ay to acknowledge the arrival of your Book. It
came ten or eleven days ago, in the "Britannia," with the three
letters of different dates announcing it.--I have read the
superfluous hundred pages of manuscript, and find it only too
popular. Beside its abundance of brilliant points and proverbs,
there is a deep, steady tide taking in, either by hope or by
fear, all the great classes of society,--and the philosophic
minority also, by the powerful lights which are shed on the
phenomenon. It is true contemporary history, which other books
are not, and you have fairly set solid London city aloft, afloat
in bright mirage in the air. I quarrel only with the popular
assumption, which is perhaps a condition of the Humor itself,
that the state of society is a new state, and was not the same
thing in the days of Rabelais and of Aristophanes, as of Carlyle.
Orators always allow something to masses, out of love to their
own art, whilst austere philosophy will only know the particles.
This were of no importance, if the historian did not so come to
mix himself in some manner with his erring and grieving nations,
and so saddens the picture; for health is always private and
original, and its essence is in its unmixableness.--But this
Book, with all its affluence of wit, of insight, and of daring
hints, is born for a longevity which I will not now compute.--In
one respect, as I hinted above, it is only too good, so sure of
success, I mean, that you are no longer secure of any respect to
your property in our freebooting America.

You must know that the cheap press has, within a few months, made
a total change in our book markets. Every English book of any
name or credit is instantly converted into a newspaper or coarse
pamphlet, and hawked by a hundred boys in the streets of all of
our cities for 25, 18, or 12 cents; Dickens's Notes for 12
cents, _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 18 cents, and so on. Three or
four great New York and Philadelphia printing-houses do this
work, with hot competition. One prints Bulwer's novel yesterday,
for 35 cents; and already, in twenty-four hours, another has a
coarser edition of it for 18 cents, in all thoroughfares.--What
to do with my sealed parcel of manuscripts and proofs? No
bookseller would in these perilous circumstances offer a dollar
for my precious parcel. I inquired of the lawyers whether I
could not by a copyright protect my edition from piracy until an
English copy arrived, and so se