Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[209] Charles Martel had not finally driven back the Saracen forces at the battle of Tours, because if he had been defeated, Urquhart says, the Mohammedans would have overrun all Europe, ‘and then even we English should have been gentlemen.’

Of all the points on which we Americans are apt to satirize ourselves, the much-discussed American girl is the most available. There is not in this wide land a journalist so callow as not to be able, when news runs short, to turn a paragraph on this theme, with some epigram as sparkling as his brains and as comprehensive as his experience. Thus, opening a Western magazine, one comes upon the amazing statement that the New York girl ‘dines heavily, drinks wine at all meals, smokes cigarettes, and revels at all times in the effects of the most advanced usages,’ —whatever this last vague and awful intimation may mean. On the next page the same author assures us, with equally close and unerring knowledge, that ‘the Southern girl is the most truly learned of her sex; . . . she is seldom otherwise than beautiful; . . . she plays all classical ’