Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance’s epigrams upon their friends.  He quite joined with his English world in its opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of great guns.  Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest of popgun paper pellets.  The English kick at the insolence, when they are not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is overshadowing and braceing.  Colney’s pretentious and laboured Satiric Prose Epic of ‘the rival tongues,’ particularly offended him, as being a clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid friend’s collapse.  How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such a spiteful diatribe!  The suicide of Dr. Bouthoin at San Francisco was the finishing stroke to the chances of success of the Serial;—­although we are promised splendid evolutions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who, after brilliant achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons of Old England’s modern renown, for a determined wrestle with our English pronunciation of words, and rescue of the spelling of them from the printer.  His headache over the present treatment of the verb ‘To bid,’ was a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before Japanese, and who acknowledged now ‘in contrition of spirit,’ that in formerly opposing the scheme for an Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public.  Further, he discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders ’grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the porker’s gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.’  After a week’s privation of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of satire upon his countrymen.  As for the ’pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr. Bouthoin,’ Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over dose of the pathos; and the same might be suspected in Britannia’s elegy upon him, a strain of hot eulogy throughout.  Mr. Semhians, all but treasonably, calls it, Papboat and Brandy:—­’our English literary diet of the day’:  stimulating and not nourishing.  Britannia’s mournful anticipation, that ’The shroud enwinding this my son is mine!’—­should the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the giant in mainly supporting her glory—­was, no doubt, a high pitch of the note of Conservatism.  But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin ’committed suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise, and no longer relieved by the practice’—­to translate from Dr. Gannius:  we are again at war with the writer’s reverential tone, and we know not what to think:  except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market’s butcher in the Satiric Art.