no public body, bound to no
party, a "Deputation sent by himself,"--he was completely free and
independent in thought and action, and enjoyed advantages for
observation which do not often meet.

It was natural that he should wish to tell his friends in Great
Britain, and in the West Indies, what he had seen and heard. To
denounce what is evil and to commend what is good is at all times
gratifying; in doing which, he sought to describe the men and the
manners of America just as they appeared to him.

Several letters, containing the narrative of a few days spent in New
Orleans, appeared in the _Patriot_. Their favourable reception by the
readers of that journal led to the preparation of the present volume,
in which the letters referred to, having undergone a careful revision,
re-appear, followed by nearly thirty others descriptive of the Author's
tour.

Our Transatlantic friends are morbidly sensitive as to the strictures
of strangers. They hate the whole tribe of Travellers and Tourists,
Roamers and Ramblers, Peepers and Proclaimers, and affect to ridicule
the idea of men who merely pass through the country, presuming to give
opinions on things which it is alleged so cursory a view cannot qualify
them fully to understand. Our cousins have, doubtless, had occasional
provocations from the detested race in question; but their feeling on
this point amounts to a national weakness. It is always worth knowing
how we appear to the eyes of others, and what impression the first
sight of us is apt to produce; and this knowledge none can communicate
but the stranger, the tourist, the passer-by. What faults and failings
soever we may have in England, and their "name is legion," by all means
let them be unsparingly exposed by every foreign tourist that treads
upon our soil. Let us be satirized, ridiculed, laughed at, caricatured,
anything, so that we may be shamed out of all that is absurd and
vicious in our habits and customs. In the present instance our Western
kinsmen are described by one, if they will believe his own testimony,
of the most candid and truthful of travellers,--one who has viewed them
and all their institutions, except _one_, with the most friendly eye,
and who deeply regrets that so much of what is lovely and of good
report should be marred and blotted by so much of what is disgraceful
to a great and enlightened people.

As to the performance in a literary point of view, the Author will say
nothing. The public