a democracy, therefore Dickens will admire and love us, and see how
immeasurably superior we are to the retrograde Britishers of his
native land." But unfortunately Dickens showed no signs of being
impressed in that particular way. On the contrary, as we have seen,
such comparison as he made in his own mind was infinitely to the
disadvantage of the United States. "We must be cracked up," says
Hannibal Chollop, in "Martin Chuzzlewit," speaking of his fellow
countrymen. And Dickens, even while feted and honoured, would not
"crack up" the Americans. He lectured them almost with truculence on
their sins in the matter of copyright; he could scarcely be restrained
from testifying against slavery; he was not the man to say he liked
manners and customs which he loathed. Jonathan must have been very
doubtfully satisfied with his guest.

It is no part of my purpose to follow Dickens lingeringly, and step by
step, from the day when he landed at Halifax, to the 7th of June, when
he re-embarked at New York for England. From Boston he went to New
York, where the great dinner was given with Washington Irving in the
chair, and thence to Philadelphia and Washington,--which was still the
empty "city of magnificent distances," that Mr. Goldwin Smith declares
it has now ceased to be;--and thence again westward, and by Niagara
and Canada back to New York. And if any persons want to know what he
thought about these and other places, and the railway travelling, and
the coach travelling, and the steamboat travelling, and the prisons
and other public institutions--aye, and many other things besides,
they cannot do better than read the "American Notes for general
circulation," which he wrote and published within the year after his
return. Nor need such persons be deterred by the fact that Macaulay
thought meanly of the book; for Macaulay, with all his great gifts,
did not, as he himself knew full well, excel in purely literary
criticism. So when he pronounces, that "what is meant to be easy and
sprightly is vulgar and flippant," and "what is meant to be fine is a
great deal too fine for me, as the description of the Falls of
Niagara," one can venture to differ without too great a pang. The
book, though not assuredly one of Dickens' best, contains admirable
passages which none but he could have written, and the description of
Niagara is noticeably fine, the sublimity of the subject being
remembered, as a piece of impassioned prose. Whether sati