The Weekly Comet

Complimentary. Our neighbor in Church street, has a very felicitous way of paying compliments, where--although they may be due -it is policy to repudiate. Thus we may say the debt is an honest debt, but we will not pay it, because we can't. There are a great variety in kinds of compliments. There is the compliment direct; and the compliment indirect; the compliment equivocal, and the compliment egotistical, which shows off the compliment payer, to a better advantage than the party complimented. It is really one of the rare beauties that the English possesses, over all other living languages. With it, a man may say what he really means, and not commit himself; and he may say what he does not mean, and leave a margin of words so that the reader may come to the conclusion that he either means it, or that he does not mean it. Is there any other living language with which the same can be done?

Here is the prettiest form of the compliment equivocal, we have ever met with. Our friend of the Advocate is the author :

We. will say. finally. that Mr. H. (Hunt), is a fine elocutionist, and rarely endowed both as a speaker and thinker; but his highest talents are of a professional, not of a political character; and, as a politician, we regard him as neither original nor strong, and feel assured he can never rise above mediocrity. Neither, we think. is his heart in the present labor that is imposed upon him; it is an up-hill business, and in the very beginning, he is cordially weary of it, or we greatly err.