it. Analogies with him are as cheap as commonplaces are
to other men. He has no hesitation in announcing his analysis in a
witticism, and condensing a principle into an epigram. His page often
blazes and burns with wit. South, Congreve, and Sheridan are hardly
richer in the precious article. In Mr. Hudson, also, the quality has
an individual character, and is the racier from its genuineness and
from its root in his intellectual constitution. This wit is, perhaps,
the leading characteristic of his style, though his diction varies
sufficiently with the varying demands of his subjects, and often
glides from the tingling concussion of antithesis into the softest
music, or rises from sarcastic brevity and stinging emphasis into rich
and sonorous amplification. The analysis of Iago, and the analysis of
the Weird Sisters, indicate, perhaps, the extremes of his manner.
Throughout the volumes, whether the subject be comic or tragic,
humorous or sublime, there is never any lack of verbal felicities.
These seem to grow spontaneously in the soil of his mind; and there is
no American writer whose style is more wholly free from worn and
wasted images, phrases, and forms of expression. He is neither
mediocre in thought nor expression.

We cannot resist the temptation to give a few of Mr. Hudson's
sentences, illustrative of his manner of stinging the minds of his
readers and enforcing their attention. Speaking of Sir Thomas Lucy, on
whose manor Shakspeare is said to have poached, Hudson remarks: "This
Warwickshire esquire, once so rich and mighty, is now known only as
the block over which the Warwickshire peasant stumbled into
immortality." Referring to those purists who regard words more than
things in their strictures on licentiousness, he calls them persons
"whose morality seems to be all in their ears." Speaking of Hume, "an
exquisite voluptuary among political and metaphysical abstractions,"
he puts him in a class of men who "study art as they study nature,
only in the process of dissection--a process which, of course, scares
away the very life which makes her nature; so that they get, after
all, but a _sort of post-mortem knowledge of her_." Again, he
observes--"Pope, for example, was the prince of versifiers, and Hume
the prince of logicians: with the one versification strangled itself
in a tub of honey; with the other logic broke its neck in trying to
fly in a vacuum. It is by no means strange, therefore, that the
thousand-eye