er of these countries for the amusement of the other; and we have
not the smallest doubt that the appearance of such a writer as we have
had the good fortune to introduce will henceforth operate as a salutary
check both on the chatterers of the 'Westminster Review' and the
growlers of the 'Quarterly.'"

Entertaining the opinions I have stated with regard to Mr. Bentham and
his labors, and being well aware that his early writings in English (the
"Fragment on Government," for example, wherein, at the age of
twenty-eight, he enters the lists with Blackstone so successfully, and
the "Defence of Usury," an argument not only unanswered, but
unanswerable, to this day) were such models of clearness, strength, and
precision, and so remarkable for a transparent beauty of style, that the
first was attributed to Lord Mansfield, and the last to others of like
reputation; while some of his earlier pamphlets (like that which is
entitled "Emancipate your Colonies," being an address to the National
Assembly of France, whose predecessors had made him a French citizen, or
the "Draught of a Code for the Organization of the Judicial
Establishment of France," written at the age of two-and-forty) were
quite as remarkable for genius, warmth, manly strength, and a lofty
eloquence, as the earlier writings mentioned were for clearness and
logical precision,--how could I be guilty of such irreverence, not to
say impertinence?

My answer is, that the believers in "Blackwood," having been pampered so
long on highly seasoned, fiery pap, to which the lines of M. G. Lewis
might often be applied,--

"And this juice of hell,
Wherever it fell,
To a cinder burned the floor,"--

were not ready for the whole truth, for the strong meat, much less for
the lion's meat I should have been delighted to serve them with; and
so, as in the case of Leigh Hunt and some others eminently obnoxious to
that journal, I slipped in the few words I have quoted _incidentally_,
as a sort of entering wedge: and the result in both cases, I must
acknowledge, fully justified my expectations; for neither Mr. Bentham
nor Leigh Hunt was ever unhandsomely treated or in any way disparaged by
that journal from that time forward, so far as I know.

Let me add, that I did this for the same reason that I began writing
about our country, and about the institutions, the people, the
literature, and the fine arts of America, as if I were an
Englishman,--for otherwise what