As to Mr. Charles Astor Bristed’s denial of the applicability of Harry Benson, alias Harry Masters, in this edition, to himself, and of all personality or individual satire throughout the pages of the work--he may say what he will, but no one will believe him. An author who, in depicting a fictitious hero, chooses to identify that hero with himself, to the extent of accurately describing the houses of his own grandfather and father-in-law, with their respective bearings, distances and situations in the city, as those of the same kinsmen of his hero--of attributing to him well-known incidents of his own life, such as lending money to a dissipated and debauched young ex-lieutenant of the English army, and then dunning his half heartbroken father for the paltry amount, with rowdy letters, which he subsequently published in the newspapers--buying a negro slave, in order to liberate him and gain Buncombe, as it is called, by making capital of his philanthropy in the public journals--and, lastly, ascribing to his fictitious personage his own domestic grievances, and his own quarrels at a watering-place--all matters of actual notoriety--has no earthly right to complain if the public say he has made himself his own hero. Nor when he describes invidiously, and most ill-naturedly depicts well-known persons of “our set,” as he chooses to denominate it--though we greatly doubt his belonging even to it, trifling, ridiculous and contemptible as it is--so accurately that neither the persons caricatured, nor any who know them, can avoid at a glance recognizing their identity, has he any reason to wonder if his wit be rewarded with the cowhide. When we compare Mr. Charles Astor Bristed’s positive denial of any personality, with his broad and brutal delineation of the _Hon. Pompey Whitey_, editor of a New York Socialist, Anti-Rent, Abolition, and Ghost-believing journal, ex-member of Congress--we say _brutal_, because in it he lifts the veil of domestic life, and touches upon matters which, whether true or false, the public has no right to hear of--we know not which most to wonder at, the audacity, or the shortsightedness, of the falsehood. The attempt at disguise is so feeble that we doubt not the prototype, either of Pompey Whitey or of the Catholic Archbishop Feegrave, could readily obtain exemplary damages from any jury, if he should think it worth the while to break a butterfly upon the wheel.