"Nor is it easy to say whether the tenor of their manners is more to be
admired for simplicity or elegance; a negro wench, as we are told, will
wait on her master at table in native nudity; and a beau will strip
himself to the waist, that he may dance unincumbered, and with more
agility. There, too, we hear of the practice of _bundling_ without any
infraction of female modesty; and the chaste maiden, without any
deception, but with right good will, ventures to share the bed with her
chaste swain! Oh, what nights and banquets, worthy of the gods! What
delightful customs among these pious people?"

But this spirit of misrepresentation and ridicule, so glaringly apparent
in the foregoing extracts, and which has so universally characterized
all those British travelers and authors who have attempted to describe
our social habits and manners, is fitly rebuked, even as long ago as
1815, by an anonymous writer, whose trenchant pen reminds our British
cousins of the old adage concerning "those who live in glass houses,"
etc.

"From the time of Jack Cade," says he, "to Lord George Gordon, and down
to the present day, neither your _grave_ or _gay_ authorities on the
subject of _bundling_ and _tarrying_ are worthy of criticism. There is a
littleness in noticing, in the _London Quarterly Review_, a work which
heretofore has been distinguished for its taste, chasteness and
celebrity, the observation of travelers who, if men of truth, could only
mean to mention customs (if they were customs) of the most vulgar and
ignorant, which at any rate are now as little known as are the operation
of the blue laws of Connecticut, or part of the penal code enacted to
keep in slavery and subjection the sister kingdom.[26]