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334 MRS. TROLLOPE. savage nature. If she had carried out her original inten- tion, and passed some months with Miss Wright on the tract of primeval wilderness which that lady bought in Tennessee, she might have learned what it costs to settle and subdue a virgin continent. She might have dis- covered that when human beings subdue the wilderness, the wilderness wreaks a revenge upon them in making them half wild. Many of the arts of domestic life are lost in the struggle. Grace of manners is lost. The art of cookery is lost. Comfort is forgotten. Men may gain in rude strength, but must lose in elegance and agreeable- ness. Mrs. Trollope, whether from perversity or want of penetration, perceived nothing of this, and conceived for the people of the United States an extreme repugnance. " I do not like them," she frankly wrote, after a stay among us of three or four years. " I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions, I do not like their government." She expanded these sentiments into two highly amusing volumes, which contain some pure truth, some not unfair burlesque, and an amount of misstatement, misconception, prejudice, and perversity absolutely without example. She had her work illustrated with a dozen or two of carica- tures, not ill-executed, which can now be inspected as curious relics of antiquity. In America half a century ago is antiquity. But I left the Trollopes in Cincinnati in 1828, father, mother, and four children. They had then been in the country more than a year, quite long enough for Mrs. Trollope to discover that Cincinnati had little in common with the republic of her dreams. She had had enough of America. How she abhorred and detested Cincinnati, the first place at which she had halted long enough for much observation ! She says : "Were I an English legislator, instead of sending