this
deplorable young man, which is one and which is the other; they are
inextricably mingled. I prefer the talk of the French _homunculus_; it
is at least more amusing.

It is interesting in this manner to perceive, so largely developed, the
germs of extinction in the so-called powerful Anglo-Saxon family. I find
them in almost as recognisable a form in a young woman from the State of
Maine, in the province of New England, with whom I have had a good deal
of conversation. She differs somewhat from the young man I just
mentioned, in that the faculty of production, of action, is, in her, less
inanimate; she has more of the freshness and vigour that we suppose to
belong to a young civilisation. But unfortunately she produces nothing
but evil, and her tastes and habits are similarly those of a Roman lady
of the lower Empire. She makes no secret of them, and has, in fact,
elaborated a complete system of licentious behaviour. As the
opportunities she finds in her own country do not satisfy her, she has
come to Europe "to try," as she says, "for herself." It is the doctrine
of universal experience professed with a cynicism that is really most
extraordinary, and which, presen