news from Percy Popjoy, approved of the genius
of young Pen; when the great Lord Steyne himself, to whom the Major
referred the article, laughed and sniggered over it, swore it was
capital, and that the Muffborough would writhe under it, like a whale
under a harpoon, the Major, as in duty bound, began to admire his nephew
very much, said, "By gad, the young rascal had some stuff in him, and
would do something; he had always said he would do something;" and with
a hand quite tremulous with pleasure, the old gentleman sate down to
write to the widow at Fairoaks all that the great folks had said in
praise of Pen; and he wrote to the young rascal, too, asking when he
would come and eat a chop with his old uncle, and saying that he was
commissioned to take him to dinner at Gaunt House, for Lord Steyne liked
anybody who could entertain him, whether by his folly, wit, or by his
dulness, by his oddity, affectation, good spirits, or any other quality.
Pen flung his letter across the table to Warrington: perhaps he was
disappointed that the other did not seem to be much affected by it.

The courage of young critics is prodigious: they clamber up to the
judgment-seat, and, with scarce a hesitation, give their opinion
upon works the most intricate or profound. Had Macaulay's History or
Herschel's Astronomy been put before Pen at this period, he would have
looked through the volumes, meditated his opinion over a cigar, and
signified his august approval of either author, as if the critic had
been their born superior and indulgent master and patron. By the help
of the Biographie Universelle or the British Museum, he would be able to
take a rapid resume of a historical period, and allude to names, dates,
and facts, in such a masterly, easy way, as to astonish his mamma at
home, who wondered where her boy could have acquired such a prodigious
store of reading and himself, too, when he came to read over his
articles two or three months after they had been composed, and when he
had forgotten the subject and the books which he had consulted. At that
period of his life, Mr. Pen owns that he would not have hesitated,
at twenty-four hours' notice, to pass his opinion upon the greatest
scholars, or to give a judgment upon the Encyclopaedia. Luckily he
had Warrington to laugh at him and to keep down his impertinence by
a constant and wholesome ridicule, or he might have become conceited
beyond all sufferance; for Shandon liked the dash and flip