this have been Orientalised?) very rare. He predicts that it would be
impossible to maintain the Yellowstone National Park as such, and
asserts that it was only a characteristic spirit of swagger and
braggadocio that prompted this attempt at an impossible ideal. He also
seems to think lynching an any-day possibility in the streets of New
York. The value of his forecasts may, however, be discounted by his
prophecy in the same book that the London County Council would be
merely a glorified vestry, utterly indifferent to the public interest,
and unlikely to attract any candidates of distinction!

An almost equal display of Philistinism--perhaps greater in proportion
to its length--is exhibited by an article entitled "Twelve Hours of
New York," published by Count Gleichen in _Murray's Magazine_
(February, 1890). This energetic young man succeeded (in his own
belief) in seeing all the sights of New York in the time indicated by
the title of his article, and apparently met nothing to his taste
except the Hoffman House bar and the large rugs with which the
cab-horses were swathed. He found his hotel a den of incivility and
his dinner "a squashy, sloppy meal." He wishes he had spent the day in
Canada instead. He is great in his scorn for the "glue kettle" helmets
of the New York police, and for the ferry-boats in the harbour, to
which he vastly prefers what he wittily and originally styles the
"common or garden steamer." His feet, in his own elegant phrase, felt
"like a jelly" after four hours of New York pavement. What are the
Americans to think of us when they find one of our innermost and most
aristocratic circle writing stuff like this under the ægis of,
perhaps, the foremost of British publishers?

As a third instance of the ingratiating manner in which Englishmen
write of Americans, we may take the following paragraph from "Travel