138 REVIEWS AMERICAN REPRINTS. 



that of American conservative-whigs ; though when one recalls the 

 difference between the old Scottish Wiggamor of 1648, or even the 

 Edinburgh Whig diS he figures in Henry Cockburn's "Memorials of his 

 Time," and what the Yankee would call the go-to-meeting respectability 

 of the English Whiggery that makes its appearance under the huff 

 and blue of the Edinburgh of January, 1858: it requires no great 

 vaticination to predict such a transmutation of the English Whig into 

 practical conservatism, as has come over the Republican "Whig of the 

 New World, since those times in the American Colonies when all were 

 whigs who were revolutionary ante-royalists. 



English and American politics, however, lie out of our way; but 

 not so the principles of literary piracy involved in this adventure, and in 

 the whole system of American-English reprints of which it is a sample. 

 An English Macaulay, or a Thackeray, a Carlyle, a Tennyson, or an 

 Elizabeth Browning, expend the toil of months and years over the 

 midnight lamp, and adorn the fruits of their labor with all the price- 

 less fire of genius, and the Anglo-Saxon of America unblushingly pil- 

 fers the product hot from the press, and appropriates it to himself in 

 happy accordance with 



The good old rule, the simple plan, 



That they should take who have the power. 



And he should keep who can. 



The American Nation is not incapable of liberal and generous acts. 

 Does it never occur to any of the thousands who revel in the enjovment 

 of a Dickens', or Thackeray's, or Browning's pages, that therein lies 

 the very source of their subsistence ; that the earlier literary produc- 

 tions of some of these very authors have been produced with as sore 

 travail as that which wrung the manly heart of young Samuel Johnson, 

 when, — as Macaulay says, in extenuation of of the rougher asperities 

 of his later years, — " he had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, 

 by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunities of 

 creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by that bread which is the 

 bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all 

 paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick." How 

 knows, or cares, the American reader whether the living English poetess 

 may not be stimulated to the production of her inspired song, even as 

 Felicia Hemans was, that thereby she might win her bread and educate 

 her sons. Nay, how knows he but that the poet's song is even now 

 as vainly sung as that of "the marvellous boy" who perished, star\'ing, 

 while bequeathing his strange immortal lays to other times. Such 

 things did not all come to an end with the eighteenth century. The 



