ickens, and a host
of others, must be converted into the garbage of St. Giles, or the
foetid slang of Wapping, before they can pass muster before an American
public? Must the book reek of "gin twist," "cock tail," and fifty
other abominations, ere it reach an American drawing-room? Must the
"bowie-knife and the whittling-stick" mark its pages; and the coarse
jest of some tobacco-chewing, wild-cat-whipping penny-a-liner
disfigure and sully the passages impressed with the glowing brilliancy
of Scott, or the impetuous torrent of Byron's genius? Is this a true
picture of America? Is her reading public indeed degraded to this
pass? I certainly have few sympathies with brother Jonathan. I like
not his spirit of boastful insolence, his rude speech, or his
uncultivated habits; but I confess I am unwilling to credit this. I
hesitate to believe in such an amount of intellectual depravity as can
turn from the cultivated writings of Scott and Bulwer to revel in the
coarseness and vulgarity of a Yankee editor, vamping up his stolen
wares with oaths from the far west, or vapid jests from life in the
Prairies. Again, what shall I say of those who follow this traffic? Is
it not enough to steal that which is not theirs, to possess themselves
of what they have no right or claim to? Must they mangle the corpse
when they have extinguished life? Must they, while they cheat the
author of his gain, rob him also of his fair fame? "He who steals my
purse steals trash," but how shall I characterise that extent of
baseness that dares to step in between an author and his
reputation--inserting between him and posterity their own illiterate
degeneracy and insufferable stupidity?

Would not the ghost of Sir Walter shudder in his grave at the thought
of the fair creations of his mind--Jeanie Deans and Rebecca--Yankeefied
into women of Long Island, or damsels from Connecticut? Is Childe
Harold to be a Kentucky-man? and are the vivid pictures of life
Bulwer's novels abound in, to be converted into the prison-discipline
school of manners, that prevail in New York and Boston, where, as
Hamilton remarks, "the men are about as like gentlemen, as are our new
police?" What should we say of the person who having stolen a
Rembrandt or a Vandyke from its owner, would seek to legalise his
theft by daubing over the picture with his own colours--obliterating
every trace of the great master, and exulting that every stroke of his
brush defaced some touch of genius,