I acknowledge the vigor of these lines, which nobody could have written who had not been compelled, in the sunny summer-days, to bray drugs in a mortar.  Yet who does not like to read a medical book?—­to pore over its jargon, to muddle himself into a hypo, and to imagine himself afflicted with the dreadful disease with the long Latin name, the meaning of which he does not by any means comprehend?  And did not the poems of our friend Bavius Blunderbore, Esq., which were of “a low and moderate sort,” cause you to giggle yourself wellnigh into an asphyxy,—­calf and coxcomb as he was?  Is not ——­’s last novel a better antidote against melancholy, stupendously absurd as it is, than foalfoot or plantain, featherfew or savin, agrimony or saxifrage, or any other herb in old Robert Burton’s pharmacopoeia?  I am afraid that we are a little wanting in gratitude, when we shake our sides at the flaying of Marsyas by some Quarterly of Apollo,—­to the dis-cuticlcd, I mean.  If he had not piped so stridently, we should not have had half so much sport; yet small largess does the miserable minstrel get for tooting tunelessly.  Let us honor the brave who fall in the battle of print.  ’Twas a noble ambition, after all, which caused our asinine friend to cloak himself in that cast leonine skin.  Who would be always reciting from a hornbook to Mistress Minerva?  What, I pray you, would become of the corn, if there were no scarecrows?  All honor to you, then, my looped and windowed sentinel, standing upon the slope of Parnassus,—­standing so patiently there, with your straw bowels, doing yeoman-service, spite of the flouts and gibes and cocked thumbs of Zoilus and his sneering, snarling, verjuicy, captious crew,—­standing there, as stood the saline helpmate of Lot, to fright our young men and virgins from the primrose-pitfalls of Poesy,—­standing there to warn them against the seductions of Phoebus, and to teach them that it is better to hoe than to hum!

The truth is, that the good and clever and polyphloisboic writers have too long monopolized the attention of the world, so that the little, well-intentioned, humble, and stupid plebeians of the guild have been snubbed out of sight.  Somebody—­the name is not given, but I shrewdly suspect Canon Smith—­wrote to Sir James Mackintosh,—­“Why do you not write three volumes quarto?  You only want this to be called the greatest man of your time.  People are all disposed to admit anything we say of you, but I think it unsafe and indecent to put you so high without something in quarto.”  This was, of course, half fun and half truth.  As there is, however, little need of setting the world on fire to demonstrate some chemical theory, so it is possible that the flame of culture may be cherished without kindling a conflagration, and truth transmitted from sire to son without the construction of edificial monsters too big for the knees, too abstruse for the brains, and too great for the lifetime of humanity.  I am not a very constant reader of Mr. Robert Browning, but I own to many a pleasant grin over his Sibrandus Schafnabrugensis dropped into the crevice of the plum-tree, and afterward pitifully reclaimed, and carried to its snug niche with the promise,—­