The Spanish and French have left behind them memorials in the beauty of their names. All the cities that have beautiful names derive them from the Spanish or the French. The English people give intensely ugly names to places. One place had such an ugly name that I refused to lecture there. It was called Grigsville. Supposing I had founded a school of Art there--fancy “Early Grigsville.” Imagine a School of Art teaching “Grigsville Renaissance.” As for slang I did not hear much of it, though a young lady who had changed her clothes after an afternoon dance did say that “after the heel kick she shifted her day goods.” American youths are pale and precocious, or sallow and supercilious, but American girls are pretty and charming--little oases of pretty unreasonableness in a vast desert of practical common-sense. Every American girl is entitled to have twelve young men devoted to her. They remain her slaves and she rules them with charming nonchalance. The men are entirely given to business; they have, as they say, their brains in front of their heads. They are also exceedingly acceptive of new ideas. Their education is practical. We base the education of children entirely on books, but we must give a child a mind before we can instruct the mind. Children have a natural antipathy to books--handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous. In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilisation. There at any rate is a country that has no trappings, no pageants and no gorgeous ceremonies. I saw only two processions--one was the Fire Brigade preceded by the Police, the other was the Police preceded by the Fire Brigade. Every man when he gets to the age of twenty-one is allowed a vote, and thereby immediately acquires his political education. The Americans are the best politically educated people in the world. It is well worth one’s while to go to a country which can teach us the beauty of the word FREEDOM and the value of the thing LIBERTY. FOOTNOTES. [3] In a poem published in an American magazine on February 15th, 1882, Wilde wrote “And in the throbbing engine room Leap the long rods of polished steel.” [4] _Poems by Oscar Wilde. Also his Lecture on the English Renaissance._ The Seaside Library, Vol. lviii. No. 1183, January 19th, 1882. 4to. Pp. 32. New York: George Munro, Publisher. A copy of this edition was sold by auction in New York last year for eight dollars. [5] See _An Essay concerning Human Understanding_, IV. xii. 10. A still more striking instance of the use of this expression is to be found in the same writer’s _Thoughts concerning Education_, s. 28, where he says:--“Once in four and twenty hours, I think, is enough; and nobody, _I guess_, will think it too much.” OSCAR WILDE IN AMERICA.