read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of
Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views of
the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with
which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud
which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found
amusing in recital. A favourite passage was one in which a certain kind
of sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, having a
phantasmal resemblance to higher animals when seen by ignorant minds in
the twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then the
other, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature's
impostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since a
congenital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made their
every action a pretence--just as a being born in doeskin gloves would
necessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what his
judgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate
hour, this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the showing up of
Merman's mistakes and the mere smattering of linguistic and historical
knowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorising;
but the more learned cited his blunders aside to each other and laughed
the laugh of the initiated. In fact, Merman's was a remarkable case of
sudden notoriety. In London drums and clubs he was spoken of abundantly
as one who had written ridiculously about the Magicodumbras and
Zuzumotzis: the leaders of conversation, whether Christians, Jews,
infidels, or of any other confession except the confession of ignorance,
pronouncing him shallow and indiscreet if not presumptuous and absurd.
He was heard of at Warsaw, and even Paris took knowledge of him. M.
Cachalot had not read either Grampus or Merman, but he heard of their
dispute in time to insert a paragraph upon it in his brilliant work,
_L'orient au point de vue actuel_, in which he was dispassionate enough
to speak of Grampus as possessing a _coup d'oeil presque français_ in