greatest pleasure, so far as their composition was concerned, have been
Belzoni's Travels, and Salame's Account of the Attack upon Algiers.
Unable, from their insufficient mastery of our tongue, to rival the
native manufacture of stiff and laborious verbosity, these foreigners
have contented themselves with the plainest and most colloquial language
that was consistent with a clear exposition of their meaning;--a
practice to which Swift was indebted for the lucid and perspicuous
character of his writings, and which alone has enabled a great living
purveyor of "twopenny trash" to retain a certain portion of popularity,
in spite of his utter abandonment of all consistency and public
principle. If the writers to whom we are alluding will not condescend to
this unstudied and familiar mode of communing with the public, let them
at least have the art to conceal their art, and not obtrude the
conviction that they are more anxious to display themselves than inform
their readers; and let them, above all things, consent to be
intelligible to the plainest capacity; for though speech, according to
the averment of a wily Frenchman, was given to us to conceal our
thoughts, no one has yet ventured to extend the same mystifying
definition to the art of writing ...

After this, let us no longer smile at the furious hyperboles of Della
Crusca upon Mrs. Robinson's eyes. In the same strain we are told of a
convent whose "walls sweat, and its floors quiver," when a contumacious
brother treads them;--and when the parents of the same personage are
torn from his room by the Director of the convent, we are informed that
"the rushing of their robes as he dragged them out, seemed like the
whirlwind that attends the presence of the destroying angel." In a
similar spirit, of pushing every thing to extremes when he means to be
impressive, the author is sometimes offensively minute; as when he makes
the aforesaid persecuted monk declare, that "the cook had learned the