s a broad difference of opinion, than in"
the United States. On the 22nd of March he writes again, to Macready,
who seems to have remonstrated with him on his growing discontent: "It
is of no use, I _am_ disappointed. This is not the republic I came to
see; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a
liberal monarchy--even with its sickening accompaniment of Court
circulars--to such a government as this. The more I think of its youth
and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it
appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast,
excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor children,
it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon, and
England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and
miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison....
Freedom of opinion; where is it? I see a press more mean and paltry
and silly and disgraceful than any country I ever knew.... In the
respects of not being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by
tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably."

Extracts like these could be multiplied to any extent, and the
question arises, why did such a change come over the spirit of
Dickens? Washington Irving, at the great New York dinner, had called
him "the guest of the nation." Why was the guest so quickly
dissatisfied with his host, and quarrelling with the character of his
entertainment? Sheer physical fatigue, I think, had a good deal to do
with it. Even at Boston, before he had begun to travel over the
unending railways, water-courses, and chaotic coach-roads of the great
Republic, that key-note had been sounded. "We are already," he had
written, "weary at times, past all expression." Few men can wander
with impunity out of their own professional sphere, and undertake
duties for which they have neither the training nor acquired tastes.
Dickens was a writer, not a king; and here he was expected to hold a
king's state, and live in a king's publicity, but without the formal
etiquette that hedge a king from intruders, and make his position
tolerable. He was hemmed in by curious eyes, mobbed in the streets,
stared at in his own private rooms, interviewed by the hour, shaken by
the hand till his arm must often have been ready to drop off, waylaid
at every turn with formal addresses. If he went to church the people
crowded into the adjacent pews, and the preacher pre