It is characteristic of Henry James that he should associate the hour in which he turned to grace with a plate of buttered muffins.  His fiction remained to the end to some extent the tale of a buttered muffin.  He made mountains out of muffins all his days.  His ecstasy and his curiosity were nine times out of ten larger than their objects.  Thus, though he was intensely interested in English life, he was interested in it, not in its largeness as life so much as in its littleness as a museum, almost a museum of bric-a-brac.  He was enthusiastic about the waiter in the coffee-room in the Liverpool hotel chiefly as an illustration of the works of the English novelists.

Again and again in his reminiscences one comes upon evidence that Henry James arrived in England in the spirit of a collector, a connoisseur, as well as that of a convert.  His ecstasy was that of a convert:  his curiosity was that of a connoisseur.  As he recalls his first experience of a London eating-house of the old sort, with its “small compartments, narrow as horse-stalls,” he glories:  in the sordidness of it all, because “every face was a documentary scrap.”

I said to myself under every shock and at the hint of every savour that this it was for an exhibition to reek with local colour, and one could dispense with a napkin, with a crusty roll, with room for one’s elbows or one’s feet, with an immunity from intermittance of the “plain boiled” much better than one could dispense with that.

Here, again, one has an instance of the way in which the show of English life revealed itself to Henry James as an exhibition of eating.  “As one sat there,” he says of his reeking restaurant, “one understood.” It is in the same mood of the connoisseur on the track of a precious discovery that he recalls “the very first occasion of my sallying forth from Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square to dine at a house of sustaining, of inspiring hospitality in the Kensington quarter.”  What an epicure the man was!  “The thrill of sundry invitations to breakfast” still survived on his palate more than forty years afterwards.  Not that these meals were recalled as gorges of the stomach:  they were merely gorges of sensation, gorges of the sense of the past.  The breakfasts associated him “at a jump” with the ghosts of Byron and Sheridan and Rogers.  They had also a documentary value as “the exciting note of a social order in which every one wasn’t hurled straight, with the momentum of rising, upon an office or a store....”  It was one morning, “beside Mrs. Charles Norton’s tea-room, in Queen’s Gate Terrace,” that his “thrilling opportunity” came to sit opposite to Mr. Frederic Harrison, eminent in the eyes of the young American, not for his own sake so much as because recently he had been the subject of Matthew Arnold’s banter.  Everybody in England, like Mr. Harrison, seemed to Henry James to be somebody, or at least to have been talked about by somebody.  They were figures, not cyphers.  They were characters in a play with cross-references.