The Daily Gate City

Blackwood has a capital criticism on Carlyle's Frederick the Great, in which is embodied a delicious imitation of his style. Blackwood remarks:

It is said that Carlyle's style is easily imitated. Not certainly his best style; for to imitate that, a man must have an equal gift of imagination. But the style we have been commenting on, is not difficult. Our friend Herr Botherwig (an Anglicised German) brought up from his cradle upon mystical and transcendental food, imitates it passably. Take this excerpt from Botherwig:

"Thomas, knowing well the greedy cormorant public is apt to take what grains of wheat are offered to it thanklessly, and with small thought or care for the labor of the winnower, does, with frequent iteration (lest said public should think that writing history were a task light and blithsome as going a Maying) bewail piteously, and not without lachrymose suffocation, the painful obscuration of his philosophic spirit, while wallowing amid the inane ponderosities of the Mud-demons or Prussian chronicle writers, where is to be found much of the raw material of our Prussian-Jargonio-History. Wherefore, in revenge, Thomas calls them hard names, of which Prussian Dryasdust is the chief opprobrious epithet-name mysterious haply to Cormorant-Public, but explainable thus: Northern magician Scott, (magician conceivably akin, some way, or shall we say by left-handed relationship, to the Sphere-Harmonies) did, in sportive preamble to certain fictitious narrative, introduce supposititious antiquarian friend, under the name of Dr. Dryasdust—which cognomen, tickling the capricious Midriff of Thomas, does for him ever after officiate as Generic appellation for all of that brotherhood; and Dryasdust is forthwith stereotyped and enrolled in that singular Lexicography, (not perusable by living men without wonder, along with the Python, Veracities, Foam-Oceans, and other Indigestions and Dire Chimeras. Whence arises, also, this other question: is there not, in the masses of his historical rubbish, some quality worse than bewildering? Is there not, moreover, something contagious?"