But the whole notion is preposterous. In Fish and Potatoes a ring is possible, but hardly in Ideas. What is the good of being educated and laboriously acquiring foreign tongues and lingoes--getting to know, for instance, what a ‘freight’ train is and what a bobolink--if I am to be prevented by a diseased patriotism from reading whatever I choose in any language I can? Mr. Matthews’ wrath, or his seeming wrath--for it is impossible to suppose that he is really angry--grows redder as he proceeds. ‘It cannot,’ he exclaims, ‘be said too often or too emphatically that the British are foreigners, and their ideals in life, in literature, in politics, in taste, in art’ (why not add ‘in victuals and drink?’) ‘are not our ideals.’ What rant this is! Mr. Matthews, however frequently and loudly he repeats himself, cannot unchain the canons of taste and compel them to be domiciled exclusively in America; nor can he hope to persuade the more intelligent of his countrymen to sail to the devil in an ark of their own sole construction. Artists all the world over are subject to the same laws. Nations, however big, are not the arbiters of good taste, though they may be excellent exemplars of bad. As for Mr. Matthews’ determination to call Britons foreigners, that is his matter, but feelings of this kind, to do any harm, must be both reciprocal and general. The majority of reasonable Englishmen and Americans will, except when angry, feel it as hard to call one another foreigners, as John Bright once declared he would find it hard to shout ‘bastard’ after the issue of a marriage between a man and his deceased wife’s sister. There is a portrait of Mr. Matthews at the beginning of this book or bomb of his, and he does not look in the least like a foreigner. I am sorry to disappoint him, but truth will out. The fact is that Mr. Matthews has no mind for reciprocity; he advises Cousin Sam to have nothing to do with John Bull’s second-rate performances, but he feels a very pardonable pride in the fact that John Bull more and more reads his cousin’s short stories and other things of the kind. He gives a countrywoman of his, Miss Agnes Repplier, quite a scolding for quoting in a little book of hers no less than fifteen British authors of very varying degrees of merit. Why, in the name of common-sense, should she not if they serve her turn? Was a more ludicrous passage than the following ever penned? It follows immediately after the enumeration of the fifteen authors just referred to: