I intended to have spoken to you of many other works which have pleased me; but I really at this moment experience the strangest sort of embarrassment imaginable in referring to them. Many agreeable new books are lying about before me; but while my head is so full of Lamartine and the Holy Land, everything seems to produce on me the effect of platitude and littleness. I must, however, conquer this so far as to tell you that you ought to read both Tocqueville and Beaumont on the United States. By the way, I am assured that the Americans declare themselves determined to change their line of conduct altogether respecting the national manner of receiving European sketches of themselves. This new law is to embrace three clauses. The first will enforce the total exclusion, from henceforth and for evermore, of all European strangers from their American homes; the second will recommend that all citizens shall abstain from reading anything, in any language written, or about to be written, concerning them and their affairs; and the third, in case the other two should fail, seems to take the form of a vow, protesting that they never will storm, rave, scold, or care about anything that anybody can say of them more. If this passes during the presidentship of General Jackson, it will immortalize his reign more than paying off the national debt. Having thus, somehow or other, slipped from the Holy Land to the United States of America, I feel sufficiently subdued in spirit to speak of lesser things than Lamartine's "Pilgrimage." On one point, indeed, a sense of justice urges me, when on the subject of modern productions, to warn you against the error of supposing that all the new theatrical pieces, which come forth here as rapidly and as brilliantly as the blossoms of the gum cistus, and which fade almost as soon, are of the nature and tendency of those I have mentioned as belonging to the Victor Hugo school. On the contrary, I have seen many, and read more, of these little comedies and vaudevilles, which are not only free from every imputation of mischief, but absolutely perfect in their kind. The person whose name is celebrated far above all others for this species of composition, is M. Scribe; and were it not that his extraordinary facility enables him to pour forth these pretty trifles in such abundance as already to have assured him a very large fortune, which offers an excellent excuse in these _positif_ times for him, I should say that he would have done better had he written less.