leading hotel." And of course he took it. After which his statement
that he carried away from the town a feeling of optimism explains
itself: he had four cigars, the dinner, and half a page of
impressions at twenty cents a word.

Nor is it only by the theft of impressions that we suffer at the
hands of these English discoverers of America. It is a part of the
system also that we have to submit to being lectured to by our
talented visitors. It is now quite understood that as soon as an
English literary man finishes a book he is rushed across to America
to tell the people of the United States and Canada all about it, and
how he came to write it. At home, in his own country, they don't care
how he came to write it. He's written it and that's enough. But in
America it is different. One month after the distinguished author's
book on The Boyhood of Botticelli has appeared in London, he is seen
to land in New York very quietly out of one of the back portholes of
the Olympic. That same afternoon you will find him in an armchair in
one of the big hotels giving off impressions of America to a group of
reporters. After which notices appear in all the papers to the effect
that he will lecture in Carnegie Hall on "Botticelli the Boy". The
audience is assured beforehand. It consists of all the people who
feel that they have to go because they know all about Botticelli and
all the people who feel that they have to go because they don't know
anything about Botticelli. By this means the lecturer is able to rake
the whole country from Montreal to San Francisco with "Botticelli the
Boy". Then he turns round, labels his lecture "Botticelli the Man",
and rakes it all back again. All the way across the continent and
back he emits impressions, estimates of national character, and
surveys of American genius. He sails from New York in a blaze of
publicity, with his cordon of reporters round him, and a month later