of Niagara is noticeably fine, the sublimity of the subject being remembered, as a piece of impassioned prose.  Whether satire so bitter and unfriendly as that in which he indulged, both here and in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” was justifiable from what may be called an international point of view, is another question.  Publicists do not always remember that a cut which would smart for a moment, and then be forgotten, if aimed at a countryman, rankles and festers if administered to a foreigner.  And if this be true as regards the English publicist’s comment on the foreigner who does not understand our language, it is, of course, true with tenfold force as regards the foreigner whose language is our own. He understands only too well the jibe and the sneer, and the tone of superiority, more offensive perhaps than either.  Looked at in this way, it can, I think, but be accounted a misfortune that the most popular of English writers penned two books containing so much calculated to wound American feeling, as the “Notes” and “Martin Chuzzlewit.”  Nor are signs entirely wanting that, as the years went by, the mind of Dickens himself was haunted by some such suspicion.  A quarter of a century later, he visited the United States a second time; and speaking at a public dinner given in his honour by the journalists of New York, he took occasion to comment on the enormous strides which the country had made in the interval, and then said, “Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn, and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first.”  And he added that, in all future editions of the two books just named, he would cause to be recorded, that, “wherever he had been, in the smallest place equally with the largest, he had been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon him by the nature of his avocation there” (as a public reader), “and the state of his health.”

And now, with three observations, I will conclude what I have to say about the visit to America in 1842.  The first is that the “Notes” are entirely void of all vulgarity of reference to the private life of the notable Americans whom Dickens had met.  He seems to have known, more or less intimately, the chief writers of the time—­Washington Irving, Channing, Dana, Bryant, Longfellow, Bancroft; but his intercourse with them he held sacred, and he made no literary capital out of it.  Secondly, it is pleasant to note that there was, so far, no great “incompatibility of temper” between him and his wife.  He speaks of her enthusiastically, in his correspondence, as a “most admirable traveller,” and expatiates on the good temper and equanimity with which she had borne the fatigues and jars of a most trying journey.  And the third point to which I will call attention is the thoroughly