fly in the ointment and _hiatus valde deflendus_--to wit the
utter absenteeism of a correct and classical style in English
composition.

To the highly educated native gentleman who searches your printed
articles, hoping fondly to find himself in a well of English pure and
undefiled, it proves merely to fish in the air. Conceive, Sir, the
disgustful result to one saturated to the skin of his teeth in best
English masterpieces of immaculate and moderately good prose extracts
and dramatic passages, published with notes for the use of the native
student, at weltering in a hotchpot and hurley-burley of arbitrarily
distorted and very vulgarised cockneydoms and purely London
provincialities, which must be of necessity to him as casting pearls
before a swine!

And I have the honour to inform you of a number of cultivated lively
young native B.A.'s, both here and in my country, who are quite capable
to appreciate really fine writing and sonoriferous periods if published
in your paper, and which would infallibly result in a feather in your
cap and bring increase of grit to the mill.

If, Honoured Sir, you feel disposed to bolster yourself up with the wet
blanket of a _non possumus_, and reply to me that your existing
quill-drivers are too fat-witted and shallow-pated for the production of
more pretentiously polished lucubrations--aye, not even if they burn the
night-light oil and hear the chimes at midnight! I will not be
hoodwinked by the superficiality of your _cui bono_, and shall make you
the answer that I am willing _for an exceedingly paltry honorarium_ to
rush into the Gordian knot and write you the most superior essays on
every conceivable and inconceivable subject under the sun, as per
enclosed samples which I forward respectfully for your delightful and
golden opinions, guaranteeing faithfully that all of your readers in
every hemisphere and postal district will fall in love with such a new
departure and fresh tack.

The specimens I send are _not my best_, only very ordinary and humdrum
affairs--but _ex pede Herculem!_ Hon'ble Sir, and you will see how
transcendentally superior are even such poor effusions compared to the
fiddle-faddle and gim-crack style of article with which you are being
fobbed off by puzzle-headed and self-opiniated nincompoops.

I can also turn out rhymed poetry after models of Poets TENNYSON,
COWPER, Mrs HEMANS, SOUTHEY, & Co., _done to a tittle_, so as not to be
detected, even by the cynos