And Now a Few Words

"Notwithstanding the good offices of the Doctor, and the strenuous exertions of the association to get itself into notice, it met with no very great success until I joined it. The truth is, the members indulged in too flippant a tone of discussion. The papers read every Saturday evening were characterized less by depth than buffoonery. They were all whipped syllabub. There was no investigation of first causes, first principles. There was no investigation of any thing at all. There was no attention paid to that great point, the "fitness of things." In short there was no fine writing like this. It was all low--very! No profundity, no reading, no metaphysics--nothing which the learned call "spirituality," and which the unlearned choose to stigmatize as "cant." (Dr. M. says I ought to spell "cant" with a capital "K"--but I know better.)"