Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

“ [60] where they might worship their Creator unmolested, in the meek and humble spirit of their own faith.” Prescott justly criticises Brown for saying, “I was fraught with the apprehension that my life was endangered” ; or “his brain seemed to swell beyond its continent” ; or “I drew every bolt that appended to it” ; or “on recovering from deliquium, you found it where it had been dropped” ; or for resorting to the circumlocution of saying, “by a common apparatus that lay beside my head I could produce a light,” when he really meant that he had a tinder-box. The criticism on Brown is fair enough, yet Prescott himself presently takes us halfway back to the florid vocabulary of that period, when, instead of merely saying that his hero was fond of reading, he tells us that “from his earliest childhood Brown gave evidence of studious propensities, being frequently noticed by his father on his return from school poring over some heavy tome.” If the tome in question was Johnson's dictionary, as it may have been, it would explain both Brown's style of writing and the milder amplifications of his biographer. Nothing is more difficult to tell, in the fictitious literature of even a generation or two ago, where a faithful delineation ends and where caricature begins. The four-story signatures of Micawber's letters, as represented by