resurrection would hardly be a more disagreeable surprise to that eminent biographer, than was the sudden appearance to me of my own unambitious Letters in the Quarterly Review. "The reader will see (for every Letter containing the least personal detail has been most industriously republished in the English papers) that I have in some slight measure corrected these Pencillings by the Way. They were literally what they were styled--notes written on the road, and despatched without a second perusal; and it would be extraordinary if, between the liberty I felt with my material, and the haste in which I scribbled, some egregious errors in judgment and taste had not crept in unawares. The Quarterly has made a long arm over the water to refresh my memory on this point. There _are_ passages I would not re-write, and some remarks on individuals which I would recall at some cost, and would not willingly see repeated in these volumes. Having conceded thus much, however, I may express my surprise that this particular sin should have been visited upon _me_, at a distance of three thousand miles, when the reviewer's own literary fame rests on the more aggravated instance of a book of personalities, published under the very noses of the persons described. Those of my Letters which date from England were written within three or four months of my first arrival in this country. Fortunate in my introductions, almost embarrassed with kindness, and, from advantages of comparison, gained by long travel, qualified to appreciate keenly the delights of English society, I was little disposed to find fault. Everything pleased me. Yet in one instance--one single instance--I indulged myself in stricture upon individual character, and I _repeat it in this work_, sure that there will be but one person in the world of letters who will not read it with approbation--the editor of the _Quarterly_ himself. It was expressed at the time with no personal feeling, for I had never seen the individual concerned, and my name had probably never reached his ears. I but repeated what I had said a thousand times, and never without an indignant echo to its truth--an opinion formed from the most dispassionate perusal of his writings--that the editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic of his age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, we owe to the _Quarterly_, it is well known, every spark of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious epithets of this bravo in literature, have been received in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the English people, and an animosity for which there was no other reason, has been thus periodically fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man--I _know_ it is my duty as an American--to lose no opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this reptile of criticism."