at
mole of Hadrian, which, being the biggest, must be also, by parity of
reason, the blindest in the world. When I was in college, I confess I
always liked those passages best in the choruses of the Greek drama
which were well sprinkled with _ai ai_, they were so grandly simple.
The force of great men is generally to be found in their intense
individuality,--in other words, it is all in their I. The merit of this
essay will be similar.

What I was going to say is this.

My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics,
which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun
to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease: I mean Eloquence and
Statuary. They threaten to render the country unfit for human
habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind. We had hitherto got on very
well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the
fish which we cured, _more medicorum_, by laying them out. But this
summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.
Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town
wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers. A certain number
of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their
own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call
their lectures "The Universal Brotherhood Course,"--for no other reason,
that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.
They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip
Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture. He has just done so, and, from
what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the
introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like
universal brotherhood. He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster,
without any regard for the feelings of those inside. He pitched into the
world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular.
Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of
vaticination. I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on "The Right of
Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public
Vituperation"; but I forbear. It may be that I do not understand the
nature of philanthropy.

Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example. He loves his kind so much that
he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother's son of
them. He goes about to save them by proving that not one of the