happy to receive; the only difficulty is, that our worthy friend
Christopher is a very absolute person, and therefore always judges for
himself with regard to everything that is offered." Now
this--considering that he himself, William Blackwood, was Christopher
North, in spirit, if not in substance, and that he himself, and not
Wilson, was the autocrat from whose judgment there was no appeal--might
pass anywhere, I think, for one of the happiest examples of persevering,
impudent mystification ever hazarded by a respectable man, while writing
confidentially to another, and quite of a piece with the celebrated
Chaldee manuscript.

And now for my acquaintance with the man himself. I was living in
Baltimore. I had given up my editorships. I had forsworn poetry and
story-telling, (on paper,) and had not only entered upon the profession
of the law with encouraging success, but had begun to settle upon my
lees.

One day, while dining with my friend Henry Robinson, who introduced gas
into Boston, after a series of disastrous experiments in Baltimore, and
the conversation happening to turn upon that subject, we wandered off
into the state of English opinions generally. He was an Englishman by
birth and early education, though his heart was American to the core.
Something was said about the literature of the day, and the question was
asked,--"Who reads an American book?" I blazed out, of course, and,
after denouncing the "Edinburgh Review," where the impudent question was
first broached, accompanied by the suggestion, that, so long as we could
"import our literature in bales and hogsheads," we had better not try to
manufacture for ourselves, I made up my mind on the spot, and within the
next following half-hour at furthest, to carry the war into Africa.

Mr. Walsh,--"Robert Walsh, Junior, Esquire,"--the "American Gentleman,"
as he called himself in the title-page of his Dictionary,--had
acknowledged, while undertaking our vindication, that our American
Parnassus was barren, or fruitful only in weeds; and by common consent
my countrymen had taken for the highest praise throughout the land what
I regarded as at best a humiliating admission from our friends over sea.
They had acknowledged, and we were base enough to feel flattered by the
acknowledgment, that, although we could not even hope to write English,
and were wellnigh destitute of invention, having no materials to work
with, and little or no aptitude for anything but the