t if he had stood at that turning of the historic road, he would
have wished a better fate to the frame-breakers and the fury against the
first machinery, and luck to the Luddite fires.

Anyhow, what is wanted is a new Martin Chuzzlewit, told by a wiser Mark
Tapley. It is typical of something sombre and occasionally stale in the
mood of Dickens when he wrote that book, that the comic servant is not
really very comic. Mark Tapley is a very thin shadow of Sam Weller. But
if Dickens had written it in a happier mood, there might have been a
truer meaning in Mark Tapley's happiness. For it is true that this
illogical good humour amid unreason and disorder is one of the real
virtues of the English people. It is the real advantage they have in
that adventure all over the world, which they were recently and
reluctantly induced to call an Empire. That receptive ridicule remains
with them as a secret pleasure when they are colonists--or convicts.
Dickens might have written another version of the great romance, and one
in which America was really seen gaily by Mark instead of gloomily by
Martin. Mark Tapley might really have made the best of America. Then
America would have lived and danced before us like Pickwick's England, a
fairyland of happy lunatics and lovable monsters, and we might still
have sympathised as much with the rhetoric of Lafayette Kettle as with
the rhetoric of Wilkins Micawber, or with the violence of Chollop as
with the violence of Boythorn. That new Martin Chuzzlewit will never be
written; and the loss of it is more tragic than the loss of _Edwin
Drood_. But every man who has travelled in America has seen glimpses and
episodes in that untold tale; and far away on the Red-Indian frontiers
or in the hamlets in the hills of Pennsylvania, there are people whom I
met for a few hours or for a few moments, whom I none the less sincerely
like and respect because I cannot but smile as I think of them. But the
converse is also true; they have probably forgotten me; but if they
remember they laugh.

_The Spirit of America_

I suggest that diplomatists of the internationalist school should spend
some of their money on staging farces and comedies of cross-purposes,
founded on the curious and prevalent idea that England and America have
the same language. I know, of course, that we both inherit the glorious
tongue of Shakespeare, not to mention the tune of the musical glasses;
but there have been moments when I t