of the hundreds of writers who come over, only a few of the most prominent of whom we have mentioned above, not one in fifty is animated by a sincere impulse of honest good-will.  They have learned to mistrust them all, as triflers with our reputation, if not predetermined calumniators.  They have witnessed over and over again the childish ignorance, the discourtesy, the vulgar deceptions of this class of bookmakers.  They are not blind to these repeated struggles to digest a mass of mental food for years, in days or weeks.  They know their nation cannot be understood by these chance viewers, feebly glancing through greenest spectacles, any more than the Atlantic can be sounded with a seven-fathom line.  They have become familiar with the English traveller only to regard him with contempt.  Each new production has opened the old wound.  Each new announcement awakens only derisive expectations.  As for “French and Germans,” with them it is very different; and Mr. Mackay ought to know it.  They commonly write, if not with comprehensive vision, at least with integrity of purpose.  The best works on America are by Frenchmen.  What Englishman has shown the sincerity and fairness of De Tocqueville or Chevalier?  Knowing, then, that absurd malice and a capacity for microscopic investigation of superficial irregularities in a society not yet defined are the principal, and in many cases the only, qualifications deemed necessary to accomplish an English book on America, is it matter for wonder that Americans should hesitate to kiss the clumsy rods so liberally dispensed?

We hasten to say that Mr. Charles Mackay’s “Life and Liberty in America” is unusually free from the worst of these faults.  Hasty judgments, offences against taste, inaccuracies, occasional revelations of personal pique it has; but it is not malicious.  Sometimes it is even affecting in its tenderness.  It breathes a spirit of paternal regard.  But it is, perhaps, the dullest of books.  If not “icily regular,” it is “splendidly null.”  The style is as oppressive as a London fog.  It is marked, to use the author’s own words, by “elegant and drowsy stagnation.”  After the first few pages, it is with weariness that we follow him.  We are inclined to think Mr. Mackay has written too much, Mr. Squeers had milk for three of his pupils watered up to the necessities of five.  Mr. Mackay’s experiences might have sustained him through a single small volume, but he has diluted them to the requirements of two large ones.  This would injure the prospects of his work in America, but may not interfere with them in England.  Minute details of toilet agonies, pecuniary miseries, laundry tribulations, and anxieties of appetite may possess an interest abroad which we are unable to appreciate here.  We are not excited by the intelligence that Mr. Mackay had an altercation with a negro servant on board a Sound steamer, because he could not have lager-beer at table.  Such things have been noticed before.  We do not shed a sympathetic tear over