He may doubt the justice of the praise or
the censure of the professional critic; but it is hard for him to
resist the fact of failure, when it comes to him palpably in the
satire that scowls in an ominous stare and the irony that lurks in an
audible yawn,--hard for him to question the reality of triumph, when
teeth flash at every gleam of his wit and eyes moisten at every touch
of his sentiment. Having tried each of these poems before more than a
hundred audiences, Mr. Saxe has fairly earned the right to face
critics fearlessly; and, indeed, the poems themselves so abound in
sense, shrewdness, sagacity, and fancy, in sayings so pithy and wit
so sparkling, are so lull of humor and good-humor, and flow on their
rhythmic and rhyming way with so much of the easy abandonment of
vivacious conversation, that few critics will desire to reverse the
favorable decisions of the audiences they have enlivened.
Among the miscellaneous poems, there are many which, in brilliancy,
in keen, good-natured satire, in facility and variety of
versification, in ingenious fancy, in joyousness of spirit and pure
love of fun, excel the longer poems to which we have just referred.
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