Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs. Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:  the ‘perfect gentleman, good citizen’; prospective heir to an earldom besides.  She bowed to Dudley’s merits; she read off the honorific pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she passed it.

She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly unjust.  For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-creatures made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite:  no mercy is in them for the transitional.  And Dudley—­and it was under her influence, and painfully, not ignobly—­was in process of development:  interesting to philosophers, if not to maidens.

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