So far, then, Sir Edward Lytton and myself (if it is not too great presumption in me to join myself with him) cordially agree. And further, it is a most nonsensical and absurd policy for a country thus to swamp its native literature, and to depress and degrade the whole class of native writers. No nation can afford to let foreigners write for it; it would be as unwise as to let them fight its battles. I may add that no nation can afford to embitter its own writers against itself by producing in their minds a sense of injustice. Strong as our feeling of nationality undoubtedly is, it will not stand this for ever. It has seemed strange to some that an American should have written such a book as "Lady Alice," the author of which appears, at first sight, to have expatriated his mind, if not his heart. His being an episcopal clergyman accounts for it in part--for the Church is essentially of Old England, and its clergy and more devoted members are morally domiciled in England, with whose institutions and social system they have a stronger sympathy than with those of their own country. Moreover, for years, he lived only among Englishmen of that class which is most intensely attached to things as they are--a part of the time in England itself. These circumstances made the thing possible. But despair of obtaining any thing like a fair copyright for an American book made it actual--led him to lay aside a projected American story, and try his hand at an English novel, with a bent less serious: at first, indeed, not without some idea of caricature, in a gay, lawless, audacious spirit, in defiance of cant of every kind: but the calm, methodical, somewhat mechanical [Greek: êthos] of actual English life, when he saw it and felt its restraints, tamed down these peculiarities somewhat. The result was a book which truly excited more surprise than sympathy in England--but which, in America, proved its real nationality by bursting in a trice all the bonds of clique, and, in spite of its acknowledged faults, securing near a hundred thousand readers in a few months. If copyright had been protected as it ought, I should have been reimbursed by so large a sale; but, as it was, even this successful book paid me less than a day laborer could have earned in the time I was writing it, in any part of the States.