Page:The Southern Literary Messenger - Minor.djvu/39

 Rh, commences his "Dissertation on the characteristic differences between the sexes and on the position and influence of Woman in Society." He was a bachelor then; but became a fortunate benedict. This learned dissertation should be republished in handsome form, in memoriam of its author and for the benefit of the living.

There is a description of the House Mountain, of which there was another, in 1837, in the Collegian of the University of Virginia, by James H. Rawlings, a student of William and Mary, a great admirer of President Dew and the roommate of B.[Benjamin] B.[Blake] Minor.

Mr. Poe gives us his very short tale, "Lionizing," on which the editor remarks: "It is an inimitable piece of wit and satire and the man must be far gone in a melancholic humor whose risibility is not moved by this tale. Although the scene of the story is laid in the foreign city of Fum Fudge, the disposition which it satirizes is often displayed in the cities of this country—even in our own community, and will probably still continue to exist, unless Mrs. Butler's Journal should have disgusted the fashionable world with Lions." Lionizing is really fun on nosology. Noses occupied a prominent place in literature, before that of Cyrano de Bergerac in recent times, and by a singular coincidence even the Messenger had prepared the way for Mr. Poe