them, on the nation at large.  When he undertakes an emotional view of the “institution,” he becomes feeble again.  He thus describes his sensations while visiting a slave-market in New Orleans:—­“I entertained at that moment such a hatred of slavery, that, had it been in my power to abolish it in an instant off the face of the earth by the mere expression of my will, slavery at that moment would have ceased to exist,”—­an avowal which will hardly be likely to confound the American people by its boldness.

The statistical information in these volumes is as accurate as that of ordinary gazetteers.  In most cases, the author appears to have drawn his information from proper sources.  The principal exceptions to this are shown in one or two statements which he makes on the authority of his Pylades, Colonel Fuller, and in his remarks upon Canada, which are colored with excessive warmth.  Mr. Mackay rests greater hopes upon the future of Canada than upon that of the United States.  He considers the Canadians as the rivals in energy, enterprise, and industry of the people of the United States.  His testimony differs from that of Lord Durham, who had good opportunities for knowing something about the matter when he had charge of Canadian affairs, and who declared, that “on the American side of the frontier all is activity and bustle,” etc., “on the British side all seems waste and desolate.”

Mr. Mackay gives correctly the most prominent names of American literature, but his list of artists is very imperfect.  The little that he says about American music is all wrong.  The first opera by an American was produced in 1845; and it is not true that this is a solitary example.  Were it possible for us to pursue them, we should run down more errors of this kind than a prudent man would have put into print.

Altogether, while we readily admit that Mr. Mackay has honestly, and, in general, good-naturedly, performed his duty as an American chronicler, renouncing in a great measure the old principle of “blowing-up,” and that his essays do not reek with ignorance, like those of many of his predecessors, it is yet proper to say that he has achieved a stupendous bore.  His two volumes are to us a melancholy remembrance.  Their life is spiced with no variety.  The same dead level of dry personal detail speaks through each chapter; or if occasional relief is afforded, it is “in liquid lines mellifluously bland,” and prosier than all the rest.  The one source of amusement that the reader will discover is the complacent self-confidence which no assumption of modesty can hide.  “A controversy had been raging for at least a week” in Philadelphia about the author’s letters in the “Illustrated London News.”  His defender was “one of the most influential and best-conducted papers of the Union”; his assailant behaved “scurvily.”  We cannot lavish examples.  This is the type of a hundred.  Mr. Mackay seems to expect that his Jeremiad on tobacco-chewing and spitting will act