As regards this hospitality given to English tailors and tailors' sons by Peru, it is quite true; true is it that they have married the rich daughters of ancient families, and made marvellous progress in all things that distinguished Dives from Lazarus. Men who would never have been anything but lackeys in their own country have become masters of lands and money in Peru. It is all true. Without wishing to disparage my own countrymen, and still less my countrywomen, I am bound to confess that the Peruvians have derived very little edification from their presence and example. Within the Guano Age a British minister has been shot at his own table in Lima while dining with his mistress. The captain of an English man-of-war lying in Callao was murdered in the outskirts of Lima while on a drunken spree: the murderers in both cases never being brought to justice. The English merchants were men noted for neither moral nor intellectual capacity, utterly innocent of any culture, or regard for it; of no manners or good customs that could reflect honour on the English name, and who gained fortunes after such fashion as only the practices of a corrupt government could sanction or connive at. Few English ladies have ever been permanently resident in Lima. It has been visited by one or two showy examples of the money-monger class; but the Lima people have not had the opportunity of knowing by actual contact in their own country the gentry of England. This has been a disadvantage to us and to them of the greatest magnitude: for while we have accepted the hospitality of Peru, we have not returned it in a manner worthy of the English name. Nor can it be said that English travellers who have written on Peru make any very great figure in the cause of truth and honesty; whilst the amount of literary pilfering has been almost as notorious as that of the pillage of the public treasury by native officers of state.