The union of liberty and order, which is the principle of their government, is also the principle of their homes. The real household virtues-good sense and good feeling—are powerful enough to overcome considerable disadvantages in the rambling education and juvenile publicity of their women.

The term which I should say applied best to the tone and carriage of American girls, from ten to eighteen, is hoydenish; laughing, giggling, romping, flirting, screaming at the top of their voices, running in and out of shops, and spending a very considerable portion of their time in lounging about in the streets.'

But what is it that follows?

These very girls, whose manners have been most displeasing to my European ways of feeling, whom I should have pointed out as romps and flirts pre-eminent, not only make excellent wives, but from the very moment of their marriage seem to forsake society, and devote themselves exclusively to household duties and retirement.' A young American lady, speaking upon this subject, said to me, "We enjoy ourselves before marriage; but in your country girls marry to obtain a greater degree of freedom, and indulge in the pleasures and dissipations of society." She was not, I think, greatly mistaken.'

This is not the way in which the subject would have been dealt with by a writer who was looking out for the opportunity of passing off real falsehoods under the countenance of apparent truths. The materials for a safe lie were just what malice would have desired.

Her nature takes fire as soon from American as from English genius. Witness her tears at the speeches of Webster, and at the poetry of Bryant and Willis. There is so little critical reserve in her admiration that she readily places her poetical theories at the disposal of either poet. Reading Bryant, bright, trustful, and wholesome (in contradiction to the literature of the age'), she is satisfied that melancholy is not essential to the nature of a 'poet.' Reading Willis, she is of opinion that all beautiful things are sad, and that it is sad to read fine poetry among the rest. Her temperament apparently connects most readily with the latter creed. But be that as it may, she was quite in the right to defend against her mother her girlish recital, almost sadly,' of the balcony scene in Juliet.

Mrs Butler visited the United States as a sort of public character. Therefore attentions paid to her father and herself would have been no general criterion. She took them accordingly as things of course; more astonished when they happened to be omitted than gratified when they were paid. Nevertheless, daughter to Charles Kemble, niece to Mrs Siddons, representative three times a-week of queens and heroines-over and above

all, properly conscious of her own merit (' clever girl that I am '), she is not too proud and saucy to be insensible to kindness manifested towards themselves. There was a scandalous attempt to injure her before the public, by misrepresenting an unlucky private conversation she had had at Washington with a young gentleman, when out riding, about his horse. The Philadelphia theatre was her place of trial; and the audience carried her through in the handsomest manner. How does she feel their

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conduct? At the end, the people shouted and shrieked for us. My father went on and made them a speech, and I went on and made them a curtsy; and certainly they do deserve the 'civilest of speeches, and lowest of curtsies from us, for they 'have behaved most kindly and courteously to us; and for mine own good part, I love the whole city of Philadelphia, from this time forth, for ever more.'

Nor, on reconsidering the sum total of her recollections, did she change her mind.

The people here are much more civil and considerate than can be imagined. I sent yesterday evening for some water-ice; the confectioner had none; when lo! to night he brings me some he had made on purpose for me, which he entreats my acceptance of. I admired a very pretty fan Mrs had in her hand; and at the end of the play, she had it sent to my dressing room,-and these sort of things are done to me, not once, but ten times every day. Nothing can exceed the kindness and attention which has encountered us every where since we have been in this country. I am sure I am bound to remember America and Americans thankfully; for, whatever I may think of their ways, manners, or peculiarities, to me they have shown unmingled good-will, and cordial, real kindness.'

The extracts which we have given look, we think, very like a friendly estimate of things and persons. At all events they are sufficiently favourable to entitle the writer of them to the privilege of stating with impunity the case, as it has appeared to her, on the other side. She has passed to the credit of their account the several items of political greatness, honesty, courtesy, and humanity; and has added her own personal obligation for boundless kindness. After this, is she to be all but stoned for setting down in her tablets, day by day, as they occurred, the opposite matters, whether serious or trifling, which have most annoyed or most amused her? And what, in truth, does the burden of her imputed testimony against America actually amount to? For the most part her troubles and horrors are those of a quick and susceptible and somewhat romantic girl, who is pining after home, and is comparing every thing with the standards which she had left behind her; the riding school at New York with Fossard's; an

evening among the rank and fashion of Chestnut Street with her last evening at Devonshire House. It may be truly a blessed country for the vast majority of mankind notwithstanding the following deductions :

There is no such thing as a good lady's horse to be got throughout the Union for love or money; horses are called well broken when they are only no longer wild; a decent rider, man or woman, is scarcely ever to be seen; their actors are in general an ignorant and inattentive set, and the audience cannot find it out; an election at the Quaker city of Philadelphia is as noisy as in London, and a clever Jacksonite can contrive to vote for 'old Hickory' nine times over; the division of labour and capital is not yet visible in their shop windows; while the dependence of the rich upon the poor (instead of the European alternative, the dependence of the poor upon the rich), is visible enough in the conduct of careless innkeepers, conversible shopmen, and washerwomen, who sit down while their mistresses are standing; for three years together a pretty woman may not get a single article of dress which shall not be ill made; what is almost as badpoetical mountains are degraded by the appellations of Crow's Nest and Butter Hill; no nightingales are to be heard in New England, nor rivulets singing through the fields; the people are given up to the realities of life, and mainly to that dull reality, the making money; they are in too great a hurry to allow themselves time to perfect any thing, and will scarcely pause to keep a Christmas or a birth-day; the want of a class with independent means, and, therefore, able to command literary leisure, and follow up the higher intellectual pursuits, is a national misfortune; the population, in consequence, is marvellously indisposed to humour, which is fancy laughing, and to poetry, which is fancy sad; the principal effort of national drollery or romance, consists in going to Lempriere's Dictionary for the names of their wooden villages negro slaves; drunkenness, while it is much less common among the poor than in England, is a frequent recreation of the rich; spitting on floor and carpet is so general that a clean white gown may be covered with yellow spots from the gentlemen's tobacco in a single afternoon; a nasal inflection is a national characteristic, while sundry peculiarities of pronunciation and accent more or less distinguish the principal divisions of the country; they play such queer tricks in modernizing the English of our liturgy, that their language must run a great chance of being driven from the solid anchorage which our ancestors had laid down in our old translation of the Bible; privacy any where is out of the question; an officer in the American army considers his commission to be a sufficient right of introduction to

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any body-young ladies included; visitors, once acquainted, walk in without leaving the visitees an option in the matter; the fair sex have a great dislike to being called women;' their feminine refined appearance is in singular contrast with their style of dress (French gone mad), and with their practice of talking across each other, five or six at a time, at the top of the shrillest voices in the world; the thorough-bred look and manners of our noble English ladies are seldom seen; married women become at once household drudges or nursery-maids; you will not find a lady at home in the morning six or seven times in three years-she is in the storeroom, while her husband is at the counting-house; for the most part society is led by chits-of whom the girls are brought up en evidence and in a bustle, and the boys are made men of business at sixteen; these democrats are as title-sick as a banker's wife in England; the distinguishing points on which American exclusives pride themselves, find, however, ample scope for variety in different parts of the country; the aristocracy of New York rests its pretensions upon its wealth, that of Boston upon its intellect, that of Philadel phia and of the south upon birth; a curious novel might be made in illustration of the struggle between the levelling spirit of American institutions and the separating and dividing spirit of Ameri can society; the effect of universal suffrage is to check mental cultivation, and give them an inferior government,-just, honest, and rational perhaps, but not enlarged or liberal; finally, and to conclude the working of the whole brings out in the higher classes a system of life and manners any thing but agreeable to gentlefolks fresh from Europe.

A great deal of this may not be very pleasant hearing; but it is all told, meaning to tell the truth, and not meaning to be impertinent. Where this is the case, it is more absurd in nations, even than in individuals, to take offence. Mrs Butler says what she thinks of other nations as unreservedly as of the Americans. She goes out of her way to mention the vanity and blasphemies of the French. She speaks as ill of the filth of London hackneycoaches as of the paces of American saddle-horses, and was as sensible to the dirtiness of her hotel at Dublin, and to the savageness of the Highland serving-man at Glasgow, as to her similar miseries in the Northern States. English pride and prejudice find no more favour from her than American irritability-nor our boarding-school trick of quizzing, than their intrusive cross-questioning curiosity. Both nations are alike unteachable in music; nationally unteachable. If the fine breeding of the Provoked 'Husband' must be heathen Greek to the American exclusives, the imaginative faculty is gone forth from among our higher classes. Our loss (by far the greatest) is so complete, that she would a

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thousand times rather act Juliet and Ophelia to a set of Manchester mechanics, than to the most select of our aristocracy. This, by the way, is telling tales out of school for in their private theatricals she had particular opportunities of seeing what they were like-being, as it were, with them behind the scenes. The fine ladies of New York saw nothing particular' in her Lady Teazle. She vindicates herself by a sneer. 'I am not 'genteel enough, and I am conscious of it.' However, our own variety of this interesting species-Almack patronesses and their tribe-do not get off much better. It is only in a different way. They are, among women, what the Camelia is among flowers, beautiful without sweetness; they are bright and polished as ice, but as slippery, as treacherous, and as cold. What then? Neither nation, nor French nor English, she is well aware, will think of directing the columns of a single newspaper against her, by reason of these hard sayings. The diary of one of her days opens with, Read Byron's Life-defend me from my friends!' Suppose a page in Mr Moore's diary were to begin, Read Mrs Butler's journal-defend one from one's self,' would either party meet the less amiably conditioned towards each other? No indeed! Europeans have learned that these things must not be thought of after this fashion; they would make us mad else.' The Americans, on the other hand, appear in this respect to be little better than so many spoiled children, unaccustomed to contradiction. They cannot play at cards unless they are allowed to call the trump.

Before the temerity of her present publication, Mrs Butler found her situation sufficiently uncomfortable. I live myself in ' daily expectation of martyrdom; and as for any body attempting to earn a livelihood here, who has but as much as said he prefers the country where he was born to this, he would stand a much better chance of thriving, if he were to begin business after confinement in the Penitentiary.' This account of the national temper is confirmed by M. de Tocqueville to the fullest extent, in his remarkable work, lately published, on The Democracy of America.' The majority, by removing out of the way every check, even the most temporary, has left to tyranny, and the impulse of the moment, an open course. • I know' (says he) no country where less independence of mind, and less ⚫ freedom of discussion are to be found than in America.' The majority has traced a formidable circle round the mind. Wo to the writer who ventures to step out of it!

The three following extracts are from the work just mentioned. They are taken from an excellent translation by Mr