The Americans were made very angry by this account of their “domestic manners”--very naturally, but not very wisely. Of course, it was asserted that many of the statements made were false and many of the descriptions caricatured. Nothing in the book from beginning to end was false; nothing of minutest detail which was asserted to have been seen had not been seen; nor was anything intentionally caricatured or exaggerated for the sake of enhancing literary effect. But the tone of the book was unfriendly, and was throughout the result of offended taste rather than of well-weighed opinion. It was full of universal conclusions drawn from particular premises; and no sufficient weight, or rather no weight at all, was allowed to the fact that the observations on which the recorded judgments were founded had been gathered almost entirely in what was then the Far West, and represented the “domestic manners” of the Atlantic states hardly at all. Unquestionably the book was a very clever one, and written with infinite _verve_ and brightness. But--save for the fact that censure and satire are always more amusing than the reverse--an equally clever and equally truthful book might have been written in a diametrically opposite spirit. No doubt the markedly favourable reception of the book was what mainly irritated our American cousins. But they certainly were angry far beyond what the importance of the matter would seem to have justified. I remember that Colley Grattan, whose fame as the author of _Highways and Byways_ was then at its zenith, in writing to me from Boston, where he resided for many years as British Consul, inviting me to visit him there, went into the question of the reception I might be likely to meet with on that side of the Atlantic. “I think,” he wrote, “that to come over under a false name would be _infra dig_. But really I fear that if you come under your own, you may be _in for a dig_!” Whether Grattan exaggerated the wrath of his Bostonian friends for the sake of his joke, I do not know. Unquestionably the Americans, even speaking of them as a nation, were made very angry by my mother’s book. But the anger was not of a very spiteful or rancorous description, for from that day to this I have never met with anything but kindness and cordial friendliness from all the Americans I have known--and I have known very many.