manner becomes like Mr. Prescott's _notes_; levity is mistaken for ease, an un-'pertinent' familiarity for intimacy, second-rate low-toned 'jocularities' (which make no one laugh but the retailer) for the light, hair-trigger repartee, the brilliancy of high-bred pleasantry. Mr. Prescott emulates Dr. Channing in his text, Dr. Dunham and Mr. Joseph Miller in his notes. Judging from the facetiæ which, by his commending them as 'good,' have furnished a gauge to measure his capacity for relishing humour, we are convinced that his non-perception of wit is so genuine as to be organic. It is perfectly allowable to rise occasionally from the ludicrous into the serious, but to descend from history to the bathos of balderdash is too bad--_risu inepto nihil ineptius_." This passage, which is an amusing example of an overflow of High Tory bile, does not by any means fairly represent the general tone of Ford's review. Prescott had here and there indulged himself in some of the commonplaces of republicanism such as were usual in American writings of that time; and these harmlessly trite political pedantries had rasped the nerves of his British reviewer. To speak of "the empty decorations, the stars and garters of an order of nobility," to mention "royal perfidy," "royal dissimulation," "royal recompense of ingratitude," and generally to intimate that "the people" were superior to royalty and nobility, roused a spirit of antagonism in the mind of Mr. Ford. Several of Prescott's semi-facetious notes dealt with rank and aristocracy in something of the same hold-cheap tone, so that Ford was irritated into a very personal retort. He wrote:-- "These pleasantries come with a bad grace from the son, as we learn from a full-length dedication, of 'the _Honourable_ William Prescott, _LL.D._' We really are ignorant of the exact value of this titular potpourri in a _soi-disant_ land of equality, of these noble and academic plumes, borrowed from the wing of a professedly despised monarchy."