Salmagundi; or, The whim-whams and opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, esq. [pseud.] and others. By William Irving, James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Printed from the original ed., with a preface and notes by Evert A. Duyckinck.

56 S. AL'MAG; UN DI.
wearing red breeches and tying his horse to a post.* The people of the United States have assured me that they themselves
are the most enlightened nation under the sun; but thou knowest that the barbarians of the desert, who assemble at the summer solstice, to shoot their arrows at that glorious luminary, in
order to extinguish his burning rays, make precisely the same
boast-which of them have the superior claim, I shall not
attempt to decide.
I have observed, with some degree of surprise, that the men
of this country do not seem in haste to accommodate themselves
even with the single wife which alone the laws permit them to
marry; this backwardness is probably owing to the misfortune
of their absolutely having no female mutes among them. Thou
knowest how valuable are these silent companions —what a price
is given for them in the East, and what entertaining wives they
make. What delightful entertainment arises from beholding the
silent eloquence of their sighs and gestures; but a wife possessed
both of a tongue and a soul-monstrous! monstrous! is it
astonishing that these unhappy infidels should shrink from a union
with a woman so preposterously endowed!
Thou hast doubtless read in the works of Abul Faraj, the
Arabian historian, the tradition which mentions that the muses
* This is another allusion to the primitive habits of Mr. Jefferson, who,
even while the first magistrate of the Republic, and on occasions when a
little of the "pomp and circumstance" of office would not have been
incompatible with that situation, was accustomed to dress in the plainest
garb, and when on horseback to be without an attendant; so that it not
unfrequently happened that he might be seen, when the business of the
state required his personal presence, riding up alone to the government
house at Washington, and having tied his steed to the nearest post, proceed to transact the important business of the nation. —Paris Ed.