iatribe! The suicide of Dr. Bouthoin at San Francisco was the
finishing stroke to the chances of success of the Serial;--although we
are promised splendid evolutions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who, after
brilliant achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons of Old
England's modern renown, for a determined wrestle with our English
pronunciation of words, and rescue of the spelling of them from the
printer. His headache over the present treatment of the verb 'To bid,'
was a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before Japanese, and
who acknowledged now 'in contrition of spirit,' that in formerly opposing
the scheme for an Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language
to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public. Further, he
discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to
the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point
of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders
'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the
porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.' After a week's privation
of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of satire upon his
countrymen. As for the 'pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr.
Bouthoin,' Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over dose of
the pathos; and the same might be suspected in Britannia's elegy upon
him, a strain of hot eulogy throughout. Mr. Semhians, all but
treasonably, calls it, Papboat and Brandy:--'our English literary diet of
the day': stimulating and not nourishing. Britannia's mournful
anticipation, that 'The shroud enwinding this my son is mine!'--should
the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the
giant in mainly supporting her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the
note of Conservatism. But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed
suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed
dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise,
and no longer relieved by the practice'--to translate from Dr. Gannius:
we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not
what to think: except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market's
butcher in the Satiric Art.

Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which, to
her present feeling, was inhuman. As little as our native public, had she
then any sympathy for the working in the idea