Apple. “Well, Tristo, though I could not succeed in making you merry, you have well nigh rendered me as sad as yourself. And Quod and Pulito have stopped their wrangling to listen to your melancholy.”
Pulito. “Yes, Tristo, you are unwontedly depressed to-night, and Dumpling has scarcely made a pun since we came together. However, the coffee is ready, that will revive you both.”
The first cup sufficed to set Apple on his legs, (speaking intellectually,) which he evinced by commencing a running fire of puns and jests, too rapid for transcription; while Tristo, more slowly, but not less surely, owned the mild, exhilarating influence. In the mean time conversation lagged, and finally ceased, while they gave themselves up to the more sensible pleasures of the palate. After a while, Pulito, who appeared to have been collecting all his energies for the onset, seized a moment, when Apple was poring over his Autobiography, Tristo with a pleased smile was dipping into Little’s poems, and Quod, as magister morum for the evening, was resettling the coffee pot on its uneasy bed, and broke forth in a most oratorical tone with the following introduction to the debate.
Pulito. “On whatever principle you may compare the writings of the older novelists with the works of Bulwer and his school, whether as to their effect, in instructing the mind, or improving the heart, quickening the moral sense, or conveying useful information, or even for mere interest, or whiling away the time in rational amusement, (which last is but the lowest commendation of a good novel): in any of these points of comparison, I maintain that the older writers have a decided and manifest superiority. I might appeal, for the support of this position, to the concurrent testimony of literary men, to the fact that they have outlived contemporary criticism, and are still classics in this fastidious age, and furthermore”—
Apple, (looking up from his manuscript.) “What book is that you’re reading out of, Pulito?”
“The book of my own intellect, as yet unpublished, Mr. Impertinence,” said Pulito, somewhat disconcerted.
Apple. “Indeed! As I was looking down, I thought from the rapid and mellifluous flow of words, the elegance and profoundness of the thought, that you were reading loud from some one of the British Essayists. No insinuations, however,” and he chuckled at the effect, while the others smiled at the harmlessness of his sarcasm.
Nescio. “Don’t suppose, Pulito, that because I prefer the modern to the ancient school among the English novelists, I therefore deny all merit to the latter. It would be strange, indeed, if men, who were admitted unâ voce to be the wits and geniuses of their age, should not have displayed many, and great, and varied excellencies. But won’t you allow that the incongruous mass, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, has gained its greenest laurels from its outrageous oddity? Its eccentricity is so astounding, so far beyond anomaly itself, that criticism pauses aghast, as at ‘the quills of the fretful porcupine,’ unknowing where to strike. You might as soon trace ‘the path of a serpent on a rock,’ or reduce to rule the movements of the wild ass of the desert. It is a mere chaos—a “rudis indigestaque moles.”
Pulito. “But, my dear fellow, such the author intended to have it.”
Nescio. “Well, and what then? Suppose he had made it dull, (as in fact much of it is, at least, to me,) would it be the more pleasing, that the author had simply fulfilled his intentions? I like a good conceit in my heart, and the more I like it, the more do I hate to see it spoiled.”