here sneers are safe, blind to the
glaring fact that sneers are never safe for him. Bold behind his Tory
bulwarks, he warns boys against adopting Mr. Bright's opinions, and so
becoming "selfish, calculating, cold; as careless of true nobility of
purpose and of soul and as worshipful of material success as Mr. Bright
himself;" and he has his little fling at Tupper, in common with many
another literary drummer-boy who would earn a cheap reputation for valor
by attacking what his superiors have already demolished. We should scorn
to parry the puny thrust of this Liliputian at the noble name which
America delights to honor, or to repel the charge of coldness against
that great heart whose burst of anguish over the grave of his friend,
and our friend, and humanity's, awoke an answering sob in a thousand
homes of this Western World; but we beg to assure this fine old English
Gentle Man and scholar, that, reading these essays, we are ready to
pronounce Mr. Tupper a master of style and his philosophy a striking and
valuable treatise.

We really beg pardon of our readers for covering so much space with this
flummery. We intended to despatch it with a thrust or two; but when our
pen was once caught in the flimsy stuff, it was difficult to withdraw it
again without bringing away considerable portions of the tangle.
Moreover, a book of so much pretension is not to be as lightly passed by
as its humbler brethren. A book that comes to us in fair type and fine
paper, bearing the imprint of a well-known and highly respected
publishing house,--a book that invokes the first names in literature and
meddles with the higher laws of life, that takes on the airs of a censor
and pushes forward into the guild of genius, that by the assumption of
its tone and the broadcast scatteration--depend upon it, that is the
word--of its odds and ends of learning, or by what hocus-pocus we know
not, has attained to a third edition in a country proud of the accuracy
and elegance of its scholarship, and that now brings its brazen face to
our doors, seeking a welcome at the hearthstones which it has insulted,
is not to be dismissed with a simple "Not at home." We have chosen
rather to pillory the pretender, pelting him only with such missiles as
his own pockets furnished. We now discharge him from custody, bidding
him and all his kind bear in mind the assurance, that, while for English
genius, English wisdom, English truth, and English love, we have only
admi