The expression of Mr. Bowles, “his consciousness of physical defect,” is not very clear.  It may mean deformity or debility.  If it alludes to Pope’s deformity, it has been attempted to be shown that this was no insuperable objection to his being beloved.  If it alludes to debility, as a consequence of Pope’s peculiar conformation, I believe that it is a physical and known fact that hump-backed persons are of strong and vigorous passions.  Several years ago, at Mr. Angelo’s fencing rooms, when I was a pupil of him and of Mr. Jackson, who had the use of his rooms in Albany on the alternate days, I recollect a gentleman named B—­ll—­gh—­t, remarkable for his strength, and the fineness of his figure.  His skill was not inferior, for he could stand up to the great Captain Barclay himself, with the muffles on;—­a task neither easy nor agreeable to a pugilistic aspirant.  As the by-standers were one day admiring his athletic proportions, he remarked to us, that he had five brothers as tall and strong as himself, and that their father and mother were both crooked, and of very small stature;—­I think he said, neither of them five feet high.  It would not be difficult to adduce similar instances; but I abstain, because the subject is hardly refined enough for this immaculate period, this moral millenium of expurgated editions in books, manners, and royal trials of divorce.

This laudable delicacy—­this crying-out elegance of the day—­reminds me of a little circumstance which occurred when I was about eighteen years of age.  There was then (and there may be still) a famous French “entremetteuse,” who assisted young gentlemen in their youthful pastimes.  We had been acquainted for some time, when something occurred in her line of business more than ordinary, and the refusal was offered to me (and doubtless to many others), probably because I was in cash at the moment, having taken up a decent sum from the Jews, and not having spent much above half of it.  The adventure on the tapis, it seems, required some caution and circumspection.  Whether my venerable friend doubted my politeness I cannot tell; but she sent me a letter couched in such English as a short residence of sixteen years in England had enabled her to acquire.  After several precepts and instructions, the letter closed.  But there was a postscript.  It contained these words:—­“Remember, Milor, that delicaci ensure everi succes.”  The delicacy of the day is exactly, in all its circumstances, like that of this respectable foreigner.  “It ensures every succes,” and is not a whit more moral than, and not half so honourable as, the coarser candour of our less polished ancestors.

To return to Mr. Bowles.  “If what is here extracted can excite in the mind (I will not say of any ‘layman’, of any ‘Christian’, but) of any human being,” &c. &c.  Is not Mr. Gilchrist a “human being?” Mr. Bowles asks “whether in attributing an article,” &c. &c, “to the critic, he had any reason for distinguishing him with that courtesy,” &c. &c.  But Mr. Bowles was wrong in “attributing the article” to Mr. Gilchrist at all; and would not have been right in calling him a dunce and a grocer, if he had written it.