The “Record of an Obscure Man” is the modest introduction to a dramatic poem of singular pathos and beauty.  A New-Englander of culture and sensibility, naturalized at the South, is supposed to communicate the results of his study and observation of that outcast race which has been the easy contempt of ignorance in both sections of the country.  Our instructor has not only a clear judgment Of the value of different testimonies, and the scholarly instinct of arrangement and classification, but also that divine gift of sympathy, which alone, in this world given for our observation, can tell us what to observe.  The illustrations of the negro’s character, and the answers to vulgar depreciation of his tendencies and capacities, are given with the simple directness of real comprehension.  It is the privilege of one acquainted in no common degree with languages and their history to expose that dreary joke of the dialect of the oppressed, which superficial people have so long found funny or contemptible.  The simplicity and earnestness which give dignity to any phraseology come from the humanity behind it.  We are well reminded that divergences from the common use of language, never held to degrade the meaning in Milton or Shakespeare, need not render thought despicable when the negro uses identical forms.  If he calls a leopard a “libbard,” he only imitates the most sublime of English poets; and the first word of his petition, “Gib us this day our daily bread,” is pronounced as it rose from the lips of Luther.  The highest truths the faith of man may reach are symbolized more definitely, and often more picturesquely, by the warm imagination of the African than by the cultivated genius of the Caucasian.  Also it is shown how the laziness and ferocity with which the negro is sometimes charged may be more than matched in the history of his assumed superior.  Yet, while acknowledging how well-considered is the matter of this introductory volume, we regret what seems to be an imperfection in the form in which it is presented.  There is too much story, or too little,—­too little to command the assistance of fiction, too much to prevent a feeling of disappointment that romance is attempted at all.  The concluding autobiography of the friend of Colvil is hardly consistent with his character as previously suggested; it seems unnecessary to the author’s purpose, and is not drawn with the minuteness or power which might justify its introduction.  We notice this circumstance as explaining why this Introduction may possibly fail of a popularity more extended than that which its tenderness of thought and style at once claimed from the best readers.