des; truths which have been
truisms for at least a century, uttered with all the pomp and
circumstance of newly discovered laws; quotations garbled, pointless, or
dipped in a feeble venom; shreds of learning pieced together, with or
without adaptation, in a nondescript patchwork; the fragments of a
thousand feasts huddled into one pot, simmered over a slow fire, and
served up as a pretty dish to set before a king.

The uniformity of the book is wonderful. It is always heavy. Its
falsehood is insipid. Its very malice has no pungency. It is dull even
where it hates. Now and then we stumble on a paragraph which starts up
from the dead level around it, glowing with real fire; but at the end we
are sure to find that it is translated from Victor Hugo or transferred
from Emerson; and generally these borrowed plumes are so torn and
bedraggled in their clumsy removal that the very bird they grew on would
scarcely recognize them. There is no intentional, no malign
maltreatment, to give us the relief of a real indignation; but we are
kept in a state of constant irritation by a series of petty
encroachments upon the integrities of literature. There is no law
compelling a man to garnish his speech with floating verse; but if he
choose to do so, he should make a point of presenting it in its true
form. At the very least, if he must garble, let him garble rhythmically,
and not add splay feet to spoiled force. One may not have a poetic taste
or a musical ear; but if he has fingers and toes, he need not say,

"Yet I doubt not through ages one increasing purpose runs."

It is utter demoralization to write "pride in his port and fire in his
eye." Indeed, the singular fatality which attends these quotations has
something of the sublime. If a sentiment _can_ be reproduced with all
its sparkle extinguished, our Gentle Man is the one to do it. Diffuse
everywhere else, he is compact in erring, and crowds more mistakes into
a paragraph than are often met on a page. He says incidentally, "Lord
Byron wrote a very pretty song, conveying the idea in its refrain 'that
the day of my destiny _is_ over, the star of my hope has declined.' Now
it is not a song, as he uses the word; the idea, if it is an idea, is
not in the refrain; there is no refrain in the piece; and there is
nothing said in the piece about the star of his hope. Lord Burleigh's
fulsome she-fool is euphemized into an irksome female fool, and Lord
Byron _jumped up_ one morning and