"His style is too often sesquipedalian and ornate; the stilty, wordy, false taste of Dr. Channing without his depth of thought; the sugar and sack of Washington Irving without the half-pennyworth of bread--without his grace and polish of pure, grammatical, careful Anglicism. We have many suspicions, indeed, from his ordinary quotations, from what he calls in others 'the cheap display of school-boy erudition,' and from sundry lurking sneers, that he has not drunk deeply at the Pierian fountains, which taste the purer the higher we track them to their source. These, the only sure foundations of a pure and correct style, are absolutely necessary to our Transatlantic brethren, who are unfortunately deprived of the high standing example of an order of nobility, and of a metropolis where local peculiarities evaporate. The elevated tone of the classics is the only corrective for their unhappy democracy. Moral feeling must of necessity be degraded wherever the multitude are the sole dispensers of power and honour. All candidates for the foul-breathed universal suffrage must lower their appeal to base understandings and base motives. The authors of the United States, independently of the deteriorating influence of their institutions, can of all people the least afford to be negligent. Far severed from the original spring of English undefiled, they always run the risk of sinking into provincialisms, into Patavinity,--both positive, in the use of obsolete words, and the adoption of conventional village significations, which differ from those retained by us,--as well as negative, in the omission of those happy expressions which bear the fire-new stamp of the only authorised mint. Instances occur constantly in these volumes where the word is English, but English returned after many years' transportation. We do not wish to be hypercritical, nor to strain at gnats. If, however, the authors of the United States aspire to be admitted _ad eundem_, they must write the English of the 'old country,' which they will find it is much easier to forget and corrupt than to improve. We cannot, however, afford space here for a _florilegium Yankyense_. A professor from New York, newly imported into England and introduced into real _good_ society, of which previously he can only have formed an abstract idea, is no bad illustration of Mr. Prescott's _over-done_ text. Like the stranger in question, he is always on his best behaviour, prim, prudish, and stiff-necky, afraid of self-committal, ceremonious, remarkably dignified, supporting the honour of the United States, and monstrously afraid of being laughed at. Some of these travellers at last discover that bows and starch are not even the husk of a gentleman; and so, on re-crossing the Atlantic, their