If ever there was an inane author—if ever there was an arrant egotist—if ever there was a traveller ignorant of his subject, that author, egotist, and traveller, is J. Silk Buckingham, late missionary in the cause of morals, to the world in general and to this land in particular, and now the author of a romance which he entitles “America, historical, statistical, and descriptive.” How could a man suffer himself to be so egregiously gulled, as Mr. Buckingham has proved himself to have been, in these volumes? If his lectures on the Holy Land contained a tithe of the exaggeration of this journal, what a precious mess of stuff his audiences must have swallowed!
Mr. Buckingham opens with a sweeping condemnation of all former writers on America, and then adroitly insinuates that his work is the “_ne plus ultra_” of all works. No one who heard him lecture can doubt his egotism or vanity. We were not, therefore, much surprised at this exordium. The text, however, keeps up the farce, and whether describing the emoluments of the bar, the genius and productions of our poets, the statistics of the States or Union, the conduct of political parties, or the advance of taste, morals, or religion, he is sure to drag in something respecting himself, and to misrepresent, more or less, the subject under discussion. Did the book merit the time and space, we would quote some of its remarks to shew what an arrant block-head, or else what a wilful libeller, this J. Silk Buckingham is.
This want of truth in Mr. Buckingham is unpardonable. While here, he was feasted, huzzaed, followed by crowds, in short made a lion of,—and, as he himself says, he had every opportunity to gain correct information. But he seems to have slighted them all. His exaggerations out-romance Amadis de Gaul. He is beside painfully dull, prosing away, page after page, just as he used to dilute his twaddle, when retailing it, by the hour, at a shilling a head. His work scarcely lays claim to mediocrity. Although ushered in by a flourish of trumpets from presses on both sides of the Atlantic, and attended by a pompous dedication to His Royal Highness Prince Albert, the volumes are inferior in every respect to the unpretending work, on this country, lately published by Mr. Combe. As Brougham said of Sheridan’s statesmanship, “it is neither a bad book, nor a good book, nor an indifferent book—the fact is, it is no book at all.”