Among other important facts connected with this great question, his discriminating mind has ascertained that an Englishman “makes it a rule to enjoy a dinner at his own expense as little as possible.”  Armed with this important discovery, he lets drive the following American shell, thus shivering to atoms the whole framework of our society.  The nation may tremble as it reads these withering words of Kentucky eloquence:—­“When it is remembered that of all the vices, avarice is most apt to corrupt the heart, and gluttony has the greatest tendency to brutalize the mind, it no longer continues surprising that an Englishman has become a proverb of meanness from Paris to Jerusalem.  The hatred and contempt of all classes of society as necessarily attend him in his wanderings as his own shadow....  Equally repulsive to every grade of society, he stands isolated and alone, a solitary monument of the degradation of which human nature is capable.”

Feeling that ordinary language is insufficient to convey his courteous and chivalrous sentiments, he ransacks natural history in search of a sublime metaphor:  his triumphant success he records in this beautifully expressed sentence—­“The dilating power of the anaconda and the gizzard of the cassowary are the highest objects of his ambition.”  But neither ordinary language nor metaphor can satisfy his lofty aspirations:  it requires something higher, it requires an embodiment of genuine American feeling, vigorous yet courteous; his giant intellect rises equal to the task.  He warns my countrymen “to use expletives oven with the danger of being diffuse, rather than be so blunt and so vulgar;” and then—­by way, I suppose, of showing them how to be sarcastic without being either blunt or vulgar—­he delivers himself of the following magnificent bursts:—­“If guts could perform the function of brains, Greece’s seven wise men would cease to be proverbial, for England would present to the world twenty-seven millions of sages....  To eat, to drink, to look greasy, and to grow fat, appear to constitute, in their opinion, the career of a worthy British subject....  The lover never asks his fair one if she admires Donizetti’s compositions, but tenderly inquires if she loves beef-steak pies.  This sordid vice of greediness is rapidly brutalizing natures not originally spiritual; every other passion is sinking, oppressed by flabby folds of fat, into helplessness.  All the mental energies are crushed beneath the oily mass.  Sensibility is smothered in, the feculent steams of roast beef, and delicacy stained by the waste drippings of porter.  The brain is slowly softening into blubber, and the liver is gradually encroaching upon the heart.  All the nobler impulses of man are yielding to those animal propensities which must soon render Englishmen beasts in all save form alone.”