This is a very gentlemanly book.  Whatever excellence of commendation belongs to the adjective we have Italicized must be awarded to Mr. Dicey.  And it is ill-adapted to the manufactures of most British tourists who have preceded him.  For, to make no mention of the vulgar buffooneries of Bunn or Grattan, we hold that neither the exalted and irrepressible prosiness of Dr. Charles Mackay, nor the cleverish magic-lantern pictures of that good-natured book-maker, Mr. Anthony Trollope, would be perfectly fitted with this polite addition.  It is no mean praise to say that the word gentlemanly naturally applies itself to a traveller’s work.  And it is necessary to allow that the majority of Americans who have printed their impressions of a scamper over Europe have fallen as hopelessly below it as a few have risen far above it.  Some word of deeper meaning must characterize the sterling sentences of “English Traits”; some epithet of more rare and subtile significance is suggested by those exquisitely painted scenes of foreign life with which Hawthorne is even now adorning the pages of the “Atlantic.”  But after the manner in which such a well-informed, modest, humane man as we would emphatically credit as an American gentleman might speak of six months in England, so has Mr. Dicey spoken of his six months in the Federal States.

And, at this present time, far better than all curious delineations or “stereographic” descriptions are the sober testimonies concerning us which Mr. Dicey offers to his countrymen.  To such loyal Americans as these volumes may reach they will give a heart not to be found in Dr. Russell’s pictorial neutrality, in the dashing effects of popular Mr. Trollope, nor even—­making all allowance for the sanative influence of counter-irritation—­in the weekly malignity of that ex-Moral Minstrel whom the London “Times” has sent to the aid of our insurgent slave-masters.  For, instead of gloating over objections and picking out what petty enigmas may not be readily soluble, Mr. Dicey has a manly, English way of accepting the preponderant evidence concerning the crisis he came to study.  He seldom gets entangled in trivial events, but knows how to use them as illustrations of great events.  It is really refreshing to meet with a British traveller who is so happily delivered from the haunting consciousness of a personal identity.  The reader is not called upon to bemoan the tribulations of temperance-taverns, the hardships of indiscriminate railroad-carriages, nor the rapacity of New-York hackmen.  There is scarcely an offence against good taste or good feeling in Mr. Dicey’s volumes; and whatever American homes may have been opened to him would doubtless reopen far more readily than to most publishing tourists from the mother-land.