d the one not a Humphrey
Clinker, nor the other a Winifred Jenkins,--and we are expected to
admire the result as a good imitation of a lively, intelligent,
well-bred American young lady! We protest against the profanation.

The letters take a wide range of subject, and treat of "Shakspeare,
taste, and the musical glasses," in a vein that would have done no
discredit to Lady Blarney and Miss Arabella Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs
themselves. We might divert our readers with some specimens of
criticism, or opinion, did our limits admit of such entertainment. We
can only inform them, on Belle Brittan's authority, that worthy Dr.
Charles Mackay, who suffers throughout the book from intermittent--nay,
chronic--attacks of puffery, is "one of the best living poets of
England"; Mademoiselle Lamoureux, the _danseuse_, is "better than
Ellsler"; and pretty Mrs. John Wood, the lively _soubrette_ of the
Boston Theatre, "possesses many of the rarest requisites of a great
actress"! But these are inanities which an inexperienced and
half-taught girl might possibly utter in a familiar letter. Not so, we
trust, as to the belief expressed by Belle Brittan, in puffing "Jim
Parton's, Fanny Fern's Jim's," Life of Burr,--"more charming than a
novel," because, as she implies, of the successful libertinism of its
hero,--when she says, speaking in the name of the maidens of America,
"We all, I suppose, must fall, like our first parents, when the hour of
_our_ temptation comes"!

We should not have given the space we have bestowed on this worthless
book, had it not been made the occasion of newspaper puffs innumerable,
recommending it to the public as something worthy of their time and
money. It is one of the worst signs of our time that a false
good-nature or imperfect taste should lead respectable papers to give
currency to books destitute of all merit, by the application to them of
stereotyped phrases of commendation. These letters, without a grace of
style, without a flash of wit, without a genial ray of humor, deformed
by coarse breeding, vulgar self-conceit, and ignorant assumption, are
bepraised as if they were fresh from the mint of genius, and bore the
image and superscription of Madame de Sevigne or Lady Mary Wortley!
This evil must be cured, or the daily press may find that it will cure
itself.

We know nothing of the author of this book, excepting what he has here
shown us of himself. He may be capable of better things, and when they
c