is indeed a remarkable evidence of inconsistent and perverse feeling, that a course which no man of sense and common humanity would think of applying to an individual, is confidently adopted in the discussion of national character and destiny.. That allowance which the mature in years instinctively make for the errors of youth-the compassion which tempers judgment in regard to the indigence, the ignorance, or the blind passions of the outcast or the criminal, is ignored when the faults or the calamities of a whole people are described. Yet such a fearful exposition of “London Labor and London Poor," which Mayhew has made familiar, should excite only emotions of shame and pity in the Christian heart. But the hardihood that so long coldly admitted or wantonly sneered at the wrongs of Ireland and Italy, gives a bitter edge or a narrow comprehension to the class of English writers on America we have, perhaps too patiently, discussed.

The simple truth is, that there is scarcely a vulnerable point in our system, social, political, or religious, but has its counterpart in the mother country. For every solecism in manners or inhuman inconsistency in practice, growing out of democratic radicalism on this side of the water, a corresponding defect or incongruity is obvious in the ecclesiastical or aristocratic monopolies and abuses on the other. For our well-fed African slaves, they have half-starved white operatives; for the tyranny of demagogues here, there is the bloated rule of duke and bishop there; for the degraded squatter life in regions of whiskey drinking and ague in America, there is the not less sad fate of the miner and the poacher in the heart of civilized England; and there is reason to believe that, if a philosophical collector of the data of suicides, railway catastrophes, and financial swindlers, were to be equally assiduous in the United States and Great Britain, the figures, in the ratio of space, time, and population, would be nearly parallel. Even the philological blunders and absurdities over which cockney travellers here have been so merry, may be equalled in many a district of England; and

if the classic names applied to new towns on this continent savor of tasteless pedantry, a similar lack of a sense of the appropriate stares us in the face in the names of villas in the suburbs of London; while the same repetition and consequent confusion of names of places occur in English shires as in our States.

Language has been one of the most prolific sources of ridicule and animadversion; especially those peculiarities of tone and speech supposed to belong exclusively to the Eastern States, and popularly designated as Yankeeisms. Yet it has been made obvious at last, that, instead of being indigenous, these oddities of speech, with very few exceptions, were brought from England, and are still current in the localities of their origin. In the preface to his "Dictionary of Americanisms," Mr. Bartlett tells us that, after having collected, he imposed upon himself the task of tracing to their source these exceptional words, phrases, and accents. "On comparing these familiar words," he writes, "with the provincial and colloquial language of the northern counties of England, a most striking resemblance appeared, not only in the words commonly regarded as peculiar to New England, but in the dialectical pronunciation of certain words, and in the general tone and accent. In fact, it may be said without exaggeration, that nine tenths of the colloquial peculiarities of New England are derived directly from Great Britain; and they are now provincial in those parts from which the. early colonists emigrated, or are to be found in the writings of well-accredited authors of the period when that emigration took place."

Neither has the long-standing reproach of a lack of literary cultivation and achievement present significance. Sydney Smith's famous query in the Edinburgh Review, “Who reads an American book?" is as irrelevant and impertinent to-day as the other famous dictum of Jeffrey in regard to Wordsworth's poetry-"This will never do." In history, poetry, science, criticism, biography, political and ethical discussions, the records of travels, of taste, and of romance,

universally recognized and standard exemplars, of American origin, now illustrate the genius and culture of the nation.

In thus referring the liberal and philosophical inquirer, who desires to comprehend the character, destinies, and history of the United States, and thence infer the relation of and duty to them on the part of Europe, to the several departments of literature which bear the impress of the national mind, another form of prejudice and phase of injustice habitual with British writers inevitably suggest themselves. Fifty years ago, American literature was declared by them beneath contempt; but as soon as leisure and encouragement stimulated the educated and the gifted natives of the soil to enter upon the eareer of authorship; when the literary products of the country attained a degree of merit that could not be ignored, these same critics objected that American literature was unoriginal-only a new instalment of English; that Irving reproduced the manner of the writers of Queen Anne's day; that Cooper's novels were imitated from those of Scott; that Brockden Brown plagiarized from Godwin, Hoffman from Moore, Holmes from Sterne, Sprague from Pope; and, in short, that, because Americans made use of good English, standard forms of verse, and familiar construction in narrative, they had no claim to a national literature. It seems a waste of time and words to confute such puerile reasoning. If the number of English authors who have written popular books in any and all of the British colonies, should have their literary merits questioned on the ground that these works, although composed and published in the vernacular, were not actually conceived and written in London, the absurd objection would be deemed too ridiculous to merit notice. Not only the language, but the culture; not only the political traditions, but the standards of taste, the religious and social education, the literary associations, the whole mental resource and discipline of an educated American, are analogous to or identical with those of England; but, as a people, the statistics of the book trade and the facts of individual culture prove that the master minds of

British literature more directly and universally train and nurture the American than the English mind. Partly from that distance that lends enchantment, and partly from the vast number of readers produced by our system of popular education, Shakspeare and Milton, Bacon and Wordsworth, Byron and Scott have been and are more generally known, appreciated, and loved, and have entered more deeply into the average intellectual life, on this than on the other side of the Atlantic; and the best thinkers, the most refined poets of Great Britain in our own day, find here a larger and more enthusiastic audience than they do at home. Accordingly, until the laws of mind are reversed, there is no reason to expect any different manifestation of literature, as far as form, style, and conventional rules are concerned, here than there. The subjects, the scenery, the characters, the opinions of our historians, poets, novelists, and essayists, are as diverse from those of British writers as the respective countries. Cooper's local coloring, his chief personages, the scope and flavor of his romances, are as unlike those of Scott as are the North American Indians from Highlanders, and Lake Ontario from Loch Leven. The details of Bryant's forest pictures are full of special traits of which there is not a trace in Thomson or Burns. The author of "Caleb Williams " acknowledged his obligations to the author of "Weiland" and "Arthur Mervyn." There are pages of the "Sketch Book" and "Bracebridge Hall" which Addison might have written, for their subjects are English life and scenes; but when the same graceful pen expatiates, with rich humor, among the legends of the Hudson or Dutch dynasties in New York, describes the prairies or colonial times in Virginia, except in the words used, there is not the slightest resemblance in subject, tone, impression, or feeling to the "Spectator." Why should Motley write otherwise than Hallam, Prescott than Macaulay, Emerson than Carlyle, Channing than Arnold, Hawthorne than Kingsley, as regards the technical use of a language common to them all, and a culture identical in its normal elements? All the individuality to be looked for is

in the treatment of their several subjects, in the style incident to their respective temperaments and characters, and in the literary genius with which they are severally endowed. Yet, if it were desirable to vindicate the American quality as a distinction of these and other approved authors, it would be an easy task to indicate a freedom and freshness, an independence and humanity, so characteristic as to prove singularly attractive to foreign readers, and to be recognized by high continental criticism as national.

The mercenary spirit so continually ascribed to our civilization by English writers, long before was the habitual reproach cast on their own by continental critics. Thrift is a Saxon trait, and the "nation of shopkeepers" cannot appropriately thus make the love of or deference to money our exclusive or special weakness; whereas the extreme and appalling diversity of condition in England, the juxtaposition of the duke and the drudge, the pampered bishop and the starving curate, the magnificent park and the malarious hovel, the luxurious peer and the squalid operative, bring into such melancholy relief the sharp and bitter inequalities of human lives and human creatures, that not all the latent and obvious resources, energy, self-reliance, and power which so beguiled the wonder and love of Emerson in the aspect of England and Englishmen in their prosperous phase, can reconcile that social atmosphere to the large, warm, sensitive heart of an unselfish, sympathetic, Christian man. Clubs and races,

cathedrals and royal drawing rooms, the freshness of rural and the luxury of metropolitan life, Parliament and the Times-all the elements, routine, substantial bases and superficial aspects of England and the English, however adequate to the insular egotism, and however barricaded by prejudice, pride, and indifference, do not harmonize, to the clear, humane gaze of soulful eyes, with what underlies and overshadows this stereotyped programme and partial significance. We hear the " cry of the human" that rang so drearily in the ear of the noblest woman and poet of the age: