Excerpt from Pencillings by the Way
Those of my letters which date from England were written within three or four months of my first arrival in this country. Fortunate in my introductions, almost em harrassed with kindness, and, from advantages of com pari son gained by long travel, qualified to appreciate keenly the peculiar delights of English society, I was little disposed to find fault. Every thing pleased me. Yet in one instance a - one single instance - I indulged myself in stricture upon individual character, and I repeat it in this work, sure that there will be but one person in the world of letters who will not read it with approbation - the editor of the Quar terly himself. It was expressed at the time with no per sonal feeling, for I had never seen the individual concerned, and my name had probably never reached his ears: I but repeated what I had said a thousand times; and never with out an indignant echo to its truth - eu opinion formed from the most dispassionate perusal of his writings - that the editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic of the age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, we owe to the Quarterly, it is well known, every spark of ill feel ing that has-been kept alive between England and Ame rica for the last twenty years. The sne’ers, the Opprobrious epithets of this bravo in literature have been received in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not under stood, as the voice of the. English people, and an animosity for which there was no other reason has been thus periodi cally fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man - I know it is my duty as an American - to lose no Opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this rep tile of criticism. He has turned and stung me. Thank God, I have escaped the slime of his approbation.
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