higher court sitting within.

But I wander from what I intended to say,--that you have, namely, shown
such a liberal way of thinking, and so much æsthetic perception of
anonymous worth in the handsome reception you gave to my book, spite of
some private piques (having bought the first thousand in barely two
weeks), that I think, past a doubt, if you measured the phiz of yours
most devotedly, Wonderful Quiz, you would find that its vertical section
was shorter, by an inch and two tenths, or 'twixt that and a quarter.

You have watched a child playing--in those wondrous years when belief is
not bound to the eyes and the ears, and the vision divine is so clear
and unmarred, that each baker of pies in the dirt is a bard? Give a
knife and a shingle, he fits out a fleet, and, on that little mud-puddle
over the street, his fancy, in purest good faith, will make sail round
the globe with a puff of his breath for a gale, will visit, in barely
ten minutes, all climes, and do the Columbus-feat hundreds of times. Or,
suppose the young poet fresh stored with delights from that Bible of
childhood, the Arabian Nights, he will turn to a crony and cry, 'Jack,
let's play that I am a Genius!' Jacky straightway makes Aladdin's lamp
out of a stone, and, for hours, they enjoy each his own supernatural
powers. This is all very pretty and pleasant, but then suppose our two
urchins, have grown into men, and both have turned authors,--one says to
his brother, 'Let's play we're the American somethings or other,--say
Homer or Sophocles, Goethe or Scott (only let them be big enough, no
matter what). Come, you shall be Byron or Pope, which you choose: I'll
be Coleridge, and both shall write mutual reviews.' So they both (as
mere strangers) before many days send each other a cord of anonymous
bays. Each piling his epithets, smiles in his sleeve to see what his
friend can be made to believe; each, reading the other's unbiased