Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[96] foreign visitors are persons of fairly good manners. It was especially to be noticed, in the large company of scientific men who visited the United States a few years ago, what simplicity and modesty marked the most eminent. Yet taking a whole year's yield, so to speak, of foreign arrivals, how much discrimination is needed, and how little we make! There is something admirable in the meekness with which we associate, on equal or even deferential terms, with persons of a far lower grade of courtesy than that to which we are accustomed-provided they come in under the laws of hospitality. Who has not dined in company with some travelling Englishman, perhaps a man of note, whose manners were so intolerable that, as a Boston woman said lately on one occasion, they justified dynamite? And who has not lived to see the same person's book of travels, in which he kindly gave his own verdict of approval or condemnation of the society which had made an exception from its general standard of good-breeding when it admitted him? Who has not heard some English lecturer, while coiling and uncoiling himself into and out of positions of inconceivable awkwardness, dole out elementary lessons on literature and science, as it were in words of one syllable, to audiences which had heard these same themes discussed by Agassiz or Rogers or Holmes? And who has not subsequently read that worthy man's