logy, having made up
my mind to go on my journey. She refused, and he cut her adrift, after
having been so dependent upon her, I know not how many years, that he
would allow her to say, "The pan is put away," when he asked for more of
a favorite dish,--fried parsley,--which he had prepared for Dr.
Macculloch, the geologist, who at one time could eat nothing else. She
was reinstated, however, within two or three years after I left him.

The other incident was this. Mr. Bentham had urged me to write a paper
for the "Westminster Review," of which Dr. Bowring and Mr. Henry
Southern were the editors. I did so, and took for my text four or five
orations by Webster, Everett, and Sprague, and then launched out upon
the subject of Jurisprudence, of the Militia System, as it prevailed
here at the time,--a monstrous folly, and a monstrous outrage upon the
rights of man,--and of Slavery. The proof came without a word of
alteration or amendment. Of course I had nothing to do but correct any
verbal errors. But, lo! when the article appeared, not only had changes
been made, passages struck out, and various emendations worked in, but I
was made to say the very reverse of what I did say, and to utter
opinions which I never entertained, and for which I have had to suffer
from that day to this among my countrymen.

For example. The editor, who had never seen the pamphlets, as he proves
by calling them "books," interpolates the following, which, as I have
said before, I have had to answer for:--

"Violent exaggeration is the character of American literature at the
present day, and, compared with the chaster and more rational style of
_our_ best writers, the style of the North American authors _is usually
the rant and unmeaning vehemence of a strolling Thespian_, when placed
beside the _calm, appropriate, and expressive delivery of an
accomplished actor_." Bear in mind that the samples I gave were from
Webster, and Everett, and Sprague!--three of our coldest and clearest
crystals, and among the least impassioned, and certainly the least
extravagant, of our orators. "Sometimes," the editor adds, with a show
of relenting at last, "sometimes the reader will find these remarkable
parts the worst, and sometimes the best of the paragraph, and often
composed in a spirit worthy of a less vitiated expression."[D]

This was a little too much; but, owing to the expostulations of Mr.
Bentham, who had wasted about twenty or twenty-five thousand dolla