--to a
dozen scattered through the book--all should resemble him.

But never mind the rest. When he had got thoroughly interested in his
project Mrs. Clemens, who had allowed the cyclone to wear itself out a
little with its own vehemence, suggested that perhaps it would be well
to have some one make an examination of the files of the paper and see
just what had been said of him. So he subscribed for the paper himself
and set a man to work on the back numbers. We will let him tell the
conclusion of the matter himself, in his report of it to Howells:

The result arrived from my New York man this morning. Oh, what a
pitiable wreck of high hopes! The "almost daily" assaults for two
months consist of (1) adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged
idiot in the London Athenaeum, (2) paragraphs from some indignant
Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette, who pays me the vast compliment
of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the
neighborhood of Rabelais, (3) a remark about the Montreal dinner,
touched with an almost invisible satire, and, (4) a remark about
refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not
necessarily malicious; and of course adverse criticism which is not
malicious is a thing which none but fools irritate themselves about.

There, that is the prodigious bugaboo in its entirety! Can you
conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive
a provocation? I am sure I can't. What the devil can those friends
of mine have been thinking about to spread those three or four
harmless things out into two months of daily sneers and affronts?

Boiled down, this vast outpouring of malice amounts to simply this:
one jest (one can make nothing more serious than that out of it).
One jest, and that is all; for foreign criticisms do not count, they
being matters of news, and proper for publication in anybody's
newspaper....

Well, my mountain has brought forth its mouse, and a sufficiently
small mouse it is, God knows. And my three weeks' hard work has got
to go into the ignominious pigeonhole. Confound it, I could have
earned ten thousand dollars with infinitely less trouble.

Howells refers to this episode, and concludes:

So the paper was acquitted and the editor's life was spared. The
wretch never, never knew how near he was to losing it, with
incredible prelimina