*Really the _nephew_.
To be serious, then, as we always wish to be, if possible, Mr. Channing
(whom we suppose to be a _very_ young man, since we are precluded from
supposing him a _very_ old one), appears to have been inoculated at the
same moment with _virus_ from Tennyson and from Carlyle, etc.
Notes.
The three paragraphs which we have quoted illustrate three different
methods of using ridicule. The first is the simple one of contemptuous
epithets--"calling names," as we put it in colloquial parlance.
So long as it is good-humored and the writer does not show personal
malice, it is a good way; but the reader soon tires of it.
A sense of fairness prevents him from listening to mere calling of names
very long. So in the second paragraph Poe changes his method to one
more subtile: he pretends to apologize and find excuses, virtually
saying to the reader, "Oh, I'm going to be perfectly fair," while at the
same time the excuses are so absurd that the effect is ridicule of a
still more intense and biting type. In the third paragraph Poe seems
to answer the reader's mental comment to the effect that "you are merely
amusing us by your clever wit" by asserting that he means to be
extremely serious.
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