Booksellers and periodicals were glad enough to publish these squibs, and the reading public read them fast enough, with considerable amusement, and no profit or intention of profiting by them; it was _parvis componere magna_, like Aristophanes and Cleon; the bystanders cheered the exposer, and followed the exposed as fast as ever. Carl began to set up for a professed satirist,--one of the worst things that can befall a man, for the benefit he confers on others is very problematical, and the evil he inflicts on himself positive and inevitable. He who had been the merriest of young men found himself growing ill-natured and morbid when he should have been in the prime of life. It was hard to say which he disliked most, the exclusives or the democracy, and he uttered his mind about both pretty freely. He was sick of the newspapers, with their bad print and worse principles--of the endless debates about the same old questions in Congress--of literary pretenders and the thousand and one "most remarkable men among us,"--of all the continuously succeeding popular delusions--of the gossiping young men in illimitable cravats, and all the personal intelligence about Mr. Brown and Miss Jones. Still he clung to old Gotham for a reason that influenced few people in it. He had strong conservative feelings and local attachments; his childhood (unlike his brother's) had been spent in the city, and the scenes of his childhood were dear to him, however little interest he might feel in the new characters that peopled them. But when in the rapid march of "up town" progress, the house which his father built, where his parents had died, and he and his brother and sister played as children, became so surrounded by shops, and stores, and manufactories, that he was fairly driven out of it, then he withdrew from the city altogether, and established himself for all the year round at his--that is to say, at his wife's--place on the Hudson. His contemporaries speedily forgot him, or if they ever thought of him, it was only as an unhappy recluse, Bellerophon-like, eating his own heart, and shunning the ways of men.