Page:The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper, 1838.djvu/170

164 music, one of the most elevating, innocent and refining of human tastes, whose influence on the habits and morals of a people is of the most beneficial tendency. This taste and knowledge are not only wanting to the people, but an appreciation of their importance. They are also wanting in most of the high tastes, and consequently in the high enjoyments, that accompany a knowledge of all the fine arts in general, and in much that depends on learning, research, and familiarity with the world.

The Americans excel in humanity, in the ordinary comforts, though inferior to the English in this respect, in general civility, in the means of motion while confined to great routes, in shipping and most of the facilities of trade, in common instruction and an aptitude to ordinary pursuits, and in an absence of the sophisms that beset older and more artificial systems. It is, however, to be regretted, that as the nation recedes from the struggle that created the present system, the truths that came uppermost in the collision, are gradually yielding to a new set of sophisms, more peculiar to the present order of things.

There is a familiar and too much despised branch of civilization, of which the population of this country is singularly and unhappily ignorant; that of cookery. The art of eating and drinking, is one of those on which more depends, perhaps, than on any other, since health, activity of mind, constitutional enjoyments, even learning, refinement, and, to a certain degree, morals, are all, more or less, connected with our diet. The Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation known. As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, ill prepared and indigestible, while it is taken in the least artificial forms that cookery will allow. The predominance of grease in the American kitchen, coupled with the habits of hasty