thus announces his proud position:  “Ime the first Lord in the younited States of A mercary Now of Newburyport. it is the voice of the peopel and I cant Help it.”  This extract is from his famous little book called “A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.”  As an inventor of a new American style he goes far beyond Mr. Whitman, who, to be sure, cares little for the dictionary, and makes his own rules of rhythm, so far as there is any rhythm in his sentences.  But Lord Timothy spells to suit himself, and in place of employing punctuation as it is commonly used, prints a separate page of periods, colons, semicolons, commas, notes of interrogation and of admiration, with which the reader is requested to “peper and soolt” the book as he pleases.

I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter, who not only taught his countrymen that they need not go to the Heralds’ College to authenticate their titles of nobility, but also that they were at perfect liberty to spell just as they liked, and to write without troubling themselves about stops of any kind.  In writing what I suppose he intended for poetry, he did not even take the pains to break up his lines into lengths to make them look like verse, as may be seen by the following specimen: 

        Wonderof wonders!

How great the soul is!  Do not you all wonder and admire to see and behold and hear?  Can you all believe half the truth, and admire to hear the wonders how great the soul is—­only behold—­past finding out!  Only see how large the soul is! that if a man is drowned in the sea what a great bubble comes up out of the top of the water...  The bubble is the soul.

I confess that I am not in sympathy with some of the movements that accompany the manifestations of American social and literary independence.  I do not like the assumption of titles of Lords and Knights by plain citizens of a country which prides itself on recognizing simple manhood and womanhood as sufficiently entitled to respect without these unnecessary additions.  I do not like any better the familiar, and as it seems to me rude, way of speaking of our fellow-citizens who are entitled to the common courtesies of civilized society.  I never thought it dignified or even proper for a President of the United States to call himself, or to be called by others, “Frank” Pierce.  In the first place I had to look in a biographical dictionary to find out whether his baptismal name was Franklin, or Francis, or simply Frank, for I think children are sometimes christened with this abbreviated name.  But it is too much in the style of Cowper’s unpleasant acquaintance: 

     “The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
     And proves by thumping on your back
     How he esteems your merit.”