d Proteus Merman,"
"Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or the New Excelsior." They tossed
him on short sentences; they swathed him in paragraphs of winding
imagery; they found him at once a mere plagiarist and a theoriser of
unexampled perversity, ridiculously wrong about _potzis_ and ignorant of
Pali; they hinted, indeed, at certain things which to their knowledge he
had silently brooded over in his boyhood, and seemed tolerably well
assured that this preposterous attempt to gainsay an incomparable
Cetacean of world-wide fame had its origin in a peculiar mixture of
bitterness and eccentricity which, rightly estimated and seen in its
definite proportions, would furnish the best key to his argumentation.
All alike were sorry for Merman's lack of sound learning, but how could
their readers be sorry? Sound learning would not have been amusing; and
as it was, Merman was made to furnish these readers with amusement at no
expense of trouble on their part. Even burlesque writers looked into his
book to see where it could be made use of, and those who did not know
him were desirous of meeting him at dinner as one likely to feed their
comic vein.

On the other hand, he made a serious figure in sermons under the name of
"Some" or "Others" who had attempted presumptuously to scale eminences
too high and arduous for human ability, and had given an example of
ignominious failure edifying to the humble Christian.

All this might be very advantageous for able persons whose superfluous
fund of expression needed a paying investment, but the effect on Merman
himself was unhappily not so transient as the busy writing and speaking
of which he had become the occasion. His certainty that he was right
naturally got stronger in proportion as the spirit of resistance was
stimulated. The scorn and unfairness with which he felt himself to have
been treated by those really competent to appreciate his ideas had
galled him and made a chronic sore; and the exultant chorus of the
incompetent seemed a pouring of vinegar on his wound. His brain became a
registry of the foolish and ignorant objections made against him, and of
continually amplified answers to these objections. Unable to get his
answers printed, he had recourse to that more primitive mode of
publication, oral transmission or button-holding, now generally regarded
as a troublesome survival, and the once pleasant, flexible Merman was on
the way to be shunned as a bore. His interest in new