Note 12 — NOTES TO THE PRECEDING LETTERS.

The above criticism on Mr. Webster’s latinity aroused many self-supposed scholars, or at least fair proficients in the Latin grammar, to take up the pen in his defence. But unluckily, the quills they seized were plucked, not from the Roman eagle, but from the wings of some of those “unclean birds,” to which Mr. Webster had introduced them. Among the most conspicuous of these defenders of Mr. Webster’s ludicrous blunder, was Professor Felton, of Harvard College. If any person wishes to see one of the most neat, elegant, and at the same time thorough cases of deplumation, any where to be found in literary history, in which an individual who strutted on to the stage as a peacock, was soon obliged to leave it as a daw, he has only to read Dr. Beck’s articles in “The Literary World,” in which the fabricated quotation of Mr. Webster, and Professor Felton’s defence of it, are shown to be exceedingly bad as Latin, and much worse as logic.