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

[100] in which he is somewhat sharp upon foreigners, he writes of the sad experience in America of “government by declamation.” And this very week, as if to illustrate his words, we have the American newspapers raising “a loud and peremptory voice” against the “gross outrage on America, insulted in the persons of Americans imprisoned in British dungeons” ; we have them crying: “The people demand their release, and they must be released; woe to the public men or the party that stand in the way of this act of justice!” We have them turning upon Mr. Lowell himself in such style as the following: “This Lowell is a fraud, and a disgrace to the American nation; Minister Lowell has scoffed at his own country, and disowned everything in its history and institutions that makes it free and great.”

I should say, for my part, though I have not, I fully own, the means for judging accurately, that all this points to an American development of our Murdstone and Quinion, the bitter Philistine and the rowdy Philistine, exhibiting themselves in conjunction, exhibiting themselves with great luxuriance and with very little check. As I write from Grub Street, I will add that, to my mind, the condition of the copyright question between us and America appears to point