I might safely leave H. K. S. C. to the same gentle correction bestowed upon a neighbour of his at Brixton some time since, by Mr. Hickson, but I must not allow him to support his dogmatic and flippant hypercriticism by falsehood and unfounded insinuation, and I therefore beg leave to assure him that I have no claim to the enviable distinction of being designated as the friend of Mr. Hickson, to whom I am an utter stranger, having never seen him, and knowing nothing of that gentleman but what his very valuable communications to your publication conveys.
I have further to complain of the want of truth in the very first paragraph of your correspondent's note: the question respecting the meaning of "Eisell" does not "remain substantially where Steevens and Malone left it;" for I have at least shown that Eisell meant Wormwood, and that Shakspeare has elsewhere undoubtedly used it in that sense.
Again: the remark about the fashion of extravagant feats, such as swallowing nauseous draughts in honour of a mistress, was quite uncalled for. Your correspondent would insinuate that I attribute to Shakspeare's time "what in reality belongs to the age of Du Guesclin and the Troubadours." Does he mean to infer that it did not in reality equally belong to Shakspeare's age? or that I was ignorant of its earlier prevalence?
The purport of such remarks is but too obvious; but he may rest assured that they will not tend to strengthen his argument, if argument it can be called, for I must confess I do not understand what he means by his "definite quantity." But the phrase drink up is his stalking-horse; and as he is no doubt familiar with the Nursery Rhymes[[1]], a passage in them—
"Eat up your cake, Jenny,
Drink up your wine."
may perhaps afford him further apt illustration.
The proverb tells us "It is dangerous playing with edge tools," and so it is with bad puns: he has shown himself an unskilful engineer in the use of Mr. Hickson's canon, with which he was to have "blown up" Mr. Hickson's argument and my proposition; with what success may be fairly left to the judgment of your readers. I will, however, give him another canon, which may be of use to him on some future occasion: "When a probable solution of a difficulty is to be found by a parallelism in the poet's pages, it is better to adopt it than to charge him with a blunder of our own creating."
The allusion to "breaking Priscian's head" reminds one of the remark of a witty friend on a similar occasion, that "there are some heads not easily broken, but the owners of them have often the fatuity to run them against stumbling-blocks of their own making."