My present business is with the Yankee declaration, that English authors to be readable in America must be passed through the ordeal of re-writing. I scarcely think that the annals of impertinence and ignorance could equal this. What! is it seriously meant that Scott and Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Rogers, Bulwer, James, Dickens, 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, wildcat-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?