him through creation, as one would a puppy-
dog;—all in a manner shocking to contemplate.
He inveighed against the Court of
St. James's; against our haughty aristocrats;
against our bloated clergy; he pitied our
starving needlewomen, our famished and
downtrodden peasantry; our groaning and
oppressed Irish serfs; the white slaves in our
factories; the gaunt and fever-stricken children
in our workhouses. No good could come
out of us anyhow—"nohow," he said. We
never could pay our national debt, the interest
of which was rapidly sapping our credit and
bringing us to bankruptcy. We had no public
building equal to the Capitol, at Washington;
Lord Brougham, Burke, Sheridan, Chatham,
never approached Patrick Henry in
oratory; Hooker, Barrow, Taylor, South, were
dunces in theological attainments to Jared
Sparks; we had no painters equal to Colonel
Trumbull. We had no poets or philosophers;
the great republic had out-manufactured us.
Hobbs had picked our locks, Commodore
Stephenson had whipped our yacht-clubs, and
Colonel Colt had driven our Mantons and
Westley Richards from the field. We had
quarrelled with our best friend, the Emperor of
Russia; our French ally was ready to turn
round on us; the port of New York exceeded
us in tonnage, as the New York clippers out-
sailed ours; our population was burning for
revolution; our colonies ripe for revolt; Canada
was knocking at the door of the Union. It
was all up with the British lion: take him
away to the knacker's yard, and sell his flesh
to the dogs'-meat vendors. "He isn't worth
that," Colonel Grunpeck would cry, throwing
away the last remnants of his quid.

All this and more did I hear in the first
month of this present year, 'fifty-five, from
the lips of Colonel Grunpeck. I must not
omit to notice, too, the dreadfully long list of
naval engagements which he was wont to
recapitulate—engagements in which British
men-of-war had been licked, riddled, sunk, or
captured by a vastly inferior American force.
Great, also, was the colonel upon the topic of
the battle of New Orleans, at which he had
himself been present, and where he had shot,
with his own patriot hand, no less than four-
and-twenty Britishers; he lying in ambuscade
behind a cotton bale, and armed only with a
rusty ship's musket, of which the barrel was
cracked in two places.

Hearing all these things, I used to go home
and wonder whether there were many more
men in the States like Colonel Grunpeck. I
began to wonder whether the Knownothings,
the Lone Stars, the New York United Irishmen,
and the Native Sympathisers, who hold
Caucusses and Indignation meetings at
Tammaney Hall, were at all of the Grunpeck
breed; whether, in fine, the British lion was
really in the pitiable state the Colonel had
represented him to be; or whether, as I had
fondly hoped and believed for some time,
there was some life, and some fighting left
in the old beast yet. For I have the pleasure
—one participated in, I trust, by many
more men—of numbering among my friends
very many American gentlemen, courteous,
accomplished, liberal, tolerant, and quite
devoid of prejudice, who are proud to call
this country yet the old one, and their mother,
and who are prompt to sympathise with our
righteous cause, as, indeed, brethren should,
who are joined to us by such strong bonds of
race, kindred, language, literature, and laws.

Taking the other side of the question, I
began to reflect, whether we, on our side
of the Atlantic, could show any English
Grunpecks, any genuine Britishers, who,
having visited the United States, had been unable
or unwilling to discern one single thing worthy
of admiration in their travelling experiences.
I read a great many books of travels, tours,
flying visits, and voyages, humorous and
sentimental, to the States; but, though in many
of these volumes I found the people, the
manners, and the institutions of the American
republic, commented upon with sufficient
severity, I was unable to discover the real
prejudiced traveller—the genuine Britisher—
who couldn't or wouldn't find any good in
the Americans—nohow. I might have gone
on to this day searching for a genuine
Britisher, had I not been fortunate enough to
stumble, in a corner of a Kentish cottage,
upon the Experiences of MR. PARKINSON.

Mr. Richard Parkinson, late of Orange
Hill, near Baltimore, and author of the
Experienced Farmer, published just fifty
years ago (you see I am obliged to go back a
good way for my genuine Britisher, but then
Colonel Grunpeck was over sixty), A Tour
in America, exhibiting sketches of Society
and Manners, and a particular account of the
American System of Agriculture. I had not
read Mr. Parkinson half through before I
began to see a sort of vision or day-ghost of
a bluff sturdy man in a blue coat, mahogany
tops, and a fluffy white hat. And the ghost
walked through the United States with one
continual upturning of the nose; and I said
to myself: Surely, this must be the genuine
Britisher I have been so long in quest of. I
will give a brief sketch of some of Mr.
Parkinson's experiences, and my readers can then
judge for themselves, how far he was British
and genuine.

Mr. Parkinson, like a true blue and wearer
of uncompromising mahogany tops, dedicates
his Tour to his Royal Highness the Duke of
York. In times like these, says Mr.
Parkinson, when the wicked intentions and wild
chimeras of designing and misguided men
have so widely disseminated principles of a
fallacious equality, it behoves every reasonable
person, and especially Mr. Parkinson,
not only to manifest proper expressions of
regard for high station and illustrious
ancestry, but also to spare his country the loss
of many a valuable though humble member,
whom misrepresentation might tempt to