Prof. Peck has a deal to say against Ingersoll’s methods; he does not think them sufficiently serious, not to say reverent. This objection may be met as Voltaire met it—by authorizing his critic to disregard the wit and answer the argument. But Prof. Peck will not admit that Ingersoll was witty. He sees nothing in his sallies but “buffoonery,” a word meaning wit directed against one’s self or something that one respects. This amazing judgment from the mouth of one so witty himself could, but for one thing, be interpreted no otherwise than as evidence that he has not read the works that he condemns. That one thing is religious bigotry which, abundantly manifest everywhere in the article under review, is nowhere so conspicuous as in the intemperate, not to say low, language in which the charge of “buffoonery” is made. Who that has an open mind would think that it was written of Robert Ingersoll that he “burst into the sacred silence of their devotion with the raucous bellowing of an itinerant stump-speaker and the clowning of a vulgar mountebank”? To those who really know the character of Robert Ingersoll’s wit—keen, bright and clean as an Arab’s scimetar; to those who know the clear and penetrating mental insight of which such wit is the expression and the proof; to those who know how much of gold and how little of mud clung to the pebbles that he slung at the Goliaths of authority and superstition; to those who have noted the astonishing richness of his work in elevated sentiments fitly expressed, his opulence of memorable aphorism and his fertility of felicitous phrase—to these it will not seem credible that such a man can be compared to one who, knowing the infidelity of a friend’s wife, would “slap his friend upon the back and tell the story with a snicker, in the coarsest language of the brothel, interspersed with Rabelaisian jokes.” It is of the nature of wit mercifully to veil its splendors from the eyes of its victim. The taken thief sees in his captor an unheroic figure. The prisoner at the bar is not a good judge of the prosecution. But it is difficult distinctly to conceive a scholar, a wit, a critic, an accomplished editor of a literary magazine, committing himself to such judgments as these upon work accessible to examination and familiar to memory. To paraphrase Pope, Who would not laugh if such a man there be? Who would not weep if Harry Peck were he?