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A preface appears to me necessary to this book, in order that the expectation with which the English reader might open it should not be disappointed.

Some curiosity has of late been excited in England with regard to America: its political existence is a momentous experiment, upon which many eyes are fixed, in anxious watching of the result; and such accounts as have been published of the customs and manners of its societies, and the natural wonders and beauties of its scenery, have been received and read with considerable interest in Europe. This being the case, I should be loth to present these volumes to the English public without disclaiming both the intention and the capability of adding the slightest detail of any interest to those which other travellers have already furnished upon these subjects.

This book is, what it professes to be, my personal journal, and not a history or a description of men and manners in the United States.

Engaged in an arduous profession, and travelling from city to city in its exercise, my leisure and my opportunities would have been alike inadequate to such a task. The portion of America which I have visited has been a very small one, and, I imagine, by no means that from which the most interesting details are to be drawn. I have been neither to the south nor to the west; consequently have had no opportunity of seeing two large portions of the population of this country—the enterprising explorers of the late wildernesses on the shores of the Mississippi—and the black race of the slave slates—both classes of men presenting peculiarities of infinite interest to the traveller: the one, a source of energy and growing strength, the other, of disease and decay, in this vast political body.

My sphere of observation has been confined to the Atlantic cities, whose astonishing mercantile prosperity, and motley mongrel societies, though curious under many aspects, are interesting but under few.

What I registered were my immediate impressions of what I saw and heard; of course, liable to all the errors attendant upon first perceptions, and want of time and occasion for maturer investigation. The notes I have added while preparing the text for the press; and such opinions and details as they contain are the result of a longer residence in this country, and a somewhat better acquaintance with the people of it.

Written, as my journal was, day by day, and often after the fatigues of a laborious evening's duty at the theatre, it has infinite sins of carelessness to answer for; and but that it would have taken less time and trouble to re-write the whole book, or rather write a better, I would have endeavoured to correct them—though, indeed, I was something of Alfieri's mind about it:—"Quanto poi allo stile, io penso di lasciar fare alla penna, e di pochissimo lasciarlo scostarsi da quella triviale e spontanea naturalezza, con cui ho scritto quest' opera, dettata dal cuore e non dall' ingegno; e che sola puo convenire a così umile tema."

However, my purpose is not to write an apology for my book, or its defects, but simply to warn the English reader, before he is betrayed into its perusal, that it is a purely egotistical record, and by no means a history of America.