Would not the ghost of Sir Walter shudder in his grave at the thought of the fair creations of his mind--Jeanie Deans and Rebecca--Yankeefied into women of Long Island, or damsels from Connecticut? Is Childe Harold to be a Kentucky-man? and are the vivid pictures of life Bulwer's novels abound in, to be converted into the prison-discipline school of manners, that prevail in New York and Boston, where, as Hamilton remarks, “the men are about as like gentlemen, as are our new police?” What should we say of the person who having stolen a Rembrandt or a Vandyke from its owner, would seek to legalise his theft by daubing over the picture with his own colours--obliterating every trace of the great master, and exulting that every stroke of his brush defaced some touch of genius, and that beneath the savage vandalism of his act, every lineament of the artist was obliterated? I ask you, would not mere robbery be a virtue beside such a deed as this? Who could compare the sinful promptings to which want and starvation give birth to, to the ruffian profligacy of such barbarity? And now, when I tell you, that not content with this, not satisfied to desecrate the work, the wretch goes a step farther and stabs its author--what shall I say of him now, who, when he had defaced the picture, marred every effect, distorted all drawing, and rendered the whole a chaotic mass of indistinguishable nonsense, goes forth to the world, and announces, “This is a Rembrandt, this is a Vandyke: ay, look at it and wonder: but with all its faults, and all its demerits, it is cried up above our native artists; it has got the seal of the old world's approval upon it, and in vain we of younger origin shall dare to dissent from its judgments.” Now, once more, I say, can you show the equal of this moral turpitude? and such I pledge myself is the conduct of your transatlantic pirates with respect to British literature. Mr. Dickens, no mean authority, asserts that in the same sheet in which they boast the sale of many thousand copies of an English reprint, they coarsely attack the author of that very book, and heap scurrility and slander on his head. Yes, such is the fact; not satisfied with robbery, they murder reputation also. And then we find them expatiating in most moving terms over the superiority of their own neglected genius! A NUT FOR THE SEASON--JULLIEN'S QUADRILLES. [Illustration: 184]