qualities which historians and poets love to attribute to their country, national tendencies and aspirations are more or loss consciously represented; these qualities the nation will by-and-by learn to attribute to itself, until, becoming gradually traditional, they will at length realize themselves as active principles.  The selfish clamor of Liverpool merchants, who see a rival in New York, and of London bankers who have dipped into Confederate stock, should not lead us to conclude, with M. Albert Blanc, that the foreign policy of England is nothing more or less than une haine de commercants et d’industriels, haine implacable et inflexible comme les chiffres.[A]

[Footnote A:  Memoires et Correspondence de J. DE MAISTRE, p. 92.]

Mr. Russell’s book purports to be, and probably is in substance, the diary from which he made up his letters to the London “Times”; and it is rather amusing, as well as instructive, to see the somewhat muddy sources which, swelled by affluents of verbiage and invention, gather head enough to contribute their share to the sonorous shallowness of “the leading journal of Europe.”  When we learn, as we do from this “Diary,” what a contributor to that eminent journal is, when left to his own devices,—­that he does not know the difference between would and should, (which, to be sure, is excusable in an Irishman,) that he believes in petto to mean in miniature, uses protagonist with as vague a notion of its sense as Mrs. Malaprop had of her derangement of epitaphs, and then recall to mind the comparative correctness of Mr. Russell’s correspondence in point of style, we conceive a hearty respect for the proof-reader in Printing-House Square.  We should hardly have noticed these trifles, except that Mr. Russell has a weakness for displaying the cheap jewelry of what we may call lingo, and that he is rather fond of criticizing the dialect and accent of persons who were indiscreet enough to trust him with their confidences.  There is one respect, however, in which the matter has more importance,—­in its bearing on our estimate of Mr. Russell as a trustworthy reporter of what he saw and heard.  Conscientious exactness is something predicable of the whole moral and intellectual nature, and not of any special faculty; so that, when we find a man using words without any sense of their meaning, and assuming to be familiar with things of which he is wholly ignorant, we are justified in suspecting him of an habitual inaccuracy of mind, which to a greater or less degree disqualifies him both as observer and reporter.  We say this with no intention of imputing any wilful misstatements to Mr. Russell, but as something to be borne in mind while reading his record of private conversations.  A scrupulous fidelity is absolutely essential, where the whole meaning may depend on a tone of voice or the use of one word instead of another.  Any one accustomed to the study of dialects will understand