don, and a thousand more, not less learned, less
accomplished, nor less useful? Forgive, great names, my half-repeated
slander: riding with the self-conceited _cortege_ of male critics, my
boasted loyalty was well-nigh guilty of _leze majeste_: but I repudiate
the thought; my verdict shall have no reproach in it, as my championship
no fear: how much has man to learn from woman! teach us still to look on
humanity in love, on nature in thankfulness, on death without fear, on
heaven without presumption; fairest, forgive those foolish and ungallant
calumnies of my ruder sex, who boast themselves your teachers--making
yet this wise use of the slander: never be so bold in authorship, as to
hazard the loss of your sweet, retiring, modest, amiable, natural
dependence: never stand out as champions on the arena of strife, but if
you will, strew it with posies for the king of the tournament; it ill
becomes you to be wrestlers, though a Lycurgus allowed it, and Atalanta,
another Eve, was tripped up by an apple in the foot-race. So digressing,
return we to our author; to wit, a man, _homo_--a human, as they say in
the west--with news of actual value to communicate, and powers of pen
competent to do so graphically, honestly, kindly, boldly.

Much as we may emulate Homer's wordy braggadocios in boasting ourselves
far better than our fathers, still, great was the wisdom of our
ancestors: and that time-tried wisdom has given us three things that
make a man; he must build a house, have a child, write a book: and of
this triad of needfuls, who perceives not the superior and innate
majesty of the last requisite?--"Build a house?" I humbly conceive, and
steal my notion from the same ancestral source, that, in nine cases out
of ten, fools build houses for wise men to live in; besides, if houses
be made a test of supreme manhood, your modern wholesale runner-up of
lath and plaster tenements, warranted to stand seven years--provided
quadrilles be excluded, and no larger flock of guests _than six_ be
permitted to settle on one spot--such a jackal for surgeons, such a
reprobate provider for accident-wards as this, would be among our
heroes, a prize-man, the flower of the species. "Children" too?--very
happy, beautiful, heart-gladdening creations--God bless them all, and
scatter those who love them not!--but still for a proof of more than
average humanity, somewhat common, somewhat overwhelming: rabbits beat
us here, with all our fecundity, so off