Note 21 — LETTER XXVIII. TO RICHARD COOPER, ESQUIRE, COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK.

Mrs. Butler, in her shrewd work on America, has given many good hits at this love for the grandiose. Whenever this lady has gone out of her particular sphere, or that of her sex, her remarks are such as might have been anticipated from a young English woman, visiting America with all her political prejudices about her, and almost as a matter of course, necessarily ignorant of the true machinery and action of governments. Even in this writer, the expectation, not to say the longing, for a dissolution of the Union, that has been so often mentioned in these pages, is sufficiently apparent, she, also, has fallen into the very common error of ascribing things to the institutions, such for instance as the nonchalance of the trades people, and the noisy, screeching, hoydenish romps of the sexes, which it suits the caprices of certain people to term society, when they ought to be referred, one to the personal independence of a country prosperous beyond example, and the other to the unsettled condition of towns, that double their population every twenty years, and their wealth in ten.

Mrs. Butler has made many other mistakes, beyond a question, for she has written under erroneous impressions at starting. Of this class are all the misconceptions connected with those usages that are thought to be tending daily towards aristocracy. Any one who knows the country well, knows that in all the ordinary appliances of this nature, America has been gradually receding from such forms, for the last forty years. Thus footmen, liveries, hatchments, coats of arms, &c. &c., are all much less common now, than at the commencement of the century. Mrs. Butler has mistaken the twilight, for the dawn; the shadows of the past for those of coming events. This is a common misapprehension of the English, and it arises from a disposition to see things in their own way.

The treatment that this lady has received, cannot be too loudly condemned. She has been derided, caricatured, almost, if not positively, slandered, because she has presumed to speak the truth about us! Mrs. Trollope has met with similar denunciations, though with a greater show of reason, for Mrs. Trollope has calumniated her own sex in America. Besides, one sees, in the book of Mrs. Trollope, a malignant feeling, and calculations of profit; while the work of Mrs. Butler is as honest as it is fearless. The latter has designated persons too plainly, perhaps, as coupled with unpleasant remarks; but all these faults may be overlooked, as the whims of a very young female.

In one thing Mrs. Butler is singularly mistaken. She says that neither England, nor France, manifests any sensibility on the subject of the comments of travellers! The French do not, ordinarily, understand the comments of the English, or the English those of the French. Neither nation reads nor knows any thing about the comments of the Americans at all. Nothing is easier than to manifest indifference to things of which we are totally ignorant. As respects the English, however, one has only to name Pillet, d’ Haussez, and Puckler-Muskau, in order to show how much abuse and calumny they can heap on those whose opinions displease them. The stories circulated in English society, concerning the latter, by way of retaliation for his book, were quite on a level with the Trollopeana of America. Both are a disgrace to civilization.