the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should
lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths.
Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they
can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is
rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to
consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I
look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy
of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as
resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words
will be one with things. I have no hope that you will find
suddenly a large audience. Says not the sarcasm, "Truth hath
the plague in his house"? Yet all men are _potentially_ (as
Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not
in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;*
and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of
diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.

------------
* This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition
of _Sartor Resartus_ have been sold.
-------------

I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it
is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more
than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in
this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't
is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I
would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly
retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately
espy you as a man, myself as another.