We had intended to
cull some of these beauties for the amusement of our readers and
the personal gratification of Mr. Wilson himself. But, as children,
gathering shells on the sea-shore, resign, one after another, the
treasures which they have collected, and grasp at newer, and, therefore,
more pleasing specimens, which are abandoned in their turn, so we,
finding our stores accumulate beyond our means of transportation, and
tantalized by a richness that made the task of selection an impossible
one, have been forced to relinquish the prize and come away with empty
hands. If there be, in the compass of what the author calls "these
volumes,"--though to us, perhaps from inability to distinguish between
unity and duality, his work appears to be comprised in a single tome,--a
sentence decently constructed, a foreign name correctly spelt, a
punctuation-mark rightly placed, a fact clearly and accurately stated,
or an argument that is not capable of an easy reduction to the absurd,
we have not been so unfortunate as to discover it. Mr. Wilson is a man
who, to use Carlyle's favorite expression, has "swallowed all formulas."
The principles that have generally been held to govern the use of
language appear to him mere arbitrary rules, invented by the "sevenfold
censorship" and the Spanish Inquisition, for the purpose of preventing
the free communication of ideas.
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