delicately appreciative than can easily be found elsewhere, and it
contains more charming and affectionate things than, I should suppose,
had ever before been written about a country not the writer's own. To
say that it is an immeasurably more exquisite and sympathetic work
than any of the numerous persons who have related their misadventures
in the United States have seen fit to devote to that country, is to
say but little, and I imagine that Hawthorne had in mind the array of
English voyagers--Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss
Martineau, Mr. Grattan--when he reflected that everything is relative
and that, as such books go, his own little volume observed the
amenities of criticism. He certainly had it in mind when he wrote the
phrase in his preface relating to the impression the book might make
in England. "Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for
courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute
in the least to any mutual advantage and comfort if we were to besmear
each other all over with butter and honey." I am far from intending to
intimate that the vulgar instinct of recrimination had anything to do
with the restrictive passages of _Our Old Home_; I mean simply that
the author had a prevision that his collection of sketches would in
some particulars fail to please his English friends. He professed,
after the event, to have discovered that the English are sensitive,
and as they say of the Americans, for whose advantage I believe the
term was invented; thin-skinned. "The English critics," he wrote to
his publisher, "seem to think me very bitter against their countrymen,
and it is perhaps natural that they should, because their self-conceit
can accept nothing short of indiscriminate adulation; but I really
think that Americans have much more cause than they to complain of me.
Looking over the volume I am rather surprised to find that whenever I
draw a comparison between the two people, I almost invariably cast the
balance against ourselves." And he writes at another time:--"I
received several private letters and printed notices of _Our Old Home_
from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with which
they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity,
jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least suspicion
that there may be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of
their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimi