ould 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 the two dollars which he once had to
disgorge in New York, in payment for a ride of two miles; nor do we
mourn for the numerous other dollars with which he reluctantly parted to
satisfy the rapacity of hack-drivers all over the Union. We do not
thrill with indignation, when we learn that he was, on a certain
occasion, swept by crinolines into the middle of Broadway. Neither are
we in any way stirred by such information as, that he, like an English
lord of whom he tells, was accustomed to eat oysters every night in New
York; or that he "was pervaded, permeated, steeped, and bathed in a
longing desire to behold Niagara," and that, when he beheld it, his
"feelings were not so much those of astonishment as of an overpowering
sense of Law"; or that a peddler in a railroad-car sold nine bottles of
quack medicine at a dollar a bottle; or that he had eight pages of
interview with a Baltimore madman, who proved his insanity by
perpetually calling Mr. Mackay the "Prince of the Poets of England." The
dreary solemnity with which these incidents are narrated renders them
doubly tedious. A flash of humor might enliven them, but we never see a
spark. Mr. Mackay's comic stories, too, of which there are not a few,
are most lamentable specimens of wit, suggesting forcibly the
poppy-seeds spoken of by Mr. Pillicoddy, which are soporific in
tendency, and which, if taken incessantly for a period of three weeks,
produce instant death.

Mr. Mackay's experiences were not of a startling character. He travelled
leisurely, and recorded discreetly. His blunders on a large scale are
not numerous; but of minor facts, he announces many which may be classed
among the remarkable discoveries of the season. He states that New York,
New Jersey,(!) and Brooklyn form one city; that Broadway, N.Y., is
decorated with elms, willows, and mountain-ashes, "drooping in green
beauty"; that persons with decent coats and clean shirts in Boston may
be safely put dow