ishment, gratitude, and disapproval. Who will
not regret that talents, which might have profited in the higher
walks of Philosophy, or in Art itself, have been so much devoted to a
rummaging among lumber-rooms; nay too often to a scraping in kennels,
where lost rings and diamond-necklaces are nowise the sole conquests?
Regret is unavoidable; yet censure were loss of time. To cure him of his
mad humors British Criticism would essay in vain: enough for her if she
can, by vigilance, prevent the spreading of such among ourselves. What
a result, should this piebald, entangled, hyper-metaphorical style of
writing, not to say of thinking, become general among our Literary men!
As it might so easily do. Thus has not the Editor himself, working over
Teufelsdrockh's German, lost much of his own English purity? Even as
the smaller whirlpool is sucked into the larger, and made to whirl along
with it, so has the lesser mind, in this instance, been forced to become
portion of the greater, and, like it, see all things figuratively: which
habit time and assiduous effort will be needed to eradicate.

Nevertheless, wayward as our Professor shows himself, is there any
reader that can part with him in declared enmity? Let us confess, there
is that in the wild, much-suffering, much-inflicting man, which almost
attaches us. His attitude, we will hope and believe, is that of a man
who had said to Cant, Begone; and to Dilettantism, Here thou canst not
be; and to Truth, Be thou in place of all to me: a man who had
manfully defied the "Time-Prince," or Devil, to his face; nay perhaps,
Hannibal-like, was mysteriously consecrated from birth to that warfare,
and now stood minded to wage the same, by all weapons, in all places,
at all times. In such a cause, any soldier, were he but a Polack
Scythe-man, shall be welcome.

Still the question returns on us: How could a man occasionally of keen
insight, not without keen sense of propriety, who had real Thoughts to
communicate, resolve to emit them in a shape bordering so closely on the
absurd? Which question he were wiser than the present Editor who should
satisfactorily answer. Our conjecture has sometimes been, that
perhaps Necessity as well as Choice was concerned in it. Seems it
not conceivable that, in a Life like our Professor's, where so much
bountifully given by Nature had in Practice failed and misgone,
Literature also would never rightly prosper: that striving with his
characteristic vehemen