Mr. Mackay gives correctly the most prominent names of American literature, but his list of artists is very imperfect. The little that he says about American music is all wrong. The first opera by an American was produced in 1845; and it is not true that this is a solitary example. Were it possible for us to pursue them, we should run down more errors of this kind than a prudent man would have put into print.
Altogether, while we readily admit that Mr. Mackay has honestly, and, in general, good-naturedly, performed his duty as an American chronicler, renouncing in a great measure the old principle of "blowing-up," and that his essays do not reek with ignorance, like those of many of his predecessors, it is yet proper to say that he has achieved a stupendous bore. His two volumes are to us a melancholy remembrance. Their life is spiced with no variety. The same dead level of dry personal detail speaks through each chapter; or if occasional relief is afforded, it is "in liquid lines mellifluously bland," and prosier than all the rest. The one source of amusement that the reader will discover is the complacent self-confidence which no assumption of modesty can hide. "A controversy had been raging for at least a week" in Philadelphia about the author's letters in the "Illustrated London News." His defender was "one of the most influential and best-conducted papers of the Union"; his assailant behaved "scurvily." We cannot lavish examples. This is the type of a hundred. Mr. Mackay seems to expect that his Jeremiad on tobacco-chewing and spitting will act in America as St. Patrick's spells did on the vermin of Ireland. Unfortunately, it will not. Mr. Dickens attempted the same thing in a much better manner,--excepting where Mr. Mackay has copied him exactly, as he has once or twice,--and even the novelist's efforts were fruitless. On the other hand, the main source of annoyance will be found in the needless elevation of minute evils, and the determination to form general judgments from isolated experiences. But of this we do not much complain. Rome derived some benefit from the cackling of a goose. Possibly we may be made in some respects a wiser and a better nation through Mr. Mackay's influence. For ourselves, however, if our aspirations ever turn toward a literary Paradise, we shall pray that it may be one where travellers cease from troubling and dull tourists are at rest.