Edited by David H. Wallace The author of these doleful reflections was not a criminal condemned to lifelong exile in Australia, nor a bankrupt emigrating to America in the hope of retrieving his fortunes in a new country, nor even a consumptive poet setting out on what he feared was a hopeless quest for a more healthful clime. He was a tourist, a man evidently of some means and education, one of those whose "restless and discontented minds," as he wrote, "seize every project which promises to display Nature to us in a novel form." This voyage, his second to the "Western World," was prompted solely by curiosity. If he had thoughts of emigrating, his experiences in the new world dispelled them for he returned to Scotland firm in the conviction "that if within thy shores, Dear Albion, man cannot be happy, he must be miserable in every other part of the world." The diary which Dunlop kept during his travels in the United States, Canada and Cuba, or rather the book he wrote about them for his own amusement and never published, came into the possession of The New-York Historical Society in 1953. Although he disclaimed any intention of allowing the work to be published, the author wrote a little introduction warning the "Gentle Reader" who might some day come upon it that his narrative was neither useful nor elegant but "a heterogeneous mass of information hastily collected from the windows of the mail coach during a post haste excursion thro the United States of America and Canada." "It is of no consequence in my opinion," he added, "how many volumes a man writes, provided he does not publish them, for it injures none but himself and even that is doubtful, for some say it is better" to write nonsense than to be idle." Despite its sketchiness, for Dunlop was no De Tocqueville, his unpretentious narrative presents a series of lively impressions of life along the Atlantic seaboard and in upstate New York in the years 1810-1811. Not the least of its charms, moreover, is the author's unconscious revelation of himself. He was first of all a Scot, constantly on the alert to note points of similarity or difference between America and his native land. He was also a loyal 265