to the noise of a city feast, and the heat of city elections.  A friend, a short time ago, quoted some lines[A] from the last-mentioned of these works, which meeting Mr. Godwin’s eye, he was so struck with the beauty of the passage, and with a consciousness of having seen it before, that he was uneasy till he could recollect where, and after hunting in vain for it in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other not unlikely places, sent to Mr. Lamb to know if he could help him to the author!

Mr. Washington Irvine’s acquaintance with English literature begins almost where Mr. Lamb’s ends,—­with the Spectator, Tom Brown’s works, and the wits of Queen Anne.  He is not bottomed in our elder writers, nor do we think he has tasked his own faculties much, at least on English ground.  Of the merit of his Knicker-bocker, and New York stories, we cannot pretend to judge.  But in his Sketch-book and Bracebridge-Hall he gives us very good American copies of our British Essayists and Novelists, which may be very well on the other side of the water, and as proofs of the capabilities of the national genius, but which might be dispensed with here, where we have to boast of the originals.  Not only Mr. Irvine’s language is with great taste and felicity modelled on that of Addison, Sterne, Goldsmith, or Mackenzie; but the thoughts and sentiments are taken at the rebound, and as they are brought forward at the present period, want both freshness and probability.  Mr. Irvine’s writings are literary anachronisms.  He comes to England for the first time; and being on the spot, fancies himself in the midst of those characters and manners which he had read of in the Spectator and other approved authors, and which were the only idea he had hitherto formed of the parent country.  Instead of looking round to see what we are, he sets to work to describe us as we were—­at second hand.  He has Parson Adams, or Sir Roger de Coverley in his “mind’s eye”; and he makes a village curate, or a country ’squire in Yorkshire or Hampshire sit to these admired models for their portraits in the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Whatever the ingenious author has been most delighted with in the representations of books, he transfers to his port-folio, and swears that he has found it actually existing in the course of his observation and travels through Great Britain.  Instead of tracing the changes that have taken place in society since Addison or Fielding wrote, he transcribes their account in a different hand-writing, and thus keeps us stationary, at least in our most attractive and praise-worthy qualities of simplicity, honesty, hospitality, modesty, and good-nature.  This is a very flattering mode of turning fiction into history, or history into fiction; and we should scarcely know ourselves again in the softened and altered likeness, but that it bears the date of 1820, and issues from the press in Albemarle-street.  This is one way