I am much obliged to you for the intelligence respecting that “excellent piece of work,” my book. Mr. Butler desires me to tell you, with his best compliments, that he will forewarn you when he means to reap the wages of iniquity. And now, permit me to tell you that to lithograph a challenge is not an American custom. They are determined and desperate duellers, and universally the most reckless of any people, not savages, in the world. But Mr. Willis, I beg you to believe, is by no means a sample of either a good or a bad American. I have never heard him mentioned in this country but with unfavourable comments, and I should almost be sorry that you fancied he was a pattern Yankee. What is to befall him I can’t think, for surely Captain Marryat is not a man to be trifled with; he don’t write as if he were. How much I like his books, and how much I should like to know him! A friend of mine is about to publish a journal of his stay in England. I think it will be rather better than your friend, Mr. Slidell’s, and I will send it to you.
