Bravo, worthy 'nuncle! Homer begged his bread, but the pen-and-ink sketcher of "Mrs. Hauksbee" shall have rewards imperial! To it again, garrulous 'nuncle--to it and cease not! "Here, by the dignified hand of Maga the ever young, we bid the young genius All hail! and more power to his elbow, to relapse into vernacular speech, which is always more convincing than the high-flown." Should it not have been written "to relapse into bathos," good 'nuncle? And beware of declaring thyself to be "ever young," for nothing lives that shall not grow old, and the younger generation already profanely dub thee "antiquated." Wipe thine eyes, Uncle _Blackwood_, polish thy spectacles, and set down our precious baby for an instant the while his other nurses, godfathers and godmothers, look at him, and speculate upon his probable growth. Let us listen to the hysterical _D. T._ the while it raveth in strophes of gin-and-water:--"Mr. Rudyard Kipling is, and seems likely to remain, a literary enigma. Who can deny his strength, his virility, his dramatic sense, his imaginative wealth, his masterful genius? He is like a young and sportive Titan, piling Pelion on Ossa in his reckless ambition to scale Olympus; he is always renewing his strength like an eagle, and rejoicing like a giant to run his course. Nothing comes amiss to him; he will produce out of his boundless stores things new and old--tragedies, comedies, farces, epics, ballads, or lyrical odes. His earliest Anglo-Indian stories revealed a new world to the astonished West; his "Soldiers Three" have attained almost the reputation of the "Three Musketeers"; his Learoyd, his Ortheris, his Mulvaney, his Mrs. Hauksbee, his Torpenhow are household words; while his barrack-room ditties, and his ballads of East and West have not only startled by their daring frankness, but conquered all criticism by their picturesqueness and truth." All this, an' so please you, on two or three volumes of small magazine stories and rhymed doggerel! That "Soldiers Three" should have attained the reputation of the "Three Musketeers" is of course only the delirious frenzy of the _D. T._ asserting itself in gasping shrieks of illiterate mindlessness--Europe knows better than to place the intellect of a smart newspaper man like Kipling on the same level with that of Dumas. Kipling is the Jumbo of the _D. T._ for the present, and journalists would not be what they are if they could not get up a "boom" somehow. Now hark we to the fond maudlin murmur of an evening journal!