beggars in the streets? But, alas, that rosy dawn ended, as rosy dawns sometimes will, in sleet and mist and very dirty weather. Before many weeks, before many days had flown, Dickens was writing in a very different spirit. On the 24th of February, in the midst of a perfect ovation of balls and dinners, he writes "with reluctance, disappointment, and sorrow," that "there is no country on the face of the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion, than in" the United States. On the 22nd of March he writes again, to Macready, who seems to have remonstrated with him on his growing discontent: "It is of no use, I _am_ disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy--even with its sickening accompaniment of Court circulars--to such a government as this. The more I think of its youth and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast, excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor children, it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon, and England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison.... Freedom of opinion; where is it? I see a press more mean and paltry and silly and disgraceful than any country I ever knew.... In the respects of not being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably."