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:

WONDER OF 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 fi