“Standing by my father’s side, I saw him kill his antagonist and tear the scalp from his head.  Fired with valor and ambition, I rushed furiously upon another, smote him to the earth with my tomahawk, ran my lance through his body, took off his scalp, and returned in triumph to my father.  He said nothing, but looked pleased.”

This little red story describes very well Spelling’s style of literary warfare.  His handling of his most conspicuous victim, Willis, was very much like Black Hawk’s way of dealing with the Osage.  He tomahawked him in heroics, ran him through in prose, and scalped him in barbarous epigrams.  Bryant and Halleck were abundantly praised; hardly any one else escaped.

If the reader wishes to see the bubbles of reputation that were floating, some of them gay with prismatic colors, half a century ago, he will find in the pages of “Truth” a long catalogue of celebrities he never heard of.  I recognize only three names, of all which are mentioned in the little book, as belonging to persons still living; but as I have not read the obituaries of all the others, some of them may be still flourishing in spite of Mr. Spelling’s exterminating onslaught.  Time dealt as hardly with poor Spelling, who was not without talent and instruction, as he had dealt with our authors.  I think he found shelter at last under a roof which held numerous inmates, some of whom had seen better and many of whom had known worse days than those which they were passing within its friendly and not exclusive precincts.  Such, at least, was the story I heard after he disappeared from general observation.

That was the day of Souvenirs, Tokens, Forget-me-nots, Bijous, and all that class of showy annuals.  Short stories, slender poems, steel engravings, on a level with the common fashion-plates of advertising establishments, gilt edges, resplendent binding,—­to manifestations of this sort our lighter literature had very largely run for some years.  The “Scarlet Letter” was an unhinted possibility.  The “Voices of the Night” had not stirred the brooding silence; the Concord seer was still in the lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection.

What dreadful work Spelling made among those slight reputations, floating in swollen tenuity on the surface of the stream, and mirroring each other in reciprocal reflections!  Violent, abusive as he was, unjust to any against whom he happened to have a prejudice, his castigation of the small litterateurs of that day was not harmful, but rather of use.  His attack on Willis very probably did him good; he needed a little discipline, and though he got it too unsparingly, some cautions came with it which were worth the stripes he had to smart under.  One noble writer Spelling treated with rudeness, probably from some accidental