him in the Boston Gazette. On February 9th there appeared the following verses from his pen:
"Critics there are, a set of snarling elves,
Who think no merit due but to themselves;
Who deal out praise, as nature deals out brains,
Or Druggist like,—in pennyweights and grains!
Yet scan their works, and what do we descry;
Nought but pedantic nonsense meets their eye—
Tis thus th' aspiring 'Censor' would be great,—
But his own 'Cossac' justly seals his fate."
The polemic between W. and Eustaphieve and his friends was taken up again in the beginning of the next season, but apparently Eustaphieve for once succumbed to the attacks, for after two or three more criticisms he gave up his endeavors to instruct the Boston public. Up to 1818 we do not again hear of him, except that he joined with others to recommend the purchase of The Landing of the Fathers, which ultimately was purchased by the Pilgrim Society and put on exhibition in Museum Hall, near Brattle Street Chapel, in September 1820.
Eustaphieve was not crushed. He was all the while laboring on a great epic, which at last appeared in 1818, "Demetrius, the Hero of the Don." At the end of the soporific 7000 lines of the seven Cantos the author cheerfully informed the public that that was only the beginning of a much longer work, that "he, therefore, respectfully takes his leave for the present, adding merely that a few notes and a critical essay upon the Epopee, particularly on Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, are contemplated in connection with the original design of the poem." This was more than the North American Review, heretofore silent in regard to Eustaphieve, was willing to endure. A sarcastic review of "Demetrius" appeared, which brought a long series of counterblasts in the Palladium, avowedly from a friend of Eustaphieve, but more likely by himself, in which he said of the North American Review, "How came this rickety, would-be malicious thing christened by the name of Review, to find its way into the grand literary galaxy of New England?"
Henceforth Eustaphieve disappeared from the pages of the periodicals, but he continued to cultivate the acquaintance of the actors and actresses of his day, and is occasionally mentioned in their reminiscences. Occasionally, too, one comes in the newspapers across some reference to his daughter's musical
