riety. As to his style, the Quarterly says:[1] "We cannot compliment our farmer upon his talents as a writer, nor, to do him justice, does he appear to expect it. It was his study to 'avoid everything which might savour of systematic arrangement,' and he has succeeded to admiration. Nothing can be more desultory than his wandering; nothing more heterogeneous than the contents of the same page—radicals and rye-coffee, slavery and green pease, bugs and statistics." Even at the distance of eighty years, it seems surprising that reputable English journals should have made the work of such an author the basis of criticisms upon American life. The sensitiveness of our forebears under such an infliction is not to be wondered at, nor the bitter retort of their representative review.[2]
However, amidst Faux's chaff there is some good grain, quite worth the attention of the student of early American life. His very brutality and frankness lead to revelations of conditions which men more delicately-minded would have felt bound to conceal. We may at this date, perhaps, pardon our author's lack of taste and good manners, for the fidelity with which he holds his mirror up to portray American nature at a time when our Middle West was the Far West. It is perhaps needless to caution the modern reader that the murders, deceits, inhumanities, defects of justice, and barbarities portrayed on the pages of Faux were the exceptional cases, industriously collected by this sensation-monger. His much-boasted revelation of a slave-murder in South Carolina was, as the North American shows, a travesty upon an inquest, and in its sequence maliciously distorted. Despite its carping tone, so annoying to Western people at the time, but which we can now
