Mr. Walsh,--"Robert Walsh, Junior, Esquire,"--the "American Gentleman," as he called himself in the title-page of his Dictionary,--had acknowledged, while undertaking our vindication, that our American Parnassus was barren, or fruitful only in weeds; and by common consent my countrymen had taken for the highest praise throughout the land what I regarded as at best a humiliating admission from our friends over sea. They had acknowledged, and we were base enough to feel flattered by the acknowledgment, that, although we could not even hope to write English, and were wellnigh destitute of invention, having no materials to work with, and little or no aptitude for anything but the manufacture of wooden nutmegs, horn gun-flints, and cuckoo-clocks, and being always too busy for anything better than dicker and truck in a small way,--the haberdashery of nations,--yet, after all, it might be said of us that we were capital imitators, or thieves and counterfeiters, so that our Brockden Brown was at least the American Godwin,--our Cooper, the American Scott,--our Irving, just flowering in the "Sketch-Book," the American Goldsmith or Addison,--and our Sigourney, the American Hemans. That my blood boiled in my veins, whenever I thought of this, I must acknowledge; and within three weeks, I believe, I was on my way to London, with a novel in the rough, which, after undergoing many transformations, appeared in that city as "Brother Jonathan,"--the manuscript of "Otho, a Tragedy," wholly recast and rewritten, with "_exit omnes_," and other monstrous Latin blunders corrected, and, on the whole, very much as it afterwards appeared in "The Yankee,"--and heaps of letters, which I could not well afford to deliver, and therefore threw into the fire: leaving my law business to take care of itself, somewhat after the fashion of that Revolutionary volunteer, "Old Put," who, when he heard the sound of a trumpet and knew the lists were opened, left his plough in the furrow, and the cattle standing in the field. My law-library, and the building I occupied, I passed over to the care of a young man of great promise, just entering the profession, who not only burned up my supply of wood for the year, but failed to pay the rent, and then took the liberty of dying suddenly, poor fellow! without a word of notice to my landlord: so that I was fairly adrift. On arriving in London, I took lodgings in Warwick Street, Pall Mall, introduced to the landlady by Leslie the painter, and occupying the very chambers where Washington Irving was delivered of the "Sketch-Book": my windows on the first floor looking out on the back entrance of Carlton House, by which the Princess Charlotte had escaped not long before, when she ran away from her father, as my landlady took care to inform me; adding, that, from the very window where we stood, she had seen the little madcap get into the carriage--a common hack, by the way--and go off at full speed.