Why, in nine cases out of ten the servant is the more independent man of the two. A good servant can find a place more readily than an employer can find a good servant. This is true to some extent even in London and Paris; it is true without qualification of all our cities. And in every case it may be affirmed the groom or coachman would rather wear a neat livery than not, unless he has been insulted on some occasion by some of those gentry who are so anxious to take care of his liberties for him.

In the next place, what harm does a livery do the public? Is there any indecency or impropriety a about it, as there would be for instance in a woman wearing a man's clothes, or vice versa? Is it any inconvenience to those who come in contact with it, like a horseman in a crowd of pedestrians, or a smoker in a public place frequented by both sexes? What is the use and purport of it? First, it enables you to distinguish your own servant in a promiscuous crowd, and in this respect it is really a great convenience, and the larger our cities become the more will liveries be needed on this account. But this is not the only intention of it. It serves a purpose of display and luxury. Yes, it does. It helps to make an equipage complete.* A carriage looks better when its driver is in proper costume, just as a race looks better when the jockies are. Well, is this a crime against republicanism? Are we to have sumptuary laws? No doubt fitness and elegance are a stench in the nostrils of some persons. It was recently made a serious charge against the President of the United States, thet his coachman and footman were dressed alike. If a man prefers incongruity, if he would rather wear one boot and one shoe than a pair of either article, by all means let him be free to follow his tastes, but let him also have common charity enough to allow those who have juster notions of symmetry to follow their tastes. The true reason of his outcry is often a mean feeling of envy against those who are better off than himself, and have more refined ideas.

I fancy that if we go very deep into the philosophic signification of a livery, it betokens a professional connection with horses and equipages. The European in-door liveried servants were originally out-door servants, who accompanied the carriage on foot, whence their name footmen. So you see this discusion comes strictly within the special province of the "Spirit."

In short, the whole question ought to lie between the servant and his employer. If I choose to give Patrick or Sambo a livery, and he chooses to wear it, (as he most probably will, being a pecuniary gainer thereby to the extent of much wear and tear of his own clothes saved.) no other person has anything to do with the matter. The man who insults Pat for wearing a livery infringes on his social freedom. The man who denounces or misrepresents me for having a servant in livery infringes on my social freedom in a small thing, you will say, but small things often lead to great. If any man or men may prescribe what dress my servants shall or shall not wear, they may by a perfectly legitimate extension of the principle, proceed to regulate my wife's dress or my own, the sort of carriage I shall drive in, or the number of rooms I shall have in my house.

However, I feel some hope that this popular delusion may be "reformed indifferently." Now that a Democratic President has appointed to an important post abroad a gentleman who was always noted for sporting neat and correct liveries, the practice may perhaps be admitted as not necessarily destructive of the Constitution.

Let us pass to another point. Perfect social equality can only be attained approximately in any country. There will always be some classes with more influence and license than others, if not by law, then by custom or possession somehow, in a greater or less degree. Now it makes some difference to a gentleman who the privileged classes are. For instance, other things being equal, he would rather have to ask a favor of a prince than of an innkeeper. I say other things being equal, not meaning to deny that some innkeepers are perfect gentlemen, and some princes quite the reverse; but the rule is a safe general one, though liable to exceptions. In many parts of America, however, a hotel-keeper is more privileged than a titled personage in any part of Western Europe: it is more dangerous to offend him, he can offend others with more impunity. Let me illustrate this by contrast. Every traveller has remarked that English hotels are generally bad and always dear. The tradition of "war prices" is kept up at them, and many other traditions and fictions. Finally the nuisance, which had long been too much for strangers, became too much for the natives;

A. B. C., X. Y. Z., and other combinations and permutations of the alphabet, inundated the "Times" with their communications; the evil has been thoroughly exposed and brought before the public, the first step, and a very necessary one, towards its abatement. The spark that kindled the flame was the letter of the first A. B. C. to the "Times." Now suppose the landlord shown up by A. B. C. aforesaid had written to the "Times" demanding the name of the person who had dared to find fault with his establishment, that the editor through fear or favor had given the name up, that the landlord had thereupon hired one London and one country paper to abuse A. B. C. in every variety of Billingsgate pour encourager les autres, which had the effect of frightening other victims into silence for some time, until matters came to a crisis in a pitched battle with deadly weapons between the guests and servants of the hotel. Put this case to an Englishman, and he would tell you that every stage of it was impossible, yet the precise counterpart happened in America a very few years ago; pars fuit your correspondent.

GRATTAN'S CIVILIZED AMERICA. Porter's Spirit, May 1859.

IT is a singular problem in the literature of the age, that no Englishman has ever written a really good book about America. Very clever and tolerably accurate newspaper and magazine articles have been produced from time to time on isolated questions, but all larger and more serious works have proved fearfully inadequate. The singularity consists in the contrast which this deficiency presents to the superiority, everywhere else obvious, in the English treatment of political and social questions. The best French writers are very clever, very neat, very ingenious; but they all lack the breadth and massiveness of the Briton, and all seem incapable of thoroughly comprehending at once the theory and the facts of a question. But when we come to American affairs, we find that the French have written some very bad books, no doubt, but also some very good ones; De Tocqueville's is a case in point.

The suggestion that no English celebrity, equal in his line to De Tocqueville, has handled the subject, would not be a sufficient solution. Oscar Commettant is no very distinguished name in French literature, yet his sketches show a fairer and truer appreciation of our people than can be found in the pages of very celebrated English writers. How comes it that the Frenchman, with all the disadvantages of a different race, language, and (generally) religion, can hit so much nearer the mark than the member of a kindred stock?

Probably it is this very resemblance which makes a great part of the difficulty. The English traveller is predisposed by these great similarities to expect many other similarities in smaller things, which do not exist; and when, instead of these, he finds marked differences, a certain feeling of disappointment and annoyance results, which interferes with his judgment on more important matters. When he goes on the Continent, he is prepared to find everything different from what it is at home; when he comes to America, he is not prepared to find anything different, except the government. Now, it is precisely in things much alike in general, that small differences of detail make the strongest impression, because they are unseen from a distance, and unsuspected beforehand. To take an extreme case: the English Universities are very like each other, and very unlike all other academic institutions. The American Colleges, too, are very much alike among themselves. Yet, a man going from Oxford to Cambridge, or from Yale to Harvard, is more struck, at first, by the difference than by the resemblance, because he had no clear expectation of any differences existing.

If it seem unphilosophical to attach so much weight to trifling differences of habits and manners, we must recollect that a great part of man's daily life is made up of these trifles. There are differences, however, much more important than the hours of dining, or the stuff of which one's "continuations" are made, or the names by which these necessary articles of dress are called marked differences of moral association and feeling. Thus, the present discussion in England respecting marriage with a deceased wife's sister, is extremely curious to an American - curious because it is quite impossible for

him, by any ordinary effort of imagination, to put himself in the place of one of the parties to it. *

Of course, we do not pretend to say that this covers the whole ground. There is another fertile source of disappointment, of which we shall have occasion to speak farther on. There are impediments on our side as well. Thus, it is extremely probable that our over-sensitiveness has prevented some of the men best qualified to write about us from doing so, for fear of giving offence to a people whom they really like, yet about whom their English frankness might oblige them to tell some unpleasant truths. In the case of one very eminent author, we can affirm this to be the fact from our own personal knowledge. While waiting in hope for Buckle's second volume, we, meanwhile, without professing fully to account for, can only deplore this incapacity or fatality, not confined to Englishmen alone, but extending to all her Majesty's subjects. Thus, Mr. Grattan is an Irishman; the only consequence of which, so far as we are concerned, is the addition of some peculiar blunders and spites to the blunders and spites of his predecessors.

The first impression which one derives from a perusal of Mr. G.'s book, is its pervading tone of ill-nature and malus animus, a set purpose to say disagreeable truths or the reverse of truths in the most disagreeable way. This intent is manifest in the earliest pages of his introduction, where, for the comfort of the whole nation, and the especial delectation of "our brethren of the South," he fixes the term Yankee, in certainly not its least offensive sense, on the entire people of the United States. It is evident in his dimly veiled or openly undisguised disparagement of every public character (except Henry Clay) whom he mentions; in his unlimited abuse of the "upper ten;" in his exaggerations of our artistic and literary deficiencies; in his "damning with

* According to this explanation, it might be argued conversely that Americans would not be able to write well about England; and this we believe to be really the case, up to a certain point, but in a less degree, because, in the nature of things, the American usually has a previous knowledge of more details about England than the Englishman has about America; and, also, because he has more of the French faculty of self-adaptation. Emerson's "English Traits" is not exactly a perfect book, but we believe it to be a better and truer one than any Englishman has written about America.