L.L, fubbard Gift 1-13-27

PREFACE.

On receiving the following " Tour," we thought of publishing notes to it, showing where and how the worthy traveller had been misled; but after having written these notes, we thought that it would be a pity to print them, as it would deprive the reader of a very great treat, Grant Thorburn's celebrity being undoubtedly caused by his absurdity. We therefore have published it as written by him, without correction of any kind on our part, merely submitting the following as as a sort of introduction and preface.

Letter from a Scots Gentleman in NEW YORK, to the Editor.

MY DEAR SIR,

NEW YORK, 2d January, 1835.

I send you herewith what I am certain you will agree with me in thinking a great literary curiosity, viz. a Tome by the redoubted Grant Thorburn, which

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has just appeared in our good city, entitled, " Men and Manners in Britain, or, a Bone to Gnaw for the Trollopes, Fidlers, &c."

It is Johnson, I think, who observes, that a most entertaining volume might be made of the sayings and doings of a savage taken suddenly from his desert, and turned loose at once on civilized society: and the justness of the remark is fully borne out by the work in question. A more complete savage, (I use the word in contra-position to the humanities of cultivated life,) than Grant Thorburn, or a more amusing morceau than the record of his journeyings, never fell under my observation.

Our author, as you are doubtless aware, emigrated when a lad from his native country of Scotland to America, where by a dogged, cheese-pairing industry in the vending of old iron, and garden seeds, he has contrived to realize a considerable fortune. His whole life has been spent behind the counter-and his ideas, in their most extensive rambles, have never penetrated beyond its limits. It has been said of the poet of the Seasons, that so completely was his mind imbued with the poetic feeling, that even a candle appeared to him in a poetical light. In like manner it may be said of Grant Thorburn, that he can see nothing but in reference to the shop. This furnishes a satisfactory key to the spirit in which he frequently speaks of his

patria nativa." What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba." He evidently set forth on his expedition with this sorites:-" My customers are Yankees-I must please my customers,—the Yankees are jealous of the superior breeding and refinement of the old country: argal, I must cut my cloth accordingly." Hence, if you find him frequently an American in the spirit of his remarks, do not uncharitably brand him as an unpatriotic apostate-he is merely a prudent tradesman looking after the mystical and all-important Number One-that most engrossing of all the figures in the mercantile multiplication table.

If you knew the man as well as I do, his portraitures of your fashionable life would afford you infinite amusement. There is something exquisitely ludicrous in the contrast between the subject and the dissertator. Denned in the murky recesses of his store, for the best part of half a century-his most select society a few "snuffling," "plugging," venders of "notions"-and the extent of his reading, the Newgate Calender, and the Daily Prices Current, he sallies. forth with the comfortable self sufficiency of " P. P. Clerk of this Parish," to give his adopted countrymen an idea of "Men and Manners" on your side of the herring pond; a task for which he is as much qualified as a blind man is to lecture on the nature and combinations of colours. The dwarfish shopkeeper knows

as much of good society even on our side of the Atlantic, as a bull in a china shop of the vases which its hoofs are demolishing: so you can imagine his competency to dilate on the manners of "the old country." Hence, you are continually meeting with some amusing absurdity; and were it not that the word "Britain" is imprinted on the title page, you might be apt to imagine sometimes that the country which he describes, is some barbarous terra incognita.

You recollect the old story of a pedantic traveller, who having seen on his first entrance into a country a female scolding, and a son of Mercury picking a pocket, wrote down,-" In this place all the women are shrews, and the men thieves." In like manner, friend Grant having encountered on his entrée to the metropolis, a horse-couper's trull on the coach box of a livery stables' Break, along with her fancy dragsman, records, that in London the ladies ride on the outside of their carriages along with the drivers. The

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lady," of course, would be showily dressed; and gaudy colours being our Daniel's criterion of high life, down goes the dictum, and the ladies of America shudder at the Amazonian habits of their transatlantic sisters. This is but one instance out of a hundred of the chronicler's fitness for the task which he has undertaken. Oh! that in this age of the cacoethes scribendi,