« - here he hesitated again.
    »Go on,« said the other, smiling as if he knew what stuck in Martin's
throat.
    »Especially,« pursued Martin, »as I can already understand that it may have
required great courage, even in his time, to write freely on any question which
was not a party one in this very free country.«
    »Some courage, no doubt,« returned his new friend. »Do you think it would
require any to do so, now?«
    »Indeed I think it would; and not a little,« said Martin.
    »You are right. So very right, that I believe no satirist could breathe this
air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us to-morrow, he would be
hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the
name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a
people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most
brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a
strange name in my ears, believe me. In some cases I could name to you, where a
native writer has ventured on the most harmless and good-humoured illustrations
of our vices or defects, it has been found necessary to announce, that in a
second edition the passage has been expunged, or altered, or explained away, or
patched into praise.«
    »And how has this been brought about?« asked Martin, in dismay.
    »Think of what you have seen and heard to-day, beginning with the colonel,«
said his friend, »and ask yourself. How they came about, is another question.
Heaven forbid that they should be samples of the intelligence and virtue of
America, but they come uppermost, and in great numbers, and too often represent
it. Will you walk?«
    There was a cordial candour in his manner, and an engaging confidence that
it would not be abused; a manly bearing on his own part, and a simple reliance
on the manly faith of a stranger; which Martin had never seen before. He linked
his arm readily in that of the American gentleman, and they walked out together.
    It was perhaps to men like this, his new companion, that a traveller of
honoured name, who trod those shores now nearly forty years ago, and woke upon
that soil, as many have done since, to blots and stains upon its high
pretensions, which in the brightness
