'Arabian Nights'

"I am myself a witness of its truth when i say that i have lived in this england more than one thousand years and have seen her bud from the callowest barbarity to the height of a prosperity and honour with which the world is full. I shall at once be branded as a liar. The accusation is familiar to my ears. I tired of resenting it before your father's fathers were born," he writes. "The scorn of your offended sense of veracity is less to me than the lisping of a child."