was a quaint beginning for one who had
soon to plead before Japanese, and who acknowledged now 'in contrition
of spirit,' that in formerly opposing the scheme for an Academy, he
helped to the handing of our noble language to the rapid reporter of
news for an apathetic public. Further, he discovered in astonishment the
subordination of all literary Americans to the decrees of their literary
authorities; marking a Transatlantic point of departure, and contrasting
ominously with the unruly Islanders 'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of
their various ways, in all the porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the
trough.' After a week's privation of bat and ball, he is, lighted or
not, a gas-jet of satire upon his countrymen. As for the 'pathetic
sublimity of the Funeral of Dr. Bouthoin,' Victor inveighed against
an impious irony in the over dose of the pathos; and the same might
be suspected in Britannia's elegy upon him, a strain of hot eulogy
throughout. Mr. Semhians, all but treasonably, calls it, Papboat and
Brandy:--'our English literary diet of the day': stimulating and
not nourishing. Britannia's mournful anticipation, that 'The shroud
enwinding this my son is mine!'--should the modern generation depart
from the track of him who proved himself the giant in mainly supporting
her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the note of Conservatism. But
considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed suicide under a depression
of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed dishes, upon a physical
system inspired by the traditions of exercise, and no longer relieved by
the practice'--to translate from Dr. Gannius: we are again at war with
the writer's reverential tone, and we know not what to think: except,
that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market's butcher in the Satiric
Art.

Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which,
to her present feeling, was inhuman. As little as our native public, had
she then any sympathy for the working in the idea: she wanted throbs,
visible aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale
of slaughter--periodically invading all English classes as a flush from
the undrained lower, Vikings all--to frigid sterile Satire. And truly
it is not a fruit-bearing rod. Colney had to stand on the defence of
it against the damsel's charges. He thought the use of the rod, while
expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and
those noble heathens, beneficial for b