FROM BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

AMERICA AND ENGLAND.

We have just read the last North American Review, which contains a most pungent paper, in reply to the article in the Quarterly on Faux's Days in America. Our readers will recollect, that we had expressed our opinion pretty distinctly on the nature and tendency of that review. It was too heavy, and too much in earnest, for a mere jeu-d'esprit, though it did contain some clever writing, and some good hits; and if it were meant as a serious picture of America, we objected, that the authority of a self-conceited, ignorant, under-bred provincial clown, who evidently knew nothing of good manners anywhere, and never could have been as far as the vestibule of decent society, was not the authority to be relied on for its truth or accuracy; and even if he were, that the extracts made, and the inferences drawn, were more conspicuous for garbling and ill-nature, than fairness and impartiality.

So far we agree with the American critic, who takes it for granted, that it proceeded from the pen of Mr. Gifford. What his authority for so saying may be, we, who are nearer the spot, and, as he will readily concede, more likely to be in such secrets, cannot determine; but indeed the question is of little consequence from whose pen it may have proceeded. Whoever the author is, if he really should entertain malevolent feelings against America, he must be abundantly gratified by the effect it has produced. Expertis crede, Mr. American Reviewer, nothing can give a writer of severe articles more solid satisfaction than to find that his hits have told; and your horrible clamour under the infliction proves that this facer of old Gifford's has done its business in no common degree. Let us calmly inquire whether such a thing ought to have had any such effect. Let us dispassionately examine whether any article in the Quarterly Review, or elsewhere, of the kind complained of, should produce such magnanimous denunciations of national fury as threats of retaliatory exposure of our sins, negligences, and offences, or angry hints that a repetition of Quarterly Reviewings of American manners will "turn into bitterness the last drop of good will toward England that exists in the United States."

As we mean to treat the question on a broad basis, we shall excuse ourselves from going through the particular review which has called forth this heat; we know the spirit which has given offence, and to it shall we look. The Americans complain that our travellers misrepresent them, by describing or exaggerating the scenes of low life which they witness in their progress-that our journals, of all shapes and sizes, make ridiculous or angry comments on these and similar details-that we pay not sufficient respect to their literature-and that from several among us their legislature, government, and administration of justice, do not meet the veneration

with which these things, as a sort of matter of faith, are regarded on the other side of the Atlantic. We have, we believe, summed up every thing, which has hitherto been made a subject of American complaint, in this enumeration. Let us take them seriatim.

It is made, then, matter of mortal offence, that tourists, who go to visit America, complain of bad roads, promiscuous inns, intruding companions, bundling three in a bed, being bitten by musquitoes;of smoky log-huts, swamps in certain places, and other such disagreeables. Others are annoyed by uncivil servants, vapouring associates, insolence to Great Britain, and extravagant laudations of the honour, liberty, and glory of the Union. Some of a higher mood complain of the existence of slavery in several States, and its accompanying evils-of the practice of such associations as regulators of the want of decorum in courts of justice-or of the jobbery of government, real or imputed. Why should the Americans wonder at these complaints? In thinly-peopled countries like theirs, roads will occasionally be bad, and inns indifferent. In States governed as theirs, men will be found who will think impertinence is freedom, and reviling other countries doing their own country honour. In climates like theirs, there will be musquitoes, and yellow fevers, and swamps, in spite of the most wise provisions to the contrary. Is, then, the mouth of a traveller going among them to be gagged? Must he see every thing white or golden, without tint of darker colour, or alloy of baser metal? With respect to the pictures of grossness of habits or conversation, we should suppose no one but a habitual inmate of grog-shops imagines that these pictures, be they caricatures or real portraits of the steamboat, or mail-coach, or country tavern manners, are intended to represent the manners of American ladies and gentlemen. Far from it, indeed. But must a man, who, as a traveller, must of necessity mix in their circles, who must dine at an ordinary with the casual company there collected, and voyage or drive about with those who make up the stray frequenters of public vehicles, hold his tongue on what is passing about him? Is not this sort of life worth description? We should wonder if a democratical writer wished us to display only the Corinthian capital to view.

Let us recommend the Americans, who feel sore on this subject, to read all tours by all writers through countries foreign to them. Is there any concealment of the sorry fare, the garlicked dishes, the filthy rooms, the absence of bed, the swarming of vermin, the importance of the landlord, in descriptions given by travellers of all nations of a Spanish venta or posada? Do we sink in silence the awkward diligence of the French; the obstinate postmaster of the Germans; the various abominations of travelling in Italy? Are our tourists more complimentary to the dominions of the autocrat Alexander, than to those of the democrat Jonathan? Or, to turn the picture, do foreign tourists pay us any uncalled-for compliments in their accounts of England? But, not to talk of foreigners, we beg the testy Americans to read our accounts of

ourselves. If any inconvenience-no matter how petty-were to happen to any of us on our own roads, and that we were tourwriting, we can assure our transatlantic neighbours it would not be kept a secret. Nor are we very courteous in laughing at the vulgarities, fooleries, impertinences, and provincialisms of the good people of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Our popular plays and novels, to say nothing of our newspapers, teem with jokes against Englishmen as coarse as the coarsest here complained of. And when we speak of the derision heaped on provincialism, it is evident that we take that word in a very broad meaning indeed; for we doubt if any of the provinces has been so much the object of quizzing for its peculiarities as the shire of Cockaigne itself,— the very dominions within sound of Bow-bell.

Suppose an American coming into England with the intention of writing his personal adventures, would we have any right to complain that he described our faults as he found them? We might question the good sense or good taste which dictated such an intention; but, it being once formed, and its propriety admitted, we should be fools indeed if we were angry at his informing us, that some particular lines of road were bad-that at some inns he drank sloe-juice and logwood water for port-that his coach broke down through the negligence of a driver-that he took a bad half crown, or a forged five pound note--that he occasionally met a saucy coachman, or disagreeable companion-that the conversation of the Glasgow mail was not classic-that he sometimes heard people talking slang, or fell in with an ultra Tory, who would see no blot, or a Whig, who could see nothing bright, in England. Would we be angry, we repeat, at this? In good truth we should not; for, to our own particular knowledge, every one of these adventures might happen, and, in all probability, do happen, every day. We should be inclined to laugh, however, if this valuable information were passed off as a picture of England. More may be said in favour of the describer of personal adventures in America, than of one who would do the same for this or any long civilized and organized country. Here, the peculiarities that render such things piquant being almost entirely out of the line of the upper ranks of society, they are much more the objects of domestic than of foreign inquiry; there, where society is not so established, it becomes an object of curiosity, innocent if not laudable, to examine how its different branches work upon one another in all classes. A foreigner here is not known as a foreigner, except we suppose to Mr. Peel; if he pays his bills, he makes his way through the country as easily and with as little observation as one of ourselves. In America he is distinguished in a moment; and there exists a desire to show off before him, which makes some difference. We own, however, that we should wish to see a gentleman travelling through the United States, mixing with gentlemen-entering into their views and their manners-and thereby affording us a book in which the usual company of "guess

ers," and "calculators," and "slick-right-away" people should not make their appearance at all. Such fellows, as Faux, of course, are here out of the question.

Perhaps we have said too much about tourists; but it is, we know, a subject which has been made of great importance in America. Before we leave it entirely we must urge, that we are xar' ¿ox, a nation of travellers; no other people whatever being so decidedly addicted to it as ourselves. At home, we have brought the art of moving about from one corner of our island to the other to a high degree of excellence; and if we wish to display the difference of foreign manners, we must do it by disparagement in many instances. To the man who has been all his life bowling away on the Bristol or Liverpool road, it is information, that there are such things as the paths across the Alleghany. To him who can get his five shillings laid out at a tavern in any way he pleases, it is a piece of novelty to be informed, that in parts of America, customs-no matter whether they be worse or better--exist, which render it imperative on him to dine with landlords whom he knows not, and at hours which he does not prefer, or to sleep in a fashion which is to him quite disagreeable. Sydney Smith, who is now almost doting, but yet continues to drivel away in the Edinburgh Review, accuses us of sulkiness for entertaining such wishes. may be so; but there is still a liberty in being allowed to be sulky if we like, and certainly no reason in the world for concealing the fact, that we cannot have our own way-wise or foolish—in America, as we have at home.

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If we turn from travellers to critics on American literature, we shall find that Americans have, in this particular, no just reason to quarrel with us as a nation. We say most truly, that America has not hitherto produced great writers. Is not this a fact? would better become those who lose their temper about it to endeavour to amend it. In this magazine, more than five years ago, a young American gentleman, an honour to his native land, gave very fair reasons for the deficiency of Americans in this respect. After going minutely through the whole question of education in the States, he came to conclusions, which we shall copy-" First, That classical learning is there generally undervalued, and of course neglected. Secondly, That knowledge of any kind is regarded only as a requisite preparation for the intended vocation in life, and not cultivated as a source of enjoyment, or a means of refining the character; and thirdly, That the demand for active talent is so great, and the reward so tempting, as invariably to draw it away from retired study, and the cultivation of letters. is not, therefore, to be expected, that she will very soon produce any critical classical scholars, or great poets, or superior dramatic writers, or fine works of fiction; in a word, any extraordinary productions of learning or taste."--[Blackwood's Magazine, March, 1819, Vol. IV. p. 649.] These are good reasons for the inferiority of American literature; besides, there is no need of a

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native supply, while they are sure of being fully furnished by us from abroad. But even if writers were as plenty as blackberries, he must be Utopian indeed who would expect them to get quarter from our critics on any ground of birth, foreign or domestic. We do not spare our own. In the number of the American Review preceding this which is calling forth our remarks, there was a very good and sound paper on Wordsworth, in which the reviewer speaks with due contempt of the base manner in which that great man was treated by Jeffrey and his crew. And does he then expect that Tim Dwight, and M Fingal Turnbull, and such worthies, are to be lauded? It is too absurd. Let him look at our own literary quarrels, and he will find that we are much more bitter on one another than on any strangers, and that nationality has nothing to do with what Dr. Southey, before he turned reviewer himself, called the "ungentle trade" of reviewing. Let America put forth a great writer, and he will find us ready to bow down before his power, or to melt in his tenderness.

Strictures on the slave-trade, as carried on in the States, form another kind of our abuse of America. This, the Americans should consider, is not so much a national as a sectarian question. Her own bosom comprehends whole sects as ready to denounce her as any body among us. The slave question, we are aware, is a ticklish one, and not to be attacked by the ignorant hands of sciolists, or the reckless hands of fanatics-but they who clamoured against the slave-trade here, must have learned to clamour against it there also; and we must add, that the juxtaposition of eternal bawling about the inalienable rights of man with the whole system of negro slavery, particularly in some of its practical branches, is, to say the least of it, open to a smile, if not to some more serious animadversions. True it is, that much misrepresentation exists as to the treatment of slaves in the United States, and we leave to their infinite contempt, the Edinburgh reviewers and their disinterested indignation on such a subject. People, even though the Atlantic rolls between, are not ignorant of the honest Whig notion which lies at the bottom of such philanthropy; but let them not imagine that the question, such as it is, is one between the two nations.

There remain to be considered our calumnies on the judges, judicatures, legislatures, &c. of America. It cannot be denied that there are very queer political parties, and very queer judicial people, in the back settlements of America; and it is not to be expected that it should be otherwise. Strange judges also exist in almost every part of the country. Must not they be mentioned? Do we exercise the same forbearance with respect to our own justices of the peace? And should the Americans think their character as a nation is more compromised by such pictures, than the English character was when the Justices Greedy, and Guttle, and Shallow, were the standing patterns of administrators of law over England? As long as economy is the order of the day in the States, so long they may depend upon it that they will every now VOL. VI. No. 31.-Museum.

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