Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/89

86 is no overloading. Without exaggeration, I believe that the viands for a rich merchant's dinner-party in New-York would suffice for any half dozen tables I have seen here; and I am not sure that the supper-table at S.'s ball, just before I left New-York, would not have supplied the evening parties of a London season. The young men there drank more Champagne than I have seen in London. May we not hope that in three or four seasons we may adopt these refinements of civilization? No, not adopt these precisely. The modes of one country are not transferable, without modification, to another. A people who dine at three or four o'clock need some more substantial refection at ten than a cup of black tea; but they do not need a lord-mayor's feast, than which nothing can be more essentially vulgar.

I told you, my dear C., that I was going to dine at L—— house. I went, and I honestly confess to you that, when I drove up the approach to this great lord's magnificent mansion, I felt the foolish trepidation I remember to have suffered when, just having emerged from our sequestered county home, I first went to a dinner-party in town. I was alone. I dreaded conventional forms of which I might be ignorant, and still more the insolent observation to which, as a stranger and an American, I might be exposed. But these foolish fears were dissipated by the recollection of the agreeable half hour I had already passed with Lord L., when I had quite forgotten that he had a lordship tacked to his name, or