"MY DEAR WATKIN,
"Many thanks for your kindness in sending me a copy of your work,
which, so far as I have gone, pleases me much. You could not have done
a wiser and more patriotic service than to make the people of this
country better acquainted with what is going on in the United States.
It is from that quarter, and not from barbarous Russia, or fickle
France, that we have to expect a formidable rivalry--and yet that
country is less studied or understood in England than is the history of
ancient Egypt or Greece. I should like to go once more to America, if
only to see Niagara again. But I am a bad sailor, and should dread the
turmoil of public meetings when I arrived there.
"My impression of Kossuth's _phrenology_ was that there was not
power or animal energy sufficient to account for the ascendancy he
acquired over a turbulent aristocracy and a rude uncivilized democracy.
The secret lies evidently in his eloquence, in which he certainly
surpasses any modern orator; and, taking all things into account, he is
in that respect probably a phenomenon without equal in past or present
times. I fear when the French news reaches America, it will damp the
ardour of his friends there, and make them more than ever resolved to
'stand upon their own ground' rather than venture into the quagmire of
European politics.
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