James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[220] right to speak in its awful name. From whatever cause—these masterly preparations were made in vain; and the Tribune went on its belligerent way, unsmashed. For some weeks, “it kept at” the election frauds, and made a complete exposure of the guilty persons.

Let us glance hastily over the rest of the volume.

It was the year of Charles Dickens' visit to the United States. The Tribune ridiculed the extravagant and unsuitable honors paid to the amiable novelist, but spoke strongly in favor of international copyright, which Mr. Dickens made it his mission “ to advocate. When the American Notes for General Circulation” appeared, the Tribune was one of the few papers that gave it a “ favorable notice.” ‘We have read the book,’ said the Tribune, ‘very carefully, and we are forced to say, in the face of all this stormy denunciation, that, so far as its tone toward this country is concerned, it is one of the very best wars of its class we have ever seen. There is not a sentence it which seems to have sprung from ill-nature or contempt; not a word of censure is uttered for its own sake or in a fault-finding spirit; the whole is a calm, judicious, gentlemanly, unexceptionable record of what the writer saw—and a candid and correct judgment of its worth and its defects. How a writer could look upon the broadly-blazoned and applauded slanders of his own land which abound in this—how he could run through the pages of Lester's book—filled to the margin with the grossest, most unfounded and illiberal assaults upon all the institutions and the social phases of Great Britain—and then write so calmly of this country, with so manifest a freedom from passion and prejudice, as Dick-Ens has done, is to us no slight marvel. That he has done it is infinitely to his credit, and confirms us in the opinion we had long since formed of the soundness of his head and the goodness of his, heart.’

In the summer of 1842, Mr. Greeley made an extensive tour, visiting Washington, Mount Vernon, Poultney, Westhaven, Londonderry, Niagara, and the home of his parents in Pennsylvania, from all of which he wrote letters to the Tribune. His letters from Washington, entitled “Glances at the Senate,” gave agreeable sketches of Calhoun, Preston, Benton, Evans, Crittenden, Wright, and others. Silas Wright he thought the “keenest logician in the Senate,” the “Ajax of plausibility,” the “Talleyrand of the forum.”