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

What is this but the hideousness, the immense ennui, of the life on which we have touched so often, the life of our serious British Philistine, our Murdstone; that life with its defective type of religion, its narrow range of intellect and knowledge, its stunted sense of beauty, its low standard of manners? Only it is this life at its simplest, rudimentary stage.

I have purposely taken the picture of it from a region outside the settled states of the Union, that it might be evident I was not meaning to describe American civilization, and that Americans might at once be able to say, with perfect truth, that American civilization is something totally different. And if, to match this picture of our Murdstone in other lands and other circumstances, we are to have — as, for the sake of clearness in our impressions, we ought to have — a picture of our Quinion too, under like conditions, let us take it, not from America at all, but from our own Australian colonies. The special correspondent of the Bathurst Sentinel criticises an Italian singer who, at the Sydney Theatre, plays the Count in the Somnambula; and here is the criticism: “Barring his stomach, he is the finest-looking artist I have seen on the stage for years; and if he don't slide into the affections or break the gizzards of half ”