All this duly reached the ears of the captain. He immediately wrote to Don Silva, requesting his company to dinner, particularly soliciting him to bring his excellent work. Of course, the little man took care to have the doctor and purser. The claret is on the table, the Amphytrion settles himself into a right critical attitude, but with a most suspicious leer in the corner of his eye. Our friend begins to read his book exultingly, but, at the memorable passage, as was previously concerted, the hue and cry is raised. During the janging of argument Reud seems undecided, and observes that he can only judge the matter from well understanding the previous style and the context, and so, every now and then, requests him, with a most persuasive politeness, to begin again from the beginning. Of course, he gets no farther than the paving. After the baited author had re-read his page-and-a-half about six or seven times, the captain smiles upon him lovingly, and says in his most insinuating tones, "Just read it over again once more, and we shall never trouble you after--we shall know it by heart." As it was well understood that the author was never to get beyond that passage until he had acknowledged it absurd and egregiously foolish, anybody who knows anything about the _genus irritabile_ will be certain, that if he lived till "the crack of doom," Don Silva would never have passed the Rubicon. It was thus that the poor fellow was tormented: and every time that he was asked to dine in the cabin, he was requested to bring his Tour, in order that the _whole_ of it might be read. The best and most imposing manner of writing is, to lay down some wise dogma, and afterwards prove it by example. I shall follow this august method. It is unwise for a midshipman to argue with the lieutenant of the watch, whilst there are three lofty mastheads unoccupied. QED. One morning, after a literary skirmish in the captain's cabin the overnight, Mr Silva smiled me over to him on his side of the quarter-deck, just as day was breaking. The weather was beautiful, and we had got well into the trade winds. "Mr Rattlin," said he, "you have not yet read my book. You are very young, but you have had a liberal education." I bowed with flattered humility. "I will lend it to you--you shall read it; and as a youthful, yet a clever scholar--give me your opinion of it--be candid. I suppose you have heard the trivial, foolish, spiteful objection started against a passage I have employed in the second page?" and he takes a copy out of his pocket and begins to read it to me until he comes to "After having _paved_ our way up the _river_," he then enters into a long justificatory argument, the gravamen of which was to prove, that in figurative phrases a great latitude of expression was not only admissible but often elegant.