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unpleasant reference which had been made to me in the Tribune from Nov.
st to date. On my own part I began to watch the current numbers, for I
1
had subscribed for the paper.
The result arrived from my New York man this morning. O, what a pitiable
wreck of high hopes! The "almost daily" assaults, for two months,
consist of--1. Adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the
London Atheneum; 2. Paragraph from some indignant Englishman in the
Pall
Mall Gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some
imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais; 3.
A remark of the Tribune's about the Montreal dinner, touched with an
almost invisible satire; 4. A remark of the Tribune's about refusal
of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily
malicious--and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a
thing which none but fools irritate themselves about.
There--that is the prodigious bugaboo, in its entirety! Can you
conceive of a man's getting himself into a sweat over so diminutive a
provocation? I am sure I can't. What the devil can those friends of mine
have been thinking about, to spread these 3 or 4 harmless things out
into two months of daily sneers and affronts? The whole offense, boiled
down, amounts to just this: one uncourteous remark of the Tribune about
my book--not me between Nov. 1 and Dec. 20; and a couple of foreign
criticisms (of my writings, not me,) between Nov. 1 and Jan. 26! If I
can't stand that amount of friction, I certainly need reconstruction.
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