Ir is now some years since the all-powerful Sydney Smith was startled from complacent belief in his own infallibility by a young unknown American traveller: "We, on our side the Atlantic, often venture to revise your criticisms, and rejudge your judgments," was the astounding assertion of one who is now among the leaders of his country's Senate. No wonder the great reviewer looked down with scorn upon the Yankee youth!-no wonder his admiring circle of dilettanti Whigs stood aghast at the audacity of the speaker, and the strangeness of the remark!

Times have changed since then; and now, even Sydney Smith would be fain to admit,

1. Autobiographic Sketches, Vols. I. and II. James Hogg, 1853-4.

2. Logic of Political Economy. W. Blackwood and Sons, 1844.

3. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and Suspiria de Profundis, with portrait; Biographical Essays; Miscellaneous Essays; The Caesars; Life and Manners; Literary Reminiscences, 2 vols.; Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, 2 vols.; Essays on the Poets, &c., 1 vol.; Historical and Critical Essays, 2 vols.; Letters to a Young Man, &c.; Philosophical Writers, &c., 2 vols. 1852-4.

Ticknor, Reed, and Fields: Boston, U. S.

VOL. XXXII. NO. III.

that among the many tests of the permanent merit of an English work, none, perhaps, is sounder than the judgment of an American public.

In literature, as in every thing else, the value of the criticism varies directly with the impartiality of the critic; and therefore, of all criticisms, is the verdict of posterity most valuable and just. Hardly inferior then will be the opinion of a nation which, while speaking the same language as ourselves, is removed by space, as is posterity by time, from the jealousies and fashions of the English world of letters; which, like posterity, can have no interest to serve by an injudicious praise of one author, nor malice to gratify by an indiscriminate censure of another, and which, for the most part, judging fairly and dispassionately of the current literature of England, will in general but anticipate the sentence of future Of this ages. fact the English public is becoming gradually aware. It cannot but remember that Carlyle was recognized in America long before England had perceived his genius and his strength. It knows how the most graceful "vers de société" in the language lay for

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