have
perpetual moonlight. Under the flood of silver light which the full moon
here pours down, even its forlorn shabbiness is softened into something
of romantic indistinctness. But daylight is dreadfully disenchanting.
The rows of tumble-down houses, the sandy, unpaved streets--through
which you flounder as in the deserts of Sahara, unless you choose to try
sidewalks that have as many ups and downs as a range of mountains, each
man building to the height that pleases himself--the large parade,
without armament or shade, a dreary common of sand, the crowds of noisy,
slouching, dirty negroes, the burnt districts, filled with the rubbish
of houses and with unwholesome vegetation growing up, do not combine to
form a very engaging whole. One would think it impossible to exaggerate
such a picture of comfortless neglect. Yet bad as it is in itself, Mr.
Sewell has mercilessly exaggerated it. One would think from his
description that there was not a decent house in the place, and that he
had never seen the rows of excellent dwellings on North street and East
street. Then he speaks of the inhabitants as being, 'taken _en masse_,
steeped to the eyelids in immorality.'

Now, if he meant that the great numerical majority of the inhabitants
bear this character, he spoke truly, inasmuch as the great numerical
majority of the inhabitants are negroes, among the most depraved in the
island. Kingston is like the slough of Despond, a place whither all the
scum and filth of the negro population in the east end of the island do
continually run, and make it a very sink of wickedness. But are the
white families and the large number of thoroughly respectable colored
families to be confounded with this mass of negro depravity, because
they are fewer in number? It is true they are fewer in number, but they
are so thoroughly distinct in standing and character that Mr. Sewell is
justly chargeable with cruel recklessness in confounding them together
as he does. It may concern the world little to distinguish among the
people of Kingston, but it does very vitally concern the morality of
authorship, that a traveller should not, by a careless and sweeping
sentence, leave a cruel sting in the minds of hundreds of refined and
virtuous women.

But I cannot vindicate Kingston society against the charge of surpassing
dulness. In an insular colony, under the enervating influence of a
tropical climate, the pulse of intellectual life beats very faintly, at