Before you write that brilliant notice of some alliterative Angelina's
book of verses, I wish you would try this experiment.
Take half a sheet of paper and copy upon it any of Angelina's
stanzas,--the ones you were going to make fun of, if you will. Now go to
your window, if it is a still day, open it, and let the half-sheet of
paper drop on the outside. How gently it falls through the soft air,
always tending downwards, but sliding softly, from side to side,
wavering, hesitating, balancing, until it settles as noiselessly as a
snow-flake upon the all-receiving bosom of the earth! Just such would
have been the fate of poor Angelina's fluttering effort, if you had left
it to itself. It would have slanted downward into oblivion so sweetly
and softly that she would have never known when it reached that harmless
consummation.
Our epizoic literature is becoming so extensive that nobody is safe from
its ad infinitum progeny. A man writes a book of criticisms. A
Quarterly Review criticises the critic. A Monthly Magazine takes up the
critic's critic. A Weekly Journal criticises the critic of the critic's
critic, and a daily paper favors us with some critical remarks on the
performance of the writer in the Weekly, who has criticised the critical
notice in the Monthly of the critical essay in the Quarterly on the
critical work we started with.
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