The Sun.
London, England, 1867-01-24 00:00:00

LATEST INTELLIGENCE. I
1 New America. By William Hepworth Dixon.
With Illustrations from Original Photographs.
Two Volumes. Hurst and Blackett.
It was but yesterday as it almost seems to us
that we were being conducted in imagination by
Mr. Dixon among the hallowed ruins and arid plains
of the Holy Land. Turning the pages of the two
eloquent and noble volumes which were produced
by him last year as the record of his pilgrimage
through Palestine, we were conducted by him, in a
reverent and believing spirit, to the regions ren-
dered sacred eighteen centuries ago by the divinely
affecting and unutterably awful incidents of the
Redemption. Under the shadow of the mountains
of Lebanon, along the slopes of the hills of Galileo,
down the valley of the Jordan, across the plains of
Acre, from the shores of the Dead Sea to those of
the Sea of Galileo, otherwise known as the Lake of
Tiberias, to Mount Tabee., to Mount Hermon,
through Nazareth, through Bethlehem, through
Jerusalem, we were led by him in a mood so well-
befitting the regions we were thus traversing
together with himself that we had a consciousness all
the while in regard to our author that while he
moved thus with a firm tread onward in his pil-
grimage his knee would never disdain to bend upon
occasion—that while he gazed around with a glance
always keenly penetrant and observant it was with
eyes not infrequently suffused with emotional tears
—that while he pointed this and that out to our ob-
servation, as with the steady index-finger of a guide
who had mastered as far as might be in any
way practicable the geographical, the topogra-
phical, and the archaeological outlines of his sub-
ject, it was not only in the spirit of a traveller of
nowadays, who, had well thumbed his " Murray,"
but of one also who had both the Old and the
New Testament perfectly well by heart. Alto-
gether, we retain not merely an agreeable but a
very grateful remembrance of Mr. Dixon's two last
volumes—the
bear esm—t
distinctly
two
of u
h lo ly Land. "
We o
hoisur"remembrance
that he had already otherwise long previously
made good his very substantial claims to re-
cognition as a man of letters. As the biographer
of Nicholas Bacon, of William Penn, of Robert
Blake, of John Howard, he had vindicated the
fair fame of men whose reputations, to say the
least of them, in very deed and truth, were not
unworthy of vindication. He had, at a still
earlier period in his career, sketched with a
wonderfully graphic vigour—as with an iron stylus
dipped in vitriol--the Literature of the Lower
Orders. He had described —as the future
biographer of Howard might have been ex-
pected to describe them, namely, with an uncom-
promising truth, mingled with a most humane
suggestiveness—the Prisons of London. In writing
the Life of Penn, he had contended, and, what is far
more, had successfully contended hand to hand with
Lord Macaulay. In writing the Life of Blake, he
had, in recording the deeds of that great English
Worthy, Admiral and General, laboured harmo-
niously side by side with Lord Dundonald. In
writing the Life of Bacon, he had triumphantly
scattered to the winds the aspersers of the Father of
Inductive Philosophy, and, while doing this, had con-
trived rather seriously to mar the reputation acquired
by Lord Campbell as the historian of his own official
predecessors, the Lord High Chancellors of England.
It was after the accomplishment of these and other
kindred labours in the pleasant paths of literature,
that Mr. Dixon only last year gave us such good
reason to welcome him with more satisfaction
than ever, by the publication of his book upon
" The Holy Land," a work which we are still dis-
posed (though without any disparagement whatever,
let us add, to these present volumes) to regard as
his masterpiece. As if resolved upon the production
of the most startling contrast that could well
have been contrived, he now claims public attention
anew, immediately afterwards, by presenting to the
world two companion volumes of a diametrical
opposite character to the two but just now particu-
larized. Traversing with him but yesterday, as we have
said, the regions of Palestine, we are to-day spirited
away by him to " fresh fiel is and pastures new."
New America, that is—the very titlo of these two ex-
hilarating and vivacious volumes, the key-note to
the vivacity of which is struck clearly and reso-
nantly at the very outset, thus :—[Titne: by the way,
August, 1866 —Place : Atchison City, Missouri,
U.S.—luterlocutors : a couple of Western boys,
hailing, each of them, from Bleeding Kansas, and
taking stock (while they converse as follows) of our
author and his companion voyageur, Mr. Charles
Wentworth Dilke, to whom, by the way, these
—.omit. 1 volumes are affectionately inscribed by Mr. Dixon:]
................ ens - e Guess these Yanks must look alive on this side the
river, unless they should happen to enjoy having their eye-
teeth drawn—ON Judge ?"
The man to whom this appeal is made as judge lifts up
his chin from a dish of hominy and corned beef, glances
first at myself, then at my fellow traveller, and, after wink-
jug an eye to the right and left, says slowly, 't Guess you
are right there, Sheriff."
Thereauent—about the drawing of those same meta-
phorical eye-teeth—quoth our traveller (anecdotally
and quite par parenthese) "Five or six years ago,
when calling on my old friend Landor in his Flo-
rentine house, and expressing my joy at finding
him so halo and bright (he was then eighty-four), I
heard, in reply to my congratulations, these notice-
able words :—' My dear fellow, say no more
about it, I have lost four of my teeth.' When
I smiled, the veteran added, 'Do not laugh at
mo ; I would rather have lost all my intellect than
one of my teeth." A phrase so over-strong, in the
emphasis of it, that one is almost tempted to hint
that not only four of his teeth had then left him, but
that, say, four out of his five wits had already gone to
keep them company. So divergent are the views of
poets no less than of other men as to whether the loss
of teeth be matter for lament or gratulation, that we
would here offer to our author's consideration as a
sort of companion picture to this reminiscence of
his own in regard to Savage Landor immediately
before the close of his long life, our own recollec-
tion of Leigh Hunt's remarking to us shortly
before the close of his life, that ho had just been
exulting over the loss of the last of his teeth
Observing whimsically that he felt thereby so
much the more etherialized ! Reverting, however,
to the threatened drawing of the eye-teeth of any
Yank or supposed Yank coming over the border-
line separating Missouri from Kansas—as plea-
santly intimated to our author and his travelling
companion by those two Western boys designating
each other respectively Judge.and Sheriff—we would
here again remark that the interchange of
those comments of theirs across the hotel table
at Atchison last August, strikes the keynote, as we
have said, to the prelude of these two most animated
and entertaining volumes. Better still, however,
than the commencement, is the conclusion
of that same opening chapter of the First Volume,
where an incident is related that, as Mr. Dixon
says, with a twinkling sense of the fun of the thing
in telling it—at once raisea him and his companion
in the estimation of those two sardonic hinters
about the drawing of eye-teeth (Judge and Sheriff)
—" Raises us in their good opinion to a height yet
higher than that from which we had evidently fal-
len, enabling us to quit the town, morally speaking,
sword in hand and with flying colours. Saunter-
ing down the street, enjoying our gossip and cigar,
we note the word Post-office on a shop front,
and on going inside we find there is one letter
with my name on the cover, written in an un-
known hand, on which -three cents are due. Pay-
ing the money and breaking open the seal, I find
the letter is not for me ; on which I fold and re-
store it to the postmaster, saying it is not mine,
and should be kept for the owner, to whom it is
perhaps of moment, Eyeing me in a queer way,
the postmaster takes the letter, and gives me back
my change of three cents. 'Do you see ?' says
the sheriff to his nearest friend, ' d—d smart that
—read his letter and got his money back ! Jiang
me if I think they are Yanks after all.' Dne
touch of roguery, it would seem—[here remarks
Mr. Dixon, serio-comically, in conclusion, when
relating the incident]—Ono touch of roguery, it
would seem, is enough to make the whole world
kin." Wide as the poles asunder, it hardly needs i
be said, are these recollections of New America,
when contrasted or brought into direct compari-
son with their authoeft previous book about " T4e

LI:
•

(REUTER'S TELEGRAMS.)

ATJSTRIii.

VIENNA, Jan. 24.

The Emperor received yesterday, at noon, the de-
putation charged to present to his Majesty the ad-
dress of the Hungarian Diet relative to the Imperial
Patent upon the organisation of the army. The
Emperor, in replying to the speech of the spokes-
man of the deputation, said that he hoped that
an Imperial rescript, to be promulgated shortly-,
would remove all the apprehensions expressed in
the address. The Emperor added that he was
ready to give satisfaction to the wishes of Hun-
gary as soon as mutual confidence should render
it possible to remove the difficulties still opposing
the formation of a responsible Ministry.
The Empress of Austria left yesterday afternoon
for Zurich, on a visit to her sister, the Countess
Trani.

BERLIN, Jan. 23.

MEAT.