bays.  Each piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other’s unbiased review, thinks—­Here’s pretty high praise, but no more than my due.  Well, we laugh at them both, and yet make no great fuss when the same farce is acted to benefit us.  Even I, who, it asked, scarce a month since, what Fudge meant, should have answered, the dear Public’s critical judgment, begin to think sharp-witted Horace spoke sooth when he said that the Public sometimes hit the truth.

In reading these lines, you perhaps have a vision of a person in pretty good health and condition; and yet, since I put forth my primary edition, I have been crushed, scorched, withered, used up and put down (by Smith with the cordial assistance of Brown), in all, if you put any faith in my rhymes, to the number of ninety-five several times, and, while I am writing,—­I tremble to think of it, for I may at this moment be just on the brink of it,—­Molybdostom, angry at being omitted, has begun a critique,—­am I not to be pitied?[1]

Now I shall not crush them since, indeed, for that matter, no pressure I know of could render them flatter; nor wither, nor scorch them,—­no action of fire could make either them or their articles drier; nor waste time in putting them down—­I am thinking not their own self-inflation will keep them from sinking; for there’s this contradiction about the whole bevy,—­though without the least weight, they are awfully heavy.  No, my dear honest bore, surdo fabulam narras, they are no more to me than a rat in the arras.  I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half-comic sorrow, to think that they all will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half-dozen selves.  Once snug in my attic, my fire in a roar, I leave the whole pack of them outside the door.  With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get fou with O’Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o’er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne’s Jacob’s-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton’s version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before, that marvel, a poet divine who can bore.  Or, out of my study, the scholar thrown off, Nature holds up her shield ’gainst the sneer and the scoff; the landscape, forever consoling and kind, pours her wine and her oil on the smarts of the mind.  The waterfall, scattering its vanishing gems; the tall grove of hemlocks, with moss on their stems, like plashes of sunlight;