TRAVELLERS' ESTIMATES. The 9 -have been made more familiar with Rome, Venice, and Dresden, than with London or Liverpool. Half a century ago Christopher North is reported to have said, “We have no good book about America." The only English work of genius on the subject remains the masterpiece of caricature of the prince of caricaturists. But the reverse holds equally. The Americans have no good book about England. statesmen and philosophic jurists, whose minds are best qualified by nature and training to grapple with the problems on either side, to indicate the dangers and unfold the secrets of the greatness of either nation, have had their energies concentrated on the patriotic measures of their own land, or consumed in its party strifes. The task they have pretermitted has consequently fallen into the hands of superficial observers and talkers, or been taken up by others more competent from isolated points of view, and hurried over with fatal haste. Mrs. B. Stowe's good-humour is as shallow as Mrs. Trollope's acerbity: of her Sunny Memories we remember nothing but an abortive attempt to describe the Atlantic, the hackneyed Melrose by Moonlight, and the writer's self-gratulations on the open doors of aristocratic philanthropists—the most famous of whom had she never met it would have been well for both, for the wildly-misplaced confidences of the one, and the rash ambition of the other, led to the foulest blot on the fair page of our literature. Similarly, Mr. N. P. Willis, running across the sea, returns with jottings from the conversation in the saloons of "the charming Countess of B——:" his Pencillings by the Way has no more relation to an adequate account of the countries visited than the sketches in a school-girl's portfolio to an authorised geological chart. Washington Irving was a "spirit of another sort." Half a European by residence, he liked our country, and, having opportunity to study it, made himself familiar with our manners; but his purpose did not lead him to abstract inquiry or analysis, and he confined himself mainly to pleasant literary and local reminiscences. The least satisfactory works of the two foremost American prose writers of recent years are those connected with their English experiences. Every chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Old Home exhibits his delicate grace and quiet subtle thought. He carried with him across the Atlantic a series of picturesque photographs of English cities, old and new, of bright young Leamington and rusty Warwick, of Lichfield market-place, of Norfolk Boston with its minster bell, of Blenheim Park and Alloway Kirk, of Greenwich Hospital, with its Trafalgar memories—many a vivid glimpse of squalid poverty and superabounding wealth; but his retiring nature sought out dim alleys and woodland ways, or loitered within the shadow of gray cathedrals, and his book, as a whole, says little of England as a whole. The mass of our well-to-do citizens will never forgive him for calling them "bulbous" and their wives "portly;" while impartial critics are constrained to accept his own sentence on himself—a sentence in which the unhistoric spirit of the artist is conspicuous. "Jotting down the little acrimonies of the moment in my Journal, and transferring them thence (when they happened to be tolerably well expressed) to these pages, it is very possible I may have said things which a profound observer of national character would hesitate to sanction." Seven years earlier Emerson's English Traits was published, and in spite of much that is true and telling in its keen and polished epigrams, it showed how deceptive the impressions derived from a brief sojourn in our country are apt to be. Mr. Emerson had not buried himself in watering-places and old towns; he had gone to our great cities and visited our great men, but he frequently caricatured them, not always in the best taste. The following characteristic passage illustrates at once the exaggeration which plays so large a part in all American wit, TRAVELLERS' ESTIMATES. 11 and the extent to which we bear on our own backs, as seen by strangers, the vices which we find most conspicuously stamped on theirs: "The English feel themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary tone on the subject of English merits. An English lady on the Rhine hearing a German speaking of her party as foreigners, exclaimed, ‘No, we are not foreigners, we are English; it is you that are foreigners.' They tell you daily in London the story of the Frenchman and Englishman who quarrelled. Both were unwilling to fight, but their companions put them up to it. At last it was agreed that they should fight alone in the dark, and with pistols. The candles were put out, and the Englishman, to make sure not to hit anybody, fired up the chimney, and brought down the Frenchman." If this1 was told daily to Mr. Emerson in London, what reliance can be placed on what was told daily to Mr. Dickens in New York? The former continues of the English, "They have no curiosity about foreigners, and answer any information you may volunteer with, 'Oh, oh,' until the informant makes up his mind that they shall die in their ignorance for any help he will offer. There are really no limits to this conceit, though brighter men among them make painful efforts to be candid. The habit of brag runs through all classes, from the Times newspaper through politicians and poets, through Wordsworth, Carlyle, Mill, and Sydney Smith, down to the boys of Eton." The intrusion of Mr. Mill's name into this list is sufficiently absurd, but it would be well if the majority of our lively sketches of American society were inspired by even as fair a spirit, or if the task of writing them had always fallen into the hands of men as accomplished, or, on the whole, as candid as either of the above-named authors. To this day 1 It occurs as a jest in the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, who adds, "Whenever I tell this story in Paris, I make the Frenchman fire up the chimney." the only attempt to give a philosophical account of American civilisation by a writer on our side of the Atlantic is the work of the illustrious De Tocqueville; and the changes of fifty years, in a country where events follow each other like the shifting scenes of a stage, call for a revisal even of his carefully-considered estimates. Professor J. E. Cairnes's excellent work on The Slave Power is avowedly limited in its range. Mr. Trollope's interesting volumes, though generally accurate, are rather those of a tourist than a student. The New America of Mr. Hepworth Dixon, though undoubtedly the most suggestive of that writer's works, deals professedly with the outskirts and anomalies of Transatlantic life. Untravelled Englishmen know much less of America as a wholeless of her geography, her history, her constitution, and of the lives of her great men-than Americans know of England. Of the mistakes on both sides-ludicrous and grave-we have the larger share. Distance, no doubt, magnifies in their eyes the importance of our Chartist, Fenian, and similar demonstrations; but they have never so misconceived a British statesman as we misconceived Mr. Lincoln, or gone so far astray in regard to any crisis of our history, as we did in reference to the moving springs, and the results of a war "worthy a Milton to defend and a Lucan to sing." The source of this greater ignorance lies not so much in greater indifference as in greater difficulty. England is one, compact and comparatively stable. The United States are many, vast, various, and in perpetual motion. An old country is a study, but a new country is a problem. It is hard to realise the past, but it is harder to read the present: to predict the future is impossible. Props to memory are more common and more secure than "aids to reflection." Antiquity is brought to our firesides in the classics, till Athens and Rome "to us are nothing novel, nothing strange." We are more familiar with the Acropolis than the western Capitol, with Mount Soracte than the MULTITUDE OF BOOKS. 13 Catskill Hills, with Pisistratus than with Jefferson Davis, Tiberius Gracchus than William Lloyd Garrison. Our scholars know more about Babylon than about Chicago. Dante immortalises for us the Middle Age; Plantagenet England is revived in Chaucer; the inner life of Modern England has a voice in Tennyson and the Brownings. Where is the poet who will reveal to us "the secrets of a land” in some respects indeed like our own, but separated in others by differences which the distance of 3000 miles of ocean only half represents; which, starting on another basis, has developed itself with energies hitherto unknown, in directions hitherto unimagined? Who will become the interpreter of a race that has in two centuries dispersed itself over a continent, whose resources are scarcely more than half discovered, and which has to absorb within itself and harmonise the discordant elements and lawless spirits of other races for whom the resources of the old world are more than half exhausted? Caret vate sacro-but it does not want poetical aspirations as well as practical daring. "This land o' ourn I tell ye 's gut to be A better country than man ever see. I feel my sperit swellin' with a cry Thet seems to say, 'Break forth an' prophesy.' O strange New World, thet yet wast never young, Mr. Anthony Trollope has said that "in no part of its (sic) national career have the United States been so successful as in that of literature." But most critics will make bold to reverse his judgment. The number of writers in the States is vast. Their press, in times of peace, pours forth a mass of prose and verse that flows in full stream to Lethe. Mr. Griswold informs us that he has in his own library more |