'Wet with their own best blood, shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip!'"
"Pardon me, madam," said Miss Parkin; "but I am of opinion you have scarcely given a fair specimen of the powers of the Noble Bard in question. The image here presented is a familiar one; 'the gnashing tooth' and 'haggard lip' we have all witnessed, perhaps some of us may even have experienced. There is consequently little merit in presenting it to the mind's eye. It is easy, comparatively speaking, to portray the feelings and passions of our own kind. We have only, as Dryden expresses it, to descend into ourselves to find the secret imperfections of our mind. It is therefore in his portraiture of the canine race that the illustrious author has so far excelled all his contemporaries—in fact, he has given quite a dramatic cast to his dogs," and she repeated, with an air of triumph—
"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall,
Hold o'er the dead their carnival;
Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipped through their jaws when their edge grew dull;
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed."
"Now, to enter into the conception of a dog—to embody one's self, as it were, in the person of a brute—to sympathise in its feelings—to make its propensities our own—to 'lazily mumble the bones of the dead,' with our own individual 'white tusks'! Pardon me, madam, but with all due deference to the genius of a Scott, it is a thing he has not dare to attempt. Only the finest mind in the universe as capable of taking so bold a flight. Scott's dogs, madam, are tame, domestic animals—mere human dogs, if I may say so. Byron's dogs—But let them speak for themselves!
'The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw.'
Show me, if you can, such an image in Scott?"
"Very fine, certainly!" was here uttered by five novices, who were only there as probationers, consequently not privileged to go beyond a response.
"Is it the dancing dogs they are speaking about?" asked Grizzy. But looks of silent contempt were the only replies she received.
"I trust I shall not be esteemed presumptuous," said Miss Graves, "or supposed capable of entertaining views of detracting from the merits of the Noble Author at present under discussion, if I humbly but firmly enter my caveat against the word 'crunch,' as constituting an innovation in our language, the purity of which cannot be too strictly preserved or pointedly enforced. I am aware that by some I may be deemed unnecessarily fastidious; and possibly Christina, Queen of Sweden, might have applied to me the celebrated observation, said to have been elicited from her by the famed work of the laborious French Lexicographer, viz. that he was the most troublesome person in the world, for he required of every word to produce its passport, and to declare whence it came and whither it was going. I confess, I too, for the sake of my country, would wish that every word we use might be compelled to show its passport, attested by our great lawgiver, Dr. Samuel Johnson."
"Unquestionably," said Mrs. Bluemits, "purity of language ought to be preserved inviolate at any price; and it is more especially incumbent to those who exercise a sway over our minds—those are, as it were, the moulds in which our young imaginations are formed, to be the watchful guardians of our language. But I lament to say that in fact it is not so; and that the aberrations of our vernacular tongue have proceeded solely from the licentious use made of it by those whom we are taught to reverence as the fathers of the Sock and Lyre."