Note 1 — LETTER XLII.

For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors, and gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds. An American republican woman, lately, describes a child which “like cherubim and seraphim continually did cry;”1 such their feminine learning of the European fashions of ‘Te Deum’! And, as I tell you, Venice in like manner taught us, when she and we were honest, our marketing, and our manners. Then she began trading in pleasure, and souls of men, before us; followed that Babylonish trade to her death,—we nothing loth to imitate, so plausible she was, in her mythic gondola, and Chariot of the Night! But where her pilotage has for the present carried her, and is like to carry us, it may be well to consider. And therefore I will ask you to glance back to my twentieth letter, giving account of the steam music, the modern Tasso’s echoes, practised on her principal lagoon. That is her present manner, you observe, of “whistling at her darg.” But for festivity after work, or altogether superseding work—launching one’s adorned Bucentaur for collation—let us hear what she is doing in that kind.