great authors whom he admired; and when he now reviewed his little
performance, he was keenly enough alive to its faults, and pretty
modest regarding its merits. It was not very good, he thought; but it
was as good as most books of the kind that had the run of circulating
libraries and the career of the season. He had critically examined
more than one fashionable novel by the authors of the day then
popular, and he thought that his intellect was as good as theirs, and
that he could write the English language as well as those ladies or
gentlemen; and as he now ran over his early performance, he was
pleased to find here and there passages exhibiting both fancy and
vigor, and traits, if not of genius, of genuine passion and feeling.
This, too, was Warrington's verdict, when that severe critic, after
half-an-hour's perusal of the manuscript, and the consumption of a
couple of pipes of tobacco, laid Pen's book down, yawning
portentously. "I can't read any more of that balderdash now," he said;
"but it seems to me there is some good stuff in it, Pen, my boy.
There's a certain greenness and freshness in it which I like, somehow.
The bloom disappears off the face of poetry after you begin to shave.
You can't get up that naturalness and artless rosy tint in after days.
Your cheeks are pale, and have got faded by exposure to evening
parties, and you are obliged to take curling-irons, and macassar, and
the deuce knows what to your whiskers; they curl ambrosially, and you
are very grand and genteel, and so forth; but, ah! Pen, the spring
time was the best."

"What the deuce have my whiskers to do with the subject in hand?" Pen
said (who, perhaps, may have been nettled by Warrington's allusion
to those ornaments, which, to say the truth, the young man coaxed, and
curled, and oiled, and purfumed, and petted, in rather an
absurd manner).