Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[112] possible to visit many nations and see less, on the whole, than if one had stayed at home; and that it is easy to say nothing through a great many tongues. No one would send his children to be trained in manners among a circle of professional couriers. Some of the most essentially vulgar women ever seen in American society have been those most versed in European drawing-rooms, and, by all testimony, not unpopular there. The brilliant Lady Eastlake went so far as to assert that high society in London “positively likes vulgarity, if it be but new” ; and that “Sir Francis Palgrave was right in saying that a person who would say rude things would be sure to take in London.” And in circles of really good manners, some of the Americans who have been most cordially received in Europe, from the Revolutionary days until the present time, have been those who did not go abroad until middle life, when their habits had been formed wholly at home. The late Richard Grant White always maintained that he never saw in Europe manners so fine as those of his own grandfather, in New England; and when he himself first visited England, at fifty or thereabouts, he was described in the London papers as having the bearing of a lord and the figure