Literary Scolding ... Hints

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language¹;

thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed²;

thou servile echo of fashionable barbarism;  

thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution;  

thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice³;

⁴thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory;  

thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity;  

thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography;  

thou arch-heretic in pronunciation;  

thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis;  

thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences;  

thou squeaking dissonance of cadence;  

thou pimp⁵ of gender;

thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology;  

thou antipode of grammar;  

thou executioner of construction;  

thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel;  

thou lingual confusion worse confounded;  

thou scape-gallows⁶ from the land of syntax;

thou scavenger of mood and tense;  

thou murderous accoucheur⁷ of infant learning;

thou ignis fatuus⁸ , misleading the steps of benighted ignorance;

thou pickle-herring⁹ in the puppet-show of nonsense;

thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom;  

thou persecutor of syllabication;  

thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus¹⁰.

¹Being a castrated male, a eunuch implies someone who is ineffective for action. This might also serve the added purpose of insulting the critic's masculinity.

²The River Tweed was in southern Scotland. The sense is that the critic has pretensions to be "An Englishman" but is only a bumpkin.

³ Gretna Green was a place where eloping couples often went to be married. It avows that such marriages were not legitimate and implies the critic is not either.

⁴There are a series of phrases comparing the subject to tradesmen (cobler, blacksmith, butcher, carpenter) suggesting he was fit only to be a laborer and was not a legitimate literary critic.

⁵A pimp is used to mean a despicable person, a varlet, not in its modern sense of living off the avails of prostitution.

⁶A scapegallows is someone who has narrowly missed being hung for his misdeeds. The implication is that this person probably deserved it.

⁷An accoucheur is a midwife. This line implies that his critic was supposed to be delivering a lesson on grammar and instead he was murdering it.

⁸Ignis fatuus translates as "foolish fire". It refers to the will-o'-the-wisp, a ghostly light that maliciously leads people astray.

⁹Pickle-herring has an old meaning of "buffoon" but it was likely chosen to create the alliteration of the consonant "p".

¹⁰Nox and Erebus are terms that denote night, so the sense is one of oncoming darkness.