Text: Lewis Gaylord Clark, “Editor's Table,” Knickerbocker (New York, NY), vol. XXVIII, no. 4, October 1846, pp. 368-369

[page 368:]

Our thanks are due to ‘J. G. H.,’ of Springfield, (Mass.,) for his communication touching the course and the capabilities of the wretched inebriate whose personalities disgrace a certain Milliner's Magazine in Philadelphia; but bless your heart, man! you can’t expect us to publish it. The jaded hack who runs a broken pace for common hire, upon whom you have wasted powder, might revel in his congenial abuse of this Magazine and its EDITOR from now till next October without disturbing our complacency for a single moment. He is too mean for hate, and hardly worthy scorn. In fact there are but two classes of persons who regard him in any light — those who despise and those who pity him; the first for his utter lack of principle, the latter for the infirmities which have overcome and ruined him. Here is a faithful picture, for which he but recently sat. We take it from one of our most respectable daily journals:

‘It is melancholy enough to see a man maimed in his limbs, or deprived by nature of his due pro- portions; the blind, the deaf, the mute, the lame, the impotent, are all subjects that touch our hearts, at least all whose hearts have not been indurated in the fiery furnace of sin; but sad, sadder, saddest of all, is the poor wretch whose want of moral rectitude has reduced his mind and person to a condition where indignation for his vices and revenge for his insults are changed into compassion for the poor victim of himself. When a man has sunk so low that he has lost the power to provoke vengeance, he is the most pitiful of all pitiable objects. A poor creature of this description called at our office the other day, in a condition of sad imbecility, bearing in his feeble body the evidences of evil living, and betraying by his talk such radical obliquity of sense, that every spark of harsh feeling toward him was extinguished, and we could not even entertain a feeling of contempt for one who was evidently committing a suicide upon his body, as he had already done upon his character. Unhappy man! He was accompanied by an aged female relative, who was going a weary round in the hot streets, following his steps to prevent his indulging in a love of drink; but he had eluded her watchful eye by some means, and was already far gone in a state of inebriation. After listening awhile with painful feelings to his profane ribaldry, he left the office, accompanied by his good genius, to whom he owed the duties which she was discharging for him.’

Now what can one gain by a victory over a person such as this? If there are some men whose enemies are to be pitied much, there are others whose alleged friends are to be pitied more. One whom this ‘critic’ has covered with what he deems praise, describes him as ‘a literary person of unfortunate peculiarities, who professes to know many to whom he is altogether unknown.”[[*]] Can it then be a matter of the least moment to us, when the quo animo of such a writer is made palpable even to his own readers, that he should underrate our circulation by thousands, overrate our age by years, or assign to other pens the departments of this Magazine which we have alone sustained, with such humble ability as we possessed, through nearly twenty- six out of its twenty-eight volumes? As well might CARLYLE lament that he had called him an ‘unmitigated ass,’ or LONGFELLOW grieve at being denounced by him as ‘a man of no genius, and an inveterate literary thief.’ And as to his literary opinions, who would regard them as of any importance? — a pen-and-ink writer, whose only ‘art’ is correctly described by the ‘London Athenæum’ to ‘consist in conveying plain things after a fashion which makes them hard to be understood, and commonplaces in a sort of mysterious form, which causes them to sound oracular.’ ‘There are times,’ continues the able critical journal from which we quote, ‘when [page 369:] he probably desires to go no farther than the obscure; when the utmost extent of his ambition is to be unintelligible; that he approaches the verge of the childish, and wanders on the confines of the absurd!’ We put it to our Massachusetts correspondent, whether such a writer's idea of style is at all satire-worthy? And are we not excused from declining our friend's kindly-meant but quite unnecessary communication?

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 368:]

* HE is equally unknown to those whom he abuses. The EDITOR hereof has no remembrance of ever having seen him save on two occasions. In the one case, we met him in the street with a gentleman, who apologized the next day, in a note now before us, for having been seen in his company ‘while he was laboring under such an excitement;’ in the other, we caught a view of his retiring skirts as he wended his ‘winding way,’ like a furtive puppy with a considerable kettle to his tail, from the publication-office, whence — having left no other record of his tempestuous visit upon the publisher's mind than the recollection of a coagulum of maudlin and abusive jargon — he had just emerged, bearing with him one of his little narrow rolls of manuscript, which had been previously submitted for insertion in the ‘excellent Magazine,’ but which, unhappily for his peace, had shared the fate of its equally attractive predecessors.