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THIS book arrived at so late a period of the month, as to preclude our making any very lengthened remarks on it; but some account of a work so anxiously looked for will, we presume, be acceptable to our readers.

"How many books," says Coleridge somewhere," are still written and "published about Charles I. and his times! Such is the fresh and endur"ing interest of that grand crisis of morals, religion, and government." If this be a good test, as Coleridge appears to think, there must be few topics of greater importance, than the present condition and future prospects of the Anglo-American nations. On most subjects, in travels as well as other departments, the current of new publications flows intermittingly. One nation is done one year, and then comes the turn of another; or if the country be a big one, it is cut into quarters, and served up piecemeal, instead of being roasted whole. But the appetite for such tell-tale garbage as most tourists in America fill their panniers with, is always keen. It has never flagged one single season since America set up for herself.

Great changes have there been, meanwhile, in the vogue of other lands. A quarter of a century ago, travels in Italy, thanks to Lord Byron, and in France, thanks to Waterloo and the Restoration,—were the universal rage. Then came the turn of unfortunate Greece, overwhelmed as she was by strangely multiplied calamities,-decimated by the Turks, cajoled by the Russians, and done at one and the same time by twaddling tourists from the Row,† and stock-jobbing Benthamites on 'Change! Then, with her troubles, came Spain's popularity in the bookmarket. Subsequently Egypt and India have occupied countless pens, some of them sprightly enough. Now-a-days, the tide of do-ification seems setting strongly into the north of Europe and Asia; and Connemara equally with Siberia trembles at the threatened invasion.

During all these fluctuations, the demand for books on America has been steady and unceasing. Before Childe Harold "awoke one morning, and found himself famous," and set thereby the whole monied ennui of Europe a-gadding in search of gape-seed, America was done periodically; and now that the path of the Childe has been trodden into a high-way by all the heavy-hoofed noodles in noodledom,-now that every dandy in every club in England has had his own wanderings like Harold, and boasts (to his particular friends) his own Juanic experiences-now that

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AMERICAN NOTES, for general circulation. By CHARLES DICKENS. 2 vols. LONDON: Chapman and Hall, 1842.

† Paternoster-row we mean.

Vide" the Ghost of Miltiades,” in “Fudges in England” :

"Oh, 'twas a sight for the ghost to see For never was Greek more Greek than he."

a mail coach crosses the Isthmus of Suez, while the Pyramids want only to be lit with gas, or a Bude light on the top of the big one, to be as thronged as Piccadilly or Charing Cross-Yankee land still preserves its aspect of strangeness; still (as old Ursa Major would seesaw it) “aggravates the perplexity of the foolish, and excites the solicitude of the wise."

Now this is all, no doubt, highly complimentary to our next-door neighbours, across the water. But still it is a terrible thing to be done. Being done sometimes ourselves, by dandies of first-rate impertinence, we can sympathise with the Yankees ; and we are not surprised if they often lose their temper. To be bitten by bugs is a damned annoyance; but to be bitten by flying bugs*-insects, who gather their nettle-bags together on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and cross it on the wings of a steamer, to satiate their vampire thirst! Socrates bore with Xantippe; but could he have borne this? To be daily and hourly overrun by salaried vermin, such as the Row too often sends forth,-ill-conditioned elderly matrons, sharp as needles, and spiteful as scorpions; philosophical spinsters, fuddled with political economy, or daft with self-conceit; younger sons of peers, and eldest sons of baronets; humdrum captains of horse, and sentimental majors of foot; and though last, not least, naval nincompoops of every grade, from rear-admirals to retired pursers-to be babbled of in print, "from July to eternity," as the Yankees phrase it, by tribes of superficial chatterboxes; to have such motley hordes of self-dubbed artists looking at you through bulls-eyes by way of spy-glasses, and carrying home such prismatic distortions as they can catch at, by way of accurate likenesses-all this is surely enough to vex a very good humoured people.

We should be sorry indeed, if any of our readers supposed that we meant for one moment to associate Mr. Dickens with the riff raff of hackney libellers, or slavering encomiasts either-whom we have attempted to classify above. Nothing in the world can be further from our intention; so far as we have been enabled to form an opinion of Mr. Dickens through his writings, nothing in his character has struck us more forcibly, than that he is a thorough gentleman, in the very best sense of the word; a man whose every word and action prove that he respects the feelings and rights of others, for the best of all possible reasons, because he respects his own.

It was rather our purpose to insinuate, that for a man of Mr. Dickens's reputation and authority, to publish a book about so sensitive a people, and, as he has done in many places, to pass the strongest censure on some of the things they take most pride in-censure not the less galling because it is for the most part temperately uttered,-savours altogether of a quix ́otism which the boldest will rather wonder at than imitate or applaud. But here again it is his warm and generous sympathies that have led Mr.

* There are such creatures. Vide Spence and Kirby's Entomology.

Dickens into mischief. His blood boils at oppression of every sort; and he has found oppression in America; for slavery lolls there,-a Typho as yet unblasted by the retributive thunderbolt,-crushing one half of the land with its bloated bulk. He has an exquisite sense of every social grace or spontaneous kindliness that smooths man's way with his fellow man; and he has been startled too frequently by grossness of feeling and grotesqueness of manner, or thoroughly disgusted by the extremes of virulence and brutality into which unbridled party-spirit will lead Americans, as well as other men. He found that some of the most influential newspapers indulged in the vilest slanders of the noblest men of their country, and that their readers battened complacently on the poisonous filth; and he has gone out of his way to decry the whole popular press of America in the most unmeasured terms. He happened to see a grey-haired father of the land, who combined in his own person the highest self-attained and the most venerable hereditary honours, insulted with impunity on the floors of Congress; and he has denounced, in consequence, the assembled legislature of the United States, in terms which we shall not quote.

Now, we think this is impolitic in any man; trebly impolitic in a man of Mr. Dickens' reputation. We believe the occasions to be very few indeed, when a stranger, on much provocation, much less a casual visitor, on none, can be justified in calling a whole people to the bar of public, or rather national opinion, after this fashion. We believe that ere now Mr. Dickens himself feels it to be so; and we are inclined to suspect that he wrote his book more to get out of the hobble as well as he could, and to avoid endless expectation and misrepresentation, than from any other motive. The dedication and conclusion of the work shew this most strongly. He could not but feel most grateful for the kind reception he met with from the Americans,-a reception in some instances all but ludicrously rapturous; 'tis plain that a thankful heart and a reproving head were miserably at strife within him. But his honest indignation too often gets the better, equally of his gratitude and his discretion. If things exist as he reports them, we do not wonder at it; we only regret he went there. Though, after all, he might have taken a lesson from the Indian diplomatist we shall speak of presently. A smile of silent scorn, such as curled the red man's lip, would have better become him than all his wrath.

Not that we mean to sanction the notion that Englishmen, generally speaking, have any especial charter to set themselves up as arbiters, either of morals or manners. No man who knows them will deny that they are largely endowed with the kindly and charitable affections; but as for the outward evidences of such a quality, as for their modes of shewing it, the people of Europe generally don't think the English remarkable that way. In all the finer observances of courtesy, in all the more delicate tokens of respect for age, and sex, and weakness, they are mostly pronounced defective. Gibbon said of them long since, "It must be con"fessed, that of all nations on the globe, the English are the least

"attentive to the old and infirm; I do not mean in acts of charity, "but in the offices of civil life." Of politeness towards the weaker sex, or of the deportment of the higher classes towards their dependents and the lower classes generally, we need not speak. Every traveller, that ever we read, testifies to the difference and superiority of continental manners in these respects.

At the present time especially, we think that an Englishman, let him be never so cleanly-minded and firm in his own integrity, ought to pause and look at home, ere he deals his wholesale censure on the boorishness of other climes. The Americans may possibly, in the momentary madness of a desperate party melée, have acted most unjustifiably towards Mr. Adams. Knowing very well what party is, we think it probable enough, and lamentable too. But how have the English, for several years continually, acted towards their QUEEN? Here is a grievance and a deep disgrace, that one need not travel four thousand miles to declaim about. An orphan from her birth, the virgin hope of England, who stayed the plague of brutal despotism or fearful anarchy, that gloomed in the too near perspective of presumptive right,-ascending the throne of that proud empire in the bloom of gentle girlhood,—taking the cares of state upon her in the sportive forenoon of existence, a young, a lovely, and accomplished woman; a young queen, a young bride, a young wife, a young mother; exemplary and admirable in every relation of life,—how have they, the English people, treated her? What slander, born of feminine intrigue, nursed in the jealousy of courts, and breathed abroad in murmured hisses by the frenzy of a desperate party, have they not received as gospel and upheld as truth? The meanest culprit in England has "the benefit of the doubt," but that is a privilege they never vouchsafed their Queen. Again, they left her, unaided and unsupported, save by her own instinct of self-defence and independence, to repel the blundering insolence of a too eager candidate for the premiership, swoln and blinded as he was, by the pride of a vulgar triumph. More recently, they have allowed her to be made, for a couple of years ere they thought of even a legal redress, a target for the pop-gun treason of every dyspeptic apprentice who thirsted for notoriety, or hungered for unearned prog: and they have not once shewn her, in the season of danger or escape, a tithe of the sympathy and support that not a Thurtell or a Greenacre goes to the gallows uncheered by. The noblest heroism, combined with the most womanly self-sacrifice, evinced by her Majesty under the most trying circumstances, and on every occasion when her life has been attacked, made no deeper impression upon her English subjects, than if they were so many stones. Whipped to it by some of the more decent of the public press, they, no doubt, performed some of the formalities of sympathy: they cheered and lifted hats, of course, when her Majesty passed next time, unshot, to church; but one token of honest loyalty, one sign of warm affection, one spark of true enthusiasm, they never shewed for her. Her Majesty might as

well have been a cow, as a young, lovely, and most courageous woman, and a mother and a queen besides, for all the interest they took in her― for all the guardianship they gave her-for all the joy they manifested when the assassin missed his aim. We have no disposition to exaggerate this blot on the English character, and it is exclusively of the English we are speaking; the Scotch and Irish have proved that they felt otherwise. But we do not believe we exaggerate. We state the fact historically, as one we mourned over at the time. We believe the fact to be as we have stated it, that not only has sovereignty no real hold on the affections of the great mass of the English people; but that the most sacred relations of life, the holy names of wife and mother, joined to that exalted station, and assailed by the traitor and the assassin, excite less of their interest and indignation, than many a petty larceny, or lese majesté of the till and the strong box. This is, we think, a deeper disgrace to the nation it characterises, than any indignity that Mr. Adams has suffered at the hands of the American people. Ah! Charles Dickens, cast thou first the beam out of John's eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull the mote out of Jonathan's.

We think, therefore, that, all things considered, an Englishman should pause before he sets himself up as a censor of the manners of another people; and we are firmly convinced that nine parts out of ten of what sketchers of American manners have held up to ridicule, are the most thorough and genuine John-Bull-isms possible; peculiarities of which English bourgeois life,—aye, and higher than bourgeois,—is full to overflowing things, once for all, which Mr. Dickens himself has won his high renown by painting as no man ever painted them before. In fact, Yankeeism and Cockneyism,-things of which the former is as little confined to New England, as the latter is to London,―are very near relations; they are chips of the same block-funguses of the same old oak. They are both uncouth developements,-awkward modern excrescences, under sadly unfortunate, and on the whole, rather despicable conditions, of a national, or generical, idiosyncracy, which Danes, and Normans, and other stalwart people, for near a thousand years, had with tolerable success prevented from unfolding itself at all. It was therefore unkind in the laureate and historian of Cockneyism, to fall foul of Yankeeism as he has; that he should paint the Yankees to the best of his ability, no man could complain of; but that is exactly what he has not done. He has stormed and scolded, and written some very able political essays on the prisons and mad-houses and other public institutions of New England ;-but of the peculiar features of the American character he has taken less note than any traveller that preceded him. In the eighteen chapters, making 600 pages of sprightly writing, comprised in these two volumes, there are not two dozen pages of Sketches by Boz;—at least not more, unless of such adventures as might have just as easily been met with on a voyage to Lisbon, or a walk through Wales.

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