question was started, "what country came next in their affections to England?" I listened, in my greenness expecting to hear one and all say " America;" no, not one feeble voice uttered the name. Mrs. ——, with her hot love of art, naturally answered, " Italy is first to us all." "Oh, no," replied two or three voices, "England first, and next—Germany." "England first," said Mrs. A., "Germany next, and I think my third country is—Malta!" I thought of my own land, planted from the English stock, where the productions of these very speakers are most widely circulated, and, if destined to live, must have their longest life; the land where the most thorough and hopeful experiment of the capacity of the human race for knowledge, virtue, happiness, and self-government is now making; the land of promise and protection to the poor and disheartened of every country; and it seemed to me it should have superseded in their affections countries comparatively foreign to them.
I have seen instances of ignorance of us in quarters where you would scarcely expect it; for example, a very cultivated man, a bishop, asked K. if there were a theatre in America! and a person of equal dignity inquired "if the society of Friends was not the prevailing religious sect in Boston!" A literary man of some distinction asked me if the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews were read in America; and one of the cultivated women of England said to me, in a soothing tone, on my expressing admiration of English trees, "Oh, you will have such in time, when
