"I have said a good deal more than I intended to, as to what things have struck me as defects in your work. Its excellences I need not take up your time with dwelling upon. With all the power, interest, and originality, I regret most exceedingly, that, in its present state, I would most earnestly advise you not to publish. It would be doing yourself the greatest injustice. I feel perfectly confident, however, that, with such materials as these, you could make a glorious book, if you would set about it again in the proper way. I do not think it would cost you much trouble, provided that the thing were to strike you." By way of postscript, he adds,-- "I received your parcel, with No. 3 of the American Writers, and the critique on Cadell's American work. Are you not giving us too much of the _Vitae Virum Obscurorum_? There is a danger of palling the public with too much even of a very good thing. This, too, terrifies me at the length of your critique, as we have had so many American articles lately. It is, in fact, as you say, a work, not an article. However, we shall see what can be done." The critique here referred to was a review of a book entitled "Summary View of America," and published by Cadell, who was also the London publisher for Blackwood. It was full of dangerous, though somewhat plausible errors, and mischievous, though perhaps unintentional, misrepresentations of our whole political and social system. I did not spare the book, nor the author, nor the publisher; and notwithstanding the great length of the paper, which grew up of itself, as I read the work with pen in hand, into most unreasonable proportions, though divided into brief paragraphs, it appeared, nevertheless, in the next following month, as a leader, with a note from "C. N.," which has already been given in the sketch of Bentham. Meanwhile this indefatigable purveyor, who knew I was engaged upon "Brother Jonathan," recasting and rewriting the whole,--not for the second time, but for the twentieth time, I verily believe,--and that I was beginning to write for other journals upon American affairs, wanted me to furnish an occasional paper for the "Noctes Ambrosianae," to be incorporated, warp and woof, into the dialogues which appeared month after month and year after year; up to the death of poor Wilson in 1853, and were afterward embodied in a book by Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie, and republished here.