, for Lord Steyne liked anybody
who could entertain him, whether by his folly, wit, or by his dullness, by his
oddity, affectation, good spirits, or any other quality. Pen flung his letter
across the table to Warrington. Perhaps he was disappointed that the other did
not seem to be much affected by it.
    The courage of young critics is prodigious; they clamber up to the judgment
seat, and, with scarce a hesitation, give their opinion upon works the most
intricate or profound. Had Macaulay's History or Herschel's Astronomy been put
before Pen at this period, he would have looked through the volumes, meditated
his opinion over a cigar, and signified his august approval of either author, as
if the critic had been their born superior and indulgent master and patron. By
the help of the »Biographie Universelle« or the British Museum, he would be able
to take a rapid résumé of a historical period, and allude to names, dates, and
facts in such a masterly, easy way, as to astonish his mamma at home, who
wondered where her boy could have acquired such a prodigious store of reading,
and himself too, when he came to read over his articles two or three months
after they had been composed, and when he had forgotten the subject and the
books which he had consulted. At that period of his life Mr. Pen owns that he
would not have hesitated, at twenty-four hours' notice, to pass an opinion upon
the greatest scholars, or to give a judgment upon the Encyclopædia. Luckily he
had Warrington to laugh at him and to keep down his impertinence by a constant
and wholesome ridicule, or he might have become conceited beyond all sufferance;
for Shandon liked the dash and flippancy of his young aide-de-camp, and was,
indeed, better pleased with Pen's light and brilliant flashes, than with the
heavier metal which his elder coadjutor brought to bear.
    But though he might justly be blamed on the score of impertinence and a
certain prematurity of judgment, Mr. Pen was a perfectly honest critic; a great
deal too candid for Mr. Bungay's purposes, indeed, who grumbled sadly at his
impartiality. Pen and his chief, the Captain, had a dispute upon this subject
one day. »In the name of common sense, Mr. Pendennis,« Shandon asked, »what have
you been doing - praising one of Mr. Bacon's books? Bungay has been with me in a
fury this morning, at seeing a laudatory article upon one of the works
