a wit so pure, that we almost believe him to be
describing a community of brothers affiliated by the close ties of deep
mutual appreciation. He flings his diamonds of learning upon the page,
and we recognize the scholar whom no extravagance in knowledge can make
bankrupt. We seem to have come by rare chance upon one of those
wardrobes of the early kings, wherein are all savory treasures,--the
rose and violet colored sugars of Alexandria, sweet almonds, and
sharp-toothed ginger. We pardon his puns, indeed we believe them to be
inevitable, the flash of the percussion cap, the sparks of electricity,
St. Elmo's stars, phosphorescent gleams, playing over the restless ocean
of his fruitful imagination. And we are persuaded that if the venerable
Democritus (who was uncanonized only because the Holy See was still
wavering, an anomalous body, in _Weissnichtwo_, and who existed forty
days on the mere sight of bread and honey) had been regaled with the
piquant delicacies of Lowell's picture of a Critic, he might have
continued unto this present. It is a satire so pleasantly constructed,
so full of palpable hits at the 'musty dogmas' of the day, so rich in
mirthful allusion, and with such a generously insinuated tribute to the
true and earnest-hearted critic, that we know not which most to admire,
the sketch, or the soul whence it emanated. The following description of
a 'regular heavy reviewer' is complete:

'And here I must say he wrote excellent articles
On the Hebraic points, or the force of Greek particles,
They filled up the space nothing else was prepared for;
And nobody read that which nobody cared for;
If any old book reached a fiftieth edition,
He could fill forty pages with safe erudition;
He could gauge the old books by the new set of rules,
And his very old nothings pleased very old fools.
But give him a new book fresh out of the heart,
And you put him at sea without compass or chart,--
His blunders aspired to the rank of an art;
For his lore was engraft, something foreign that grew in him,
Exhausting the sap of the native, and true in him,
So that when a man came with a soul that was new in him,
Carving new forms of truth out of Nature's old granite,
New and old at their birth, like Le Verrier's planet,
Which, to get a true judgment, themselves must create
In the soul of their critic the measure and weight,
Being rather themselves a fresh standard of grace,
To compute their