as astounded to find the _feuilleton_ introducing a pair of stammerers
talking in this agreeable fashion:

"Wou-wou-would you de-de-de-deceive me, you wr-wr-wretch?" said
the old corsair in a tone of thunder.

"I ne-ne-ne-never de-de-de-deceived an-an-an-anybody,"
exclaimed Baccarat, imitating the other's defect in
pronunciation.

"Wh-wh-wh-where is Ro-ro-rocam-bo-bole?"

"You ne-ne-never will kn-know."

"He will make all his characters stutter soon," said Millaud. "We had
better pay him by the line." Of course this is a story _faite a
plaisir_, as is also the one that as soon as Dumas made his first
contract by the line, enchanted with the arrangement, he invented dear
old Grimaud, who only opened his mouth to utter "yes," "no," "what?"
"ah!" "bah!" and other monosyllables; but when the editor, who knew the
cash price of "peuh" and "oh," declared he would only pay for lines half
full, Grimaud was slaughtered the next morning. However, these yarns
show that the French can satirize their jerky, staccato style of
_feuilleton_, with each sentence staked off in a paragraph by itself,
like some grimacing clown, who expects each particular joke or
handspring to be observed individually, and to be greeted with separate
applause. Across the channel we of course find the English journals
going to the other extreme, in insular pride, and packing distinct
subjects into the same paragraph.

Greek and Roman Tuppers used, no doubt, to "reel off a couple of hundred
lines, standing on one foot;" but the veneering of a thin layer of ideas
upon a thick layer of words is naturally the special trait of our age of
cheap ink and paper, of steam printing, and of paying for writing by
long measure. The "Country Parson" is a favorite writer of this sort,
whose excellence is in "the art of putting things," rather than in
having many things to put. The essays of the "Spectator," "Guardian,"
"Tatler," "Rambler," rarely gave only a pennyworth of wit to an
intolerable deal of words; but our modern periodical essay achieves
success by taking some such assertion as "Old maids are agreeable," or
"Old maids are disagreeable," and wire-drawing it into sundry yards of
readable matter. Macbeth's

The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon!
Where got'st thou that goose-look?

would supply a modern playwright with a square foot of gold-beaten
invective. "True poems," said Irving, "are caskets which e