ort" is a
subject which the Immortal would hardly handle. Well, well; let us allow
that the book is not worthy of such a polite critic--that the beer is
not strong enough for a gentleman who has taste and experience in beer.

That opinion no man can ask his honor to alter; but (the beer being the
question), why make unpleasant allusions to the Gazette, and hint at the
probable bankruptcy of the brewer? Why twit me with my poverty; and what
can the Times' critic know about the vacuity of my exchequer? Did he
ever lend me any money? Does he not himself write for money? (and who
would grudge it to such a polite and generous and learned author?) If he
finds no disgrace in being paid, why should I? If he has ever been poor,
why should he joke at my empty exchequer? Of course such a genius is
paid for his work: with such neat logic, such a pure style, such a
charming poetical turn of phrase, of course a critic gets money. Why, a
man who can say of a Christmas book that "it is an opuscule denominated
so-and-so, and ostensibly intended to swell the tide of expansive
emotion incident upon the exodus of the old year," must evidently have
had immense sums and care expended on his early education, and deserves
a splendid return. You can't go into the market, and get scholarship
like THAT, without paying for it: even the flogging that such a writer
must have had in early youth (if he was at a public school where the
rods were paid for), must have cost his parents a good sum. Where would
you find any but an accomplished classical scholar to compare the books
of the present (or indeed any other) writer to "sardonic divings after
the pearl of truth, whose lustre is eclipsed in the display of the
diseased oyster;" mere Billingsgate doesn't turn out oysters like these;
they are of the Lucrine lake:--this satirist has pickled his rods in
Latin brine. Fancy, not merely a diver, but a sardonic diver: and the
expression of his confounded countenance on discovering not only a
pearl, but an eclipsed pearl, which was in a diseased oyster! I say
it is only by an uncommon and happy combination of taste, genius, and
industry, that a man can arrive at uttering such sentiments in such fine
language,--that such a man ought to be well paid, as I have no doubt
he is, and that he is worthily employed to write literary articles,
in large type, in the leading journal of Europe. Don't we want men of
eminence and polite learning to sit on the literary bench,