y it; to
recognize its relations to an age when darkness was slowly yielding to
light; to note its possible suggestions to great poets who followed,
especially to Dante; and to behold it lost to human knowledge, and
absolutely forgotten, until saved by a single verse, which, from its
completeness of form and its proverbial character, must live as long as
the Latin language endures. The verse does not occupy much room; but it
is a sure fee simple for the poet. And are we not told by an ancient,
that it is something, in whatever place or recess you may be, to have
made yourself master of a single lizard?

"Est aliquid, quocumque loco, quocumque recessu,
Unius sese dominum fecisse lacertae."

A poem of ten books shrinks to a very petty space. There is a balm of a
thousand flowers, and here is a single hexameter which is the express
essence of many times a thousand verses. It was the jest of the
grave-digger, in "Hamlet," that the noble Alexander, returning to dust
and loam, had stopped a bung-hole. But the memorable poem celebrating
him is reduced as much, although it may be put to higher uses.

MORAL.

At the conclusion of a fable there is a moral, or, as it is sometimes
called, the application. There is also a moral now, or, if you please,
the application. And, believe me, in these serious days, I should have
little heart for any literary diversion, if I did not hope to make it
contribute to those just principles which are essential to the
well-being, if not the safety of the Republic. To this end I have now
written. This article is only a long whip with a snapper to it.

Two verses saved from the wreck of a once popular poem have become
proverbs, and one of these is very famous. They inculcate clemency, and
that common sense which is found in not running into one danger to avoid
another. Never was their lesson more needed than now, when, in the name
of clemency to belligerent traitors, the National Government is
preparing to abandon the freedmen, to whom it is bound by the most
sacred ties; is preparing to abandon the national creditor also, with
whose security the national welfare is indissolubly associated; and is
even preparing, without any probation or trial, to invest belligerent
traitors, who for four bloody years have murdered our fellow-citizens,
with those Equal Rights in the Republic which are denied to friends and
allies, so that the former shall rule over the latter. Verily, here is a
case fo