ABSTRACT
The absurdity in this case, we think, is palpable and glaring but it is exactly of the same nature with that which infects the whole substance of the work – a puerile ambition of singularity engrafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms; and an affected passion for simplicity and humble life, most awkwardly combined with a taste for mystical refinements, and all the gorgeousness of obscure phraseology. His taste for simplicity is evinced by sprinkling up and down his interminable declamations, a few descriptions of baby-houses, and of old hats with wet brims, and his amiable partiality for humble life, by assuring us, that a wordy rhetorician, who talks about Thebes, and allegorizes all the heathen mythology, was once a pedlar – and making him break in upon his magnificent orations with two or three awkward notices of something that he had seen when selling winter raiment about the country – or of the changes in the state of society, which had almost annihilated his former calling.
