in regard to the
realistic, when the truth of a well-told story or life-like character
does not come home, we think that then, too, there is deficiency in the
critical ability. But there is nothing necessarily lacking to a man
because he does not enjoy _The Heathen Chinee_ or _The Biglow Papers_;
and the man to whom these delights of American humour are leather and
prunello may be of all the most enraptured by the wit of Sam Weller or
the mock piety of Pecksniff. It is a matter of taste and not of
intellect, as one man likes caviare after his dinner, while another
prefers apple-pie; and the man himself cannot, or, as far as we can see,
does not direct his own taste in the one matter more than in the other.

Therefore I cannot ask others to share with me the delight which I have
in the various and peculiar expressions of the ludicrous which are
common to Thackeray. Some considerable portion of it consists in bad
spelling. We may say that Charles James Harrington Fitzroy Yellowplush,
or C. FitzJeames De La Pluche, as he is afterwards called, would be
nothing but for his "orthogwaphy so carefully inaccuwate." As I have
before said, Mrs. Malaprop had seemed to have reached the height of this
humour, and in having done so to have made any repetition unpalatable.
But Thackeray's studied blundering is altogether different from that of
Sheridan. Mrs. Malaprop uses her words in a delightfully wrong sense.
Yellowplush would be a very intelligible, if not quite an accurate
writer, had he not made for himself special forms of English words
altogether new to the eye.

"My ma wrapped up my buth in a mistry. I may be illygitmit; I may have
been changed at nus; but I've always had gen'l'm'nly tastes through
life, and have no doubt that I come of a gen'l'm'nly origum." We cannot
admit that there is wit, or even humour, in bad spelling alone. Were it
not that Yellowplush, with his bad spelling, had so much to say for
himself, there would be nothing in it; but there is always a sting of
satire directed against some real vice, or some growing vulgarity, which
is made sharper by the absurdity of the language. In _The Diary of
George IV._ there are the following reflections on a certain
correspondence; "Wooden you phansy, now, that the author of such a
letter, instead of writun about pipple of tip-top quality, was
describin' Vinegar Yard? Would you beleave that the lady he was a-ritin'
to was a chased modist lady of honour and mother of a f