The Diary gives some significant glimpses of Charles Dickens in America. In 1842 New York welcomed the Englishman riotously. Washington laughed at New York for doing too much and went to the other extreme. John Quincy Adams gave the Dickenses a dinner at which Hone was a guest. "Some clever people were invited to meet them" is the way the ingenuous Hone puts it. "They" (Dickens and Mrs. Dickens) "came, he in a frock-coat, and she in her bonnet. They sat at table until four o'clock, when he said: 'Dear, it is time for us to go home and dress for dinner.' They were engaged to dine with Robert Greenhow at the fashionable hour of half-past five! A most particularly funny idea to leave the table of John Quincy Adams to dress for a dinner at Robert Greenhow's!" Hone referred to the visitors as "The Boz and Bozess," and described the author of "Pickwick" as "a small, bright-eyed, intelligent-looking young fellow, thirty years of age, somewhat of a dandy in his dress, with 'rings and things and fine array,' brisk in his manner, and of a lively conversation"; and Mrs. Dickens as "a little, fat, English-looking woman, of an agreeable countenance, and, I should think, 'a nice person.'" Dickens was not the only British author of those days to kindle the flames of American resentment. Almost all who came to our shores seemed to possess the faculty of "getting a rise" out of Yankee sensibilities. Captain Marryat was one of the offenders. At a dinner in Toronto he gave an injudicious toast. Thereupon the town of Lewistown, Maine, built a huge bonfire on the shore directly opposite Queenstown and destroyed all the "Midshipman Easys," "Peter Simples," "Japhets," and "Jacob Faithfuls" that could be obtained. Hone commented sensibly on the affair in his Diary for May 5, 1838. "Captain Marryat, I dare say, made a fool of himself (not a very difficult task, I should judge, from what I have seen of him); but the Lewistownians have beaten him all to smash, as the Kentuckians say. How mortified he must have been to hear that his books had been burned after they were paid for!" A year before Marryat had dined at the Hone house in New York and the host wrote: "The lion, Captain Marryat, is no great things of a lion, after all. In truth, the author of 'Peter Simple' and 'Jacob Faithful' is a very every-day sort of a man. He carries about him in his manner and conversation more of the sailor than the author, has nothing student-like in his appearance, and savours more of the binnacle lamp than of the study." And again, six months after the Lewistown flare-up: "It would have been better for both parties if the sailor author had been known on this side of the Atlantic only by his writings ... he has evidently not enjoyed the benefits of refined society, or intercourse with people of literary talents."