t ease about his
system; but this is a world in which the truth requires defence, and
specious falsehood must be met with exposure. Grampus having once looked
through the book, no longer wanted any urging to write the most crushing
of replies. This, and nothing less than this, was due from him to the
cause of sound inquiry; and the punishment would cost him little pains.
In three weeks from that time the palpitating Merman saw his book
announced in the programme of the leading Review. No need for Grampus to
put his signature. Who else had his vast yet microscopic knowledge, who
else his power of epithet? This article in which Merman was pilloried
and as good as mutilated--for he was shown to have neither ear nor nose
for the subtleties of philological and archaeological study--was much
read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of
Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views of
the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with
which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud
which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found
amusing in recital. A favourite passage was one in which a certain kind
of sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, having a
phantasmal resemblance to higher animals when seen by ignorant minds in
the twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then the
other, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature's
impostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since a
congenital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made their
every action a pretence--just as a being born in doeskin gloves would
necessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what his
judgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate
hour, this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the showing up of
Merman's mistakes and the mere smattering of linguistic and historical
knowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorising;
but the more learned cited his blunders aside to each other and laughed
the laugh of the initiated. In fact, Merman's was a remarkable case of
sudden notoriety. In London drums and clubs he was spoken of abundantly
as one who had written ridiculously about the Magicodumbras and
Zuzumotzis: the leaders of conversation, whether Christians, Jews,
infidels, or of any other confession except the confe