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Heaven bless his lordship on the bench–What a gentle manlike badinage he has, and what a charming and playful wit always at hand! What a sense he has for a simile, or what Mrs. Malaprop calls an odorous comparison, and how gracefully he conducts it to “its ultimate purport.” A gentleman writing a poor little book is a scavenger asking for a Christmas-box!

As I try this small beer which has called down such a deal of thunder, I can’t help thinking that it is not Jove who has interfered (the case was scarce worthy of his divine vindictiveness); but the Thunderer’s man, Jupiter Jeames, taking his master’s place, adopting his manner, and trying to dazzle and roar like his awful employer. That figure of the dustman has hardly been flung from heaven: that “ultimate purport” is a subject which the Immortal would hardly handle. Well, well; let us allow that the book is not worthy of such a polite critic–that the beer is not strong enough for a gentleman who has taste and experience in beer.

That opinion no man can ask his honor to alter; but (the beer being the question), why make unpleasant allusions to the Gazette, and hint at the probable bankruptcy of the brewer? Why twit me with my poverty; and what can the Times’ critic know about the vacuity of my exchequer? Did he ever lend me any money? Does he not himself write for money? (and who would grudge it to such a polite and generous and learned author?) If he finds no disgrace in being paid, why should I? If he has ever been poor, why should he joke at my empty exchequer? Of course such a genius is paid for his work: with such neat logic, such a pure style, such a charming poetical turn of phrase, of course a critic gets money. Why, a man who can say of a Christmas book that “it is an opuscule denominated so-and-so, and ostensibly intended to swell the tide of expansive emotion incident upon the exodus of the old year,” must evidently have had immense sums and care expended on his early education, and deserves a splendid return. You can’t go into the market, and get scholarship like THAT, without paying for it: even the flogging that such a writer must have had in early youth (if he was at a public school where the rods were paid for), must have cost his parents a good sum. Where would you find any but an accomplished classical scholar to compare the books of the present (or indeed any other) writer to “sardonic divings after the pearl of truth, whose lustre is eclipsed in the display of the diseased oyster;” mere Billingsgate doesn’t turn out oysters like these; they are of the Lucrine lake:–this satirist has pickled his rods in Latin brine. Fancy, not merely a diver, but a sardonic diver: and the expression of his confounded countenance on discovering not only a pearl, but an eclipsed pearl, which was in a diseased oyster! I say it is only by an uncommon and happy combination of taste, genius, and industry, that a man can arrive at uttering such sentiments in such fine language,–that such a man ought to be well paid, as I have no doubt he is, and that he is worthily employed to write literary articles, in large type, in the leading journal of Europe. Don’t we want men of eminence and polite learning to sit on the literary bench, and to direct the public opinion?

But when this profound scholar compares me to a scavenger who leaves a copy of verses at his door and begs for a Christmas-box, I must again cry out and say, “My dear sir, it is true your simile is offensive, but can you make it out? Are you not hasty in your figures and illusions?” If I might give a hint to so consummate a rhetorician, you should be more careful in making your figures figures, and your similes like: for instance, when you talk of a book “swelling the tide of exhilaration incident to the inauguration of the new year,” or of a book “bearing the stamp of its origin in vacuity,” etc.,–or of a man diving sardonically; or of a pearl eclipsed in the display of a diseased oyster–there are some people who will not apprehend your meaning: some will doubt whether you had a meaning: some even will question your great powers, and say, “Is this man to be a critic in a newspaper, which knows what English, and Latin too, and what sense and scholarship, are?” I don’t quarrel with you–I take for granted your wit and learning, your modesty and benevolence–but why scavenger–Jupiter Jeames–why scavenger? A gentleman, whose biography the Examiner was fond of quoting before it took its present serious and orthodox turn, was pursued by an outraged wife to the very last stage of his existence with an appeal almost as pathetic–Ah, sir, why scavenger?