This was the most literary conversation I was ever present at in Cincinnati.*

    (The pleasant, easy, unpretending talk on all subjects,
     (which I enjoyed in Mr. Flint’s family, was an exception
     (to every thing else I met at Cincinnati.

In truth, there are many reasons which render a very general diffusion of literature impossible in America.  I can scarcely class the universal reading of newspapers as an exception to this remark; if I could, my statement would be exactly the reverse, and I should say that America beat the world in letters.  The fact is, that throughout all ranks of society, from the successful merchant, which is the highest, to the domestic serving man, which is the lowest, they are all too actively employed to read, except at such broken moments as may suffice for a peep at a newspaper.  It is for this reason, I presume, that every American newspaper is more or less a magazine, wherein the merchant may scan while he holds out his hand for an invoice, “Stanzas by Mrs. Hemans,” or a garbled extract from Moore’s Life of Byron; the lawyer may study his brief faithfully, and yet contrive to pick up the valuable dictum of some American critic, that “Bulwer’s novels are decidedly superior to Sir Walter Scott’s;” nay, even the auctioneer may find time, as he bustles to his tub, or his tribune, to support his pretensions to polite learning, by glancing his quick eye over the columns, and reading that “Miss Mitford’s descriptions are indescribable.”  If you buy a yard of ribbon, the shopkeeper lays down his newspaper, perhaps two or three, to measure it.  I have seen a brewer’s drayman perched on the shaft of his dray and reading one newspaper, while another was tucked under his arm; and I once went into the cottage of a country shoemaker, of the name of Harris, where I saw a newspaper half full of “original” poetry, directed to Madison F. Harris.  To be sure of the fact, I asked the man if his name were Madison.  “Yes, Madam, Madison Franklin Harris is my name.”  The last and the lyre divided his time, I fear too equally, for he looked pale and poor.

This, I presume, is what is meant by the general diffusion of knowledge, so boasted of in the United States; such as it is, the diffusion of it is general enough, certainly; but I greatly doubt its being advantageous to the population.

The only reading men I met with were those who made letters their profession; and of these, there were some who would hold a higher rank in the great Republic (not of America, but of letters), did they write for persons less given to the study of magazines and newspapers; and they might hold a higher rank still, did they write for the few and not for the many.  I was always drawing a parallel, perhaps a childish one, between the external and internal deficiency of polish and of elegance in the native volumes of the country.  Their compositions have not that condensation of