When Marryat was about to start for the United States he gave a reason of some gravity for his proposed trip. The last words of the “Diary on the Continent” propound a serious question: “Do the faults of this people (to wit, the Swiss) arise from the peculiarity of their constitutions, or from the nature of their government? To ascertain this, one must compare them with those who live under similar institutions. I must go to America--that’s decided.” A biographer of any virtue will desire to be inspired with the Boswellian spirit--to write as loyally as Macaulay did of Addison--but I cannot quite believe that Marryat’s visit to America was caused by a sudden passion for the study of comparative politics, and the influence of institutions on national character. A more plausible explanation could be found. It was excellently given by the elder Mr. Weller in the course of some remarks made for the benefit of Mr. Pickwick. To write a book about America was a favourite enterprise with literary persons in those years. Miss Martineau and Mrs. Trollope had just done it, and there was no reason why Marryat should not do it also. A taste for seeing the world may have helped to turn his activity in that direction, and, besides he was, as will be seen, on the lookout for promising speculations, and may have had some thoughts on copyright. Possibly none of these motives were very clear to himself, and he may really have thought he was going to study American institutions.
Moved by sufficient motives, whether the alleged or the unconsciously felt, he did go to America by the packet _Quebec_ in 1837, did stay there for two years, and write a book about the States in six volumes, and two series. Of this book it may be said, in a favourite phrase of the writer whom Marryat described as “Mr. Carlisle, the author of ‘Sartor Resartus’” (a slip which was dreadfully avenged), that “it is forgetable.” Marryat’s diary and remarks show that he would have made an excellent newspaper correspondent. He had a faculty for getting up information, a quick eye, and a ready pen. With these qualities a man can easily make “copy” out of a visit to a new country. Indeed, Marryat was no novice at the work, for which his “Diary on the Continent” had prepared him. When his six volumes on America are judged as what they were, they are on the whole creditable. He made the Americans very angry, but that it was never difficult to do. He had provocation to write more bitterly than he did. But whatever may be the merits of, or the excuses for, the thing, it is hardly worth while to return to “newspaper correspondence” at the end of half a century. Unless the correspondent has seen history in the making, and has noted it well so as to become an original authority, he can hardly hope to be read two generations or so later on. The worst of it, too, is that Marryat saw something which was well worth recording, and did not record it properly. A large part of his book is taken up with contradicting Miss Martineau; and who can rejoice in the refutation of an almost forgotten book by a still more forgotten book?