what we mean, if he compare Mr. Olmsted’s extracts from his diary with Mr. Russell’s.  The latter represents himself as constantly hearing the word Britisher used seriously and in good faith, and remarks expressly on an odd pronunciation of Europe with the accent on the last syllable, which be noticed in Mr. Seward among others.  Mr. Russell’s memory is at fault.  What he heard was European; and Britisher is not, and never was, an Americanism.

We do not, however, mean to doubt the general truthfulness of Mr. Russell’s reports.  We find nothing in his book which leads us to modify the opinion we expressed of him more than a year ago.[B] We still think him “a shrewd, practised, and, for a foreigner, singularly accurate observer.”  We still believe that his “strictures, if rightly taken, may do us infinite service.”  But we must enter our earnest protest against a violation of hospitality and confidence, which, if it became common, would render all society impossible.  Any lively man might write a readable and salable book by exploiting his acquaintances; but such a proceeding would be looked upon by all right-minded people as an offence similar in kind, if not in degree, to the publication of private letters.  A shrewd French writer has remarked, that a clever man in a foreign country should always know two things,—­what he is, and where he is.  Mr. Russell seems habitually to have forgotten both.  Even Montaigne, the most garrulous of writers, becomes discreet in speaking of other people.  If we learn from him that the Duke of Florence mixed a great deal of water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all. we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a hundred and fifty years after his death.

[Footnote B:  Atlantic Monthly, Vol.  VIII., p. 765.]

One of the first reflections which occur to the reader, as he closes Mr. Russell’s book, with a half-guilty feeling of being an accomplice after the fact in his indiscretions, to use the mildest term, is a general one on the characteristic difference between the traveller as he is and as he was hardly a century ago.  A man goes abroad now not so much to see countries and learn something from them, as to write a book that shall pay his travelling-charges.  The object which men formerly proposed to themselves, in visiting foreign lands, seems to have been to find out something which might be of advantage to their own country, in the way either of trade, agriculture, or manufactures,—­and they treated of manners, when they touched upon them at all, with the coolness and impartiality of naturalists:  They did not conclude things to be necessarily worse because they were different.  A modern Tom Coryat, instead of introducing the use of the fork among his countrymen, would find some excuse for thinking the Italians a nasty people because they used it.  In our day it would appear that the chief aim of a