liberty committed to its charge.  And let it be remarked that our expectations of English approval were never Utopian.  The great principle involved in the American contest was so far above the level of the ordinary pursuits of men, that, even among ourselves, few have been able to transfuse it into their daily consciousness.  We never looked to England for the encouragement of a popular enthusiasm,—­hardly, perhaps, for a cold acquiescence.  John Bull, we said, is proverbially a grumbler, proverbially indifferent to all affairs but his own; he will be annoyed by tariffs, and plagued by scarcity of cotton;—­what wonder, if we are a little misunderstood?  The minor contributors to his daily press will not be able to think long or wisely of what they write; we must be ready to pardon a certain amount of irritation and misstatement.  That such was the feeling of intelligent Americans towards England, at the beginning of our troubles, we have no doubt.  But for the scurrility heaped upon us by what claims to be the higher British press we were totally unprepared,—­and for this good reason, that such malignity of criticism as is possible in America could never have suggested it.  Let us not be misunderstood.  We acknowledge the “Rowdy Journal” and Mr. Jefferson Brick.  Undoubtedly, newspapers exist among us of which the description of Mr. Dickens is no very extravagant caricature.  But their editors, if not of notoriously infamous life, are those whose minds are unenlarged by any generous education,—­men whose lack of grammar suggests a certain palliation of their want of veracity and good-breeding.  Such journals are seldom or never seen by the large class of cultivated American readers, and are in no sense representative of them.  The “Saturday Review” and “Blackwood’s Magazine” are said to be conducted by men of University training.  Their articles are written in clear and precise English, and often contain vigorous thought.  They publish few papers which do not give evidence of at least tolerable scholarship in their writers.  Of kindred periodicals on this side of the ocean it may be safely said, that the intelligence of the reader forces their criticism up to some decent standard of honest painstaking.  We may thus explain the bewilderment which came over us at that burst of vulgar ribaldry from the leading British press, in which the organs above named have achieved a scandalous preeminence.  Vibrating from the extreme of shallowness to the extreme of sufficiency, scorning to be limited in abuse by adhering to any single hypothesis, the current literature of England has gloated over the rebellion of Slavery with the cynical chuckles of a sour spinster.  Would that language less strong could express our meaning!  President Lincoln—­whatever may be judged his deficiency in resources of statesmanship—­will be embalmed by history as one possessing many qualities peculiarly adapted to our perilous crisis, together with an integrity of life and purpose honorably representing