so much want of common humanity in the relations existing between them, on the part of the superior, that, so far from sympathising with them upon the loss of their liberty, I could not but regret that they ever should have had so much in former times, seeing how cruelly they abused the little which was still left them.

"Such an assertion may draw down upon me the stigma of the patriotic, who only see oppressed virtue in every Polish exile. I am not defending the oppressor, nor do I suppose him to be an iota better than his conquered neighbour; the demoralization of one does not justify the oppression of the other. Every Englishman would gladly, from his heart, rejoice in the restoration of Poland to her state of political freedom; but every Englishman who, like myself resided some time in the country, would more rejoice to see the nobility permit that civil freedom to their serfs, which can alone entitle the nobility of Poland to the commiseration of a people who allow that liberty to others which they enjoy themselves. But many of those 'who dwell where Kosciusko dwelt' are unworthy of him whom Campbell has immortalized in the lines

Hope for a moment bade the world farewell, And freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell.'

The times are changed in Poland, and that hospitality for which it was so deservedly celebrated has naturally received much modification.

"It was once usual for every nobleman, who could afford it, to make his house a gratuitous tavern; and a gentlemanly demeanour was all that was necessary to insure a welcome reception and the use of servants and horses, with the advantage of the best fare, to any traveller who presented himself. I have often heard the count say, that it was not unusual for a dozen guests to be seated at his father's table, whom he never saw before, might never see again, and whom he knew not by name. These good old times are gone; and the Pole, having lost his country, but not his hospitable character, displays by necessity abroad, what he once could do by choice at home. It is chiefly this spirit of hospitality which gains him such ready admission into all foreign society. Independent of this, however, the Pole is, of all others, the man most calculated to shine in society. Variety of language, which to most foreigners is so great a barrier, and allows them rather to be tolerated than courted, is to him no obstacle. When he is at Vienna he speaks better German than the emperor; when in Paris, the most

refined ear can hardly detect the foreign accent; and even in London, his pronunciation of English is so much more tolerable than that of all other foreigners, that it is the subject of general admiration.

"This great facility of speaking languages, so peculiar to the Poles, is attributable to two causes: primo, their own language comprehends of itself all the sounds which can be found by a combination of letters; and, secundo, they are accustomed, from infancy, to speak several languages daily. Polish, German, French and English, ring the changes in their ears every hour of the day; and when these are instilled into them at an age when no choice is allowed, the difficulty of acquiring is inconsiderable.

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Languages are only acquired by the habit of speaking them, and not by rules of grammar.

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"It is the constant conversation with natives themselves which gives the facility. Whichever language is predominant, this alone will be the one well spoken; hence the great object is to allow none to be predominant; and this is accomplished in the education of Polish children, as much from necessity as from choice. The child is at the commencement of his existence, put into the arms of an English nursery-maid; as he grows older, he will probably have a French dancing-master, German music-master, and an English tutor. When he has completed his morning tasks under these different tutors, he sits down to table, where the languages are as various as the dishes; and when he retires to his playground, he finds half a dozen children of different nations to play with. There is not a day in the whole year in which he is confined to speaking and hearing his mother tongue. It is precisely the language which he knows the least, and which he never speaks from choice."

We must pass over an interesting account of the salt-mines of Weelitzka, and proceed at a somewhat quicker pace than heretofore; nor have we time and space to dally with our author through his Russian tours, his intention in visiting the cold north being to make a fortune, wherewith to return to more hospitable regions.

"Every thing conspired to strengthen me in this opinion. The prince assured me that my success was certain; and what better assurance could I require than that of a man so influential as

himself, and occupying so high a rank in society? All the Russians and Poles whom I had attracted in Paris spoke in the same terms of certainty; and judging, as I did, from the liberal manner in which they had enumerated my services, I anticipated an abundant harvest. As I journeyed along the the road towards my destination, the same hopes seemed to revive as the season advanced.

"At Carlsbad I was promised a place at court, which, indeed, I considered essential, believing with Touchstone, that not to have been at court was to be like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side. My sojourn in Cracow fed my hopes still more; and my .progress through the provinces, until my arrival at Odessa, still fanned the flame. Here the climax-the crown of professional glory was placed upon my head. I was here presented to her imperial majesty, and graciously received; nay, I was to attend one of the imperial children professionally. 'Je vous attende avec impatience a St. Petersbourgh,' was the valedictory blessing of my numerous friends upon my quitting the capital of the south. Buoyed up with the hope and certainty of a continuation of previous good fortune, I hardly inquired concerning the English settlers whom I should find in St. Petersburg. Strange to say, I had never heard of the factory.

"What was it then but fate, chance, or destiny which so thwarted my career in one sphere, to establish it in another and altogether unhoped-for direction?

"I fell suddenly from the pinnacle of ambitious expectation, to climb, by slow and surer degrees, the tree of medical existence.

"I had aimed at plucking the apples of the Hesperides, and found myself too happy in the possession of the Ribston pippins supplied at the hospitable boards of the English merchants. If my former expectations were founded upon excessive vanity, I must plead in my excuse, that most men will believe themselves to be what others designate them; and if a certain degree of success corroborates the assertion, we can hardly be censured for acting upon an idea which has grown gradually into imaginary reality."

While speaking of the misstatements of travellers concerning Russia, our author remarks with his usual quickness one great cause of that dif fusion of dishonest and knavish habits so rife in the dominions of the czar.

"No man in office can live upon his

pay in Russia. This holds good from the field-marshal to the ensign-from the chancellor to the lawyer's scribefrom the grand-masters of the police to the city-watchmen. Every Russian will attest to the truth of this assertion. Now, as these people must and do live, so the deficiency is made up by private fortune or by peculation. As all the higher ranks are found, under some pretext or other, to serve their country in some shape, so their salaries are of minor consideration; and it is indeed the custom for men of fortune to divide the salary they receive from government among their subordinates. In no country is there so great a number of employés as in Russia; for as its small nobility are, from the causes before mentioned innumerable, it is necessary not only to put them into all vacant places, bnt to create a number of such for their special service, and consequently this class of nobility or chinapicks, or what we should call little gentry, are the crying burden of the state. The army disposes of many of them; and although their pay is but trifling, they still find means sufficient for subsistence. But the greater class are employed as scribes in the public offices; and as most of them do not receive more than thirty pounds' salary, out of which they must furnish an uniform, their mode of existence must be very equivocal. As regards those who are in the pay of the police, no doubt can exist as to their way of going to work.

"One example will be sufficient to furnish the clue to the whole machinery. The city is divided into different quar ters, over which is placed a superior police officer, who is of course subor dinate to the grand-master of the police. The former, however, has a large suite of underlings, and is the active personage in maintaining order in his district. He is a man of a certain education; he is lodged in a good house; generally keeps two or three pair of horses, a number of servants; lives in that style which supposes an income of £700 sterling per annum while his whole receipts from government do not exceed £80. His means of making up the deficiency I shall leave to conjecture."

There is much amusement and some information to be gained by accompanying the physician in his rambles to Sweden and back, by Berlin, Magdeburg, and the German baths, to England, where he arrives at last,` after a long absence. But we have already dwelt too much on these things at least, our editor's frowns

are before us, and certain warnings are in our ears that politics and poetry demand also their legitimate attention at his hands; nor can we better conclude our notice of these pleasant and entertaining volumes than in the words of their author

"And now if any one has had patience to accompany me in my travels, I wish him farewell, and thank him for his company. I am now riding at anchor, and it is not my intention to put to sea again. Should I ever be tempted to slip my cable, I shall steer directly for the New World. I should say of my book, that it is a curious production, touching upon many things, and dwelling upon none. It is highly electric: it approaches all surrounding bodies, which, as soon as they have touched it, fly off at a tangent, repelling each other."

"The Change for the American Notes" is an unhappy exception to the class of books we have just presented to our reader's notice; and it would seem that the conclusion of our paper, like the codicil of certain wills, was to revoke any provision contained in the body of the testament.

From the title of this volume, no less than from the degree of irritation and anger caused by Mr. Dickens' recent work on America, we were disposed to expect something like an attack or a refutation of his notes; a strong case made out to show misrepresentation and misstatement, and clever defence of America against the assaults of so distinguished a writer. On the contrary, however, Mr. Dickens' name only occurs at intervals throughout the volume; the allusions to him and to his book are few and meagre, and never accompanied by even an effort at contradiction, and the Change for the American Notes is simply an attempted "Roland for Boz's Oliver”— a miserable endeavour to carry the war into the enemy's camp, at the moment too when their own army is routed, The object of the book is certainly strange, coming from one who, in a few lines of preface, affects to regret the evils arising from severe animadversions on the part of travellers, but which probably the consoled herself for in the present instance by the comforting assurance she concludes with "that the English will not be much VOL. XXII.-No. 128.

impressed by her remarks, for when it is told of themselves, they are a people regularly uamoved by the truth."

The politeness of the remark, not to speak of its veracity, might have disposed us to leave the volume where we found it-the more as we flatter ourselves Mr. Dickens versus the lady is about as much odds as any reasonable man could wish for; but a lurking curiosity to see the points selected for attack, rather than the mode of conducting it, induced us to proceed further, and here we present "our experience" to our readers.

The volume purports to be a series of letters written by an American lady to her friend at New York, and opens with some random remarks about taxes and custom houses, both of which excite her American indignation, in company with the unhappy Thames, "whose smallness she cannot get over." These are followed by an obligato introduction of Mr. Dickens' name, of whom, after some very pretty marks of approval regarding his works of fiction, of which we feel assured Boz is duly sensible and proud, she thus discourses:-"The noblest rivers in the world rolled from him unregarded by, or at least unparagraphed. In the Mississippi he beholds but a muddy stream flowing through a woody wilderness; his mind's eye catches no prescient glimpse of the cities that in the fulness of time will adorn its banks-he alludes not to the all hail hereafter."

We confess we deem this hard, very hard indeed; that Mr. Dickens should be rated not only for not having indulged in a special panegyric of the Hudson and the Mississippi, but also because he did not launch forth into ecstacies over cities which have no existence. "He did not see the Spanish fleet, because it was not yet in sight," such is the measure of his iniquity. That Mr. Dickens gave not the rein to his glowing imagination in this instance, were we an American, we should feel excessively grateful for; had fancy predominated over reason, and had he suffered himself to catch these same "prescient glimpses" the lady speaks of, the probability is that his vision would have been of low and stagnant swamps peopled by caymans, a fœtid morass, redolent of ague

N

and pestilent fever, where miserable humanity toiled, and sickened, and died, unpitied and unknown. But to pass on-after some dalliance on the score of a new bonnet, in which she incidentally remarks that "in French fashions we are in advance of the ladies in London"-a natural circumstance doubtless attributable to the vicinity to Paris and the greater intercourse between the two nations; we have an apt comparison between Indians and opera dancers, in which the palm of gracefulness is accorded to the former. If the lady be correct in this instance, we can only say, that Mr. Catlin must have been hoaxing us here to a considerable extent: any thing more barbarous than the cotillons of his red men we never witnessed, and with about as much resemblance to Ellsler or Cerito as the "Change" bears to the American "Notes" themselves.

In her fourth letter we are treated to a trip to Windsor, the main object of which is, to contrast the conduct and manners of American and English railroad travellers. "No smoking is allowed in any of the carriages; there are no feathery showers such as Boz tells of. The English rarely open their mouths for any purpose but to eat and drink, while they travel." How handsome he would be if he had only a goitre, was the exclamation of the Swiss peasant, to whom the frightful deformity from long habit had become a beauty in her eyes; and so with the lady, she cannot contain her regret that no feathery showers remind her of the land of the west-no pleasant fumes of chewed tobacco scent the breezes, to recall the free winds of America.

A little further on we are informed that one of her solicitors assured her she "could not be taken for any thing but an English lady. He intended it for a compliment," &c. With every respect for a legal opinion, we beg most respectfully to dissent from this, and say, "an American against the world."

Westminster Abbey and its stipendiary system, which we are most willing to condemn, open the ninth letter; and we are gravely told, "the Americans as well as the British may feel ennobled in Westminster; for there are the great names of a common ancestry

-the warriors who made British valour felt-the poets and philosophers who gave undying lustre to the language long before misrule made America exclaim, I will be free;' Chaucer, and Spencer, and Barrow, and Addison, and Newton, are ours as well as England's." It would be difficult to cram more absurdity into one paragraph than this; and we would ask with what face Americans can affect pride in their connection with a nation which by every effort in public and private, they never cease to vilify? "That great men lived before misrule made America exclaim" any thing, is very possible, inasmuch as great men existed before America was ever known or thought of; and as to any copartnery they possess in the illus trious names of English history, they have it in common with Jack Sheppard, and Turpin, and Jonathan Wilde, and others of that stamp-ay, and pretty much on the same conditions too. The collection of names reminds us not a little of the Irish schoolmaster's'classical authorities Vulcan, Venus, and Nicodemus;" but this we forgive, begging to assure the "lady" that if we are severe in our strictures on America, we have at least this much of consistency to boast of-that we never affect to feel proud of what we so strenuously condemn.

After some remarks, much more flippant than true, about the ignorance of the lower classes in England, the lady remarks, "that on the west coast of Ireland there are a great many islands, and the inhabitants are as rude and as apparently uncared for, as they were centuries ago. How self-denying then are the British to send out teachers to Tahiti, to New Zealand, to the Niger, &c. Am I deceived, dear Julia, in my irony?" As in all likelihood dear Julia" will not be able to reply, we shall do so for her. You are deceived. The islands you speak of are the scene of the labours of one of the most remarkable men of the day, the Rev. Mr. Nangle, a clergyman of the Church of England, who, voluntarily submitting to the hardships and vicissitudes of a life of the greatest privation, devotes his entire energies to the religious and moral instruction of these people. That you may have heard of the islands, and not of him, with whose name they now are and

must for ever be associated, might be somewhat strange, but that it is perfectly in keeping with the tone of information in the entire volume. This is followed by a digression-for so goes on the book-as to how a writer should describe America, in which the chief force lies in the exaltation and enumeration of all the great things which America has not done-the cities that do not exist-the people who are not born, and the "giant's strength and sage's wisdom;" the only evidences of which we have seen are to be found in the practice of slavery and the declaration of national bankruptcy; the "strength" that tyrannizes -the "wisdom" that cheats.

"I think," writes the "lady," "the boastfulness imputed to Americans is generally a trick of manner more than any thing else." We confess ourselves unable to say yea or nay to the doctrine, not knowing what the words "trick of manner" are meant exactly to imply. If merely a habit if nothing more than a passing tribute to conventional usage, in which nothing serious is intended, then say we, for heaven's sake abandon it. Miserable as your long dyspeptic faces make us unhappy as we feel at the uncouth liberties of your parts of speech-disgusted as we must be at your feathery showers"-your vainglorious boastfulness is, of all your sins, the most grievous and difficult to endure.

We have met them at home and abroad; in their own Broadway and on the continent of Europe; of every class, from the diplomatist downwards, and this one pervading feature went through all, rendering their conversation almost unendurable, and their intercourse a "bore;” and here let us remark that nothing is more false and untrue than to suppose that Americans only meet severe criticism from the English. The most cutting sarcasms on their vulgarity, the heaviest censures on their ill breeding, want of tact and manner, we have ever heard, came from foreigners when, speaking of the class of persons who represent the "States" at European courts.

The lady concludes an endeavour to refute Alison's powerful and most trustworthy picture of America in the last volume of his history of Europe by remarking, "That America, confi

dent in her resources, can afford to be evil spoken of, and is pretty well inured to it into the bargain," a confession, we own, that might be adopted with great success and propriety by many calumniated individuals at the Old Bailey. The old story about the Americans speaking English with more purity than the English, because some peasants in Yorkshire are unintelligible, scarce deserves a notice. When we talk of a language in its purity, we mean that language as spoken by the educated classes, by whom its standard is preserved; and with what truth can any one assert that English is so spoken in New York, Boston, or even Washington? In the very volume before us too many Yankeeisms are apparent. Whence came the word "napery?" Who ever heard of neighbourhood as a verb? and so on: if we took the pains, we might string twenty similar in

stances.

"The Americans intonate more deliberately." That they do!-con-si-derably; but if they did not impart a nasal twang to the whole, we might forgive the intonation.

As to their proficiency in European languages, it is lamentable; we scarcely remember ever to have met an American a tolerable Frenchs cholar. We never saw but one-he was a Gottingen student who could speak German. The "lady," though not sparing of French quotations, only once ventures on employing a phrase on her own account; and then she uses "embonpoint" as an adjective, page 369, the common error of all who employ a French word without knowing the language.

But enough, and more than enough. The whole case of the lady is this :The Americans have great virtues and some faults; the former all their own, the latter of English origin. Selfishfishness, vain boasting, and unamiability came from England, together with purse pride and bad grammar.

As regards bravery, patriotism, a high sense of honour, and a chivalrous feeling, they are of home origin, or to use the proper phrase, they were raised in America.

Methinks France would be somewhat astonished to hear that Quebec was the true type, and Paris the false

one.

But why dispute the point? The more they write the stronger the argu