Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

[178] of truth and soberness in them, the poverty in serious interest, the personality and sensation-mongering, are beyond belief. There are a few newspapers which are in whole, or in part, exceptions. The New York Nation, a weekly paper, may be paralleled with the Saturday Review as it was in its old and good days; but the New York Nation is conducted by a foreigner, and has an extremely small sale. In general, the daily papers are such that when one returns home one is moved to admiration and thankfulness not only at the great London papers, like the Times or the Standard, but quite as much at the great provincial newspapers, too,--papers like the Leeds Mercury and the York-shire Post in the north of England, like the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald in Scotland.

The Americans used to say to me that what they valued was news, and that this their newspapers gave them. I at last made the reply: “Yes, news for the servants' hall!” I remember that a New York newspaper, one of the first I saw after landing in the country, had a long account, with the prominence we should give to the illness of the German Emperor or the arrest of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, of a young woman who had married a man who was a bag of bones, as we say, and who used to exhibit himself as a