If the good heaven have any word to impart to this
unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its
occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of
criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let
who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye off from that
gracious Infinite which embosoms us. As a literary artist, he has
great merits, beginning with the main one, that he never wrote one
dull line. How well read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one
art of writing; with his expedient for expressing those unproven
opinions, which he entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one
of his men of straw from the cell, and the respectable Sauerteig, or
Teufelsdrock, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveller says what is put
into his mouth and disappears. That morbid temperament has given his
rhetoric a somewhat bloated character, a luxury to many imaginative
and learned persons, like a showery south wind with its sunbursts and
rapid chasing of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its
offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish
some concession were possible on the part of the humorist.
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