Confining his contemptuous observations about American crudity to his private notes

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 91.

But Foster swept into Washington all charm and goodwill. Thirty-three years old, handsome, well-bred, he struck a studied contrast to the prickly arrogance of his predecessors. His mother, herself the daughter of an earl, had married the Duke of Devonshire on the death of her first husband and had used her powerful connections to promote her son for the job. “I know you dislike that country, but it is a wonderful opportunity for future advancement,” she wrote him. Foster arrived with the secure confidence of a man who felt himself so far above the taint of vulgarity that he could even rub shoulders with American republicans with natural ease. He brought with him seven servants and a lavish entertainment budget, and proceeded to exhaust his $50,000 expense account in six months, wooing congressmen, giving excellent dinners for as many as two hundred guests at a time three or four times a week, and confining his contemptuous observations about American crudity to his private notes. Even there he seemed more amused than affronted as he recounted the “droll, original but offending” characters he became acquainted with among the Republican members of Congress, such as the one who had been caught in the act of relieving himself into Foster’s drawing room fireplace when he thought everyone had left the room for supper during a ball the minister gave for the queen’s birthday, or the others, not knowing what caviar was, who mistook it for black raspberry jam and crammed in huge mouthfuls that they immediately spat out. He had moved the legation to a new location at the very heart of the city, taking three of the adjacent row houses that made up the Seven Buildings on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue at Nineteenth Street, just three blocks from the White House. Foster immediately let it be known that he had come with instructions to settle the Chesapeake matter by offering compensation to the victims’ families and returning the seized Americans, still prisoners four years after the event—their sentences of five hundred lashes having since been remitted to “temporary” imprisonment.