We shall now proceed, as briefly as possible, to make some observations of a critical nature upon the intellectual and moral character of the American press generally. It is not, certainly, in any spirit of national superiority that we point to the undoubted fact that, notwithstanding the great expansion of newspaper literature in the States, the wide diffusion of popular education, and the circulation of English books of the best kind at a mere nominal cost, the Americans have as yet produced nothing representatively like our London _Times_, or _Punch_, or the _Athenæum_, or the _Illustrated London News_, or the _Saturday Review_, or the _Art Journal_, or the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_. They have not even produced a single great newspaper writer like Captain Stirling, of the _Times_, Albany Fonblanque, sen., of the _Examiner_, or Hugh Miller, of the _Edinburgh Witness_, for Bennett, Greeley, and Raymond, though capital editors, are all greatly inferior to these men in that art of scholarly, dignified, and tasteful leader-writing, which gives such a power and charm to London journalism. Newspaper writing is, perhaps, the most difficult of all writing; there is none at least in which excellence is so rarely attained. The capacity of bringing widely-scattered information into a focus, of drawing just conclusions from well-selected facts, of amplifying, compressing, illustrating a succession of topics, all on the spur of the moment, without a moment's stay to examine or revise, argues great intellectual cultivation. The articles may not be of a lofty order, or demand for their execution the very highest kind of talent, but the power of accomplishing it with success is very uncommon, and of all the varieties of ways in which incompetency is manifested, an irrepressible tendency to fine writing is associated with the greater number of them. De Tocqueville says that democratic journalism has a strong tendency to be virulent in spirit and bombastic in style. It certainly runs the risk of lawlessness, inaccuracy, and irreverence, with much of vehemence, and with little taste, imagination, or profundity. One serious charge we have to bring against the American newspapers is, that they have sorely vulgarized and vitiated the English language. We are aware that many of them imagine the language of their country to be the standard as to idiom, pronunciation, and spelling, and any English variation from their golden rule as erroneous and heterodox; but such critics are entitled to no consideration whatever. If men of education at the American press refuse to study the style of the great authors who fixed and purified the language of our common forefathers, so that we may have one and not two languages spoken on opposite sides of the Atlantic, let them at least imitate such writers of their own as Washington Irving, Horace Bushnell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose pure and