tors will do for them after they are gone may
deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves
into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing has begun to feel a
wholesome dread of this posthumous retribution. I cannot in any other
way account for that nightmare of the solitary horseman on the edge of
the horizon, in his Hartford Speech. His imagination is infected with
the terrible consciousness, that Mr. Mills, as the younger man, will, in
the course of Nature, survive him, and will be left loose to seek new
victims of his nefarious designs. Formerly the punishment of the wooden
horse was a degradation inflicted on private soldiers only; but Mr.
Mills (whose genius could make even Pegasus look wooden, in whatever
material) flies at higher game, and will be content with nothing short
of a general. Mr. Cushing advises extreme measures. He counsels us to
sell our real estate and stocks, and to leave a country where no man's
reputation with posterity is safe, being merely as clay in the hands of
the sculptor. To a mind undisturbed by the terror natural in one whose
military reputation insures his cutting and running, (I mean, of course,
in marble and bronze,) the question becomes an interesting one,--To
whom, in case of a general exodus, shall we sell? The statues will have
the land all to themselves,--until the Aztecs, perhaps, repeopling their
ancient heritage, shall pay divine honors to these images, whose
ugliness will revive the traditions of the classic period of Mexican
Art. For my own part, I never look at one of them now without thinking
of at least one human sacrifice.

I doubt the feasibility of Mr. Cushing's proposal, and yet something
ought to be done. We must put up with what we have already, I suppose,
and let Mr. Webster stand threatening to blow us all up with his pistol
pointed at the elongated keg of gunpowder on which his left hand
rests,--no bad type of the great man's state of mind after the
nomination of General Taylor, or of what a country member would call a
penal statue. But do we reflect that Vermont is half marble, and that
Lake Superior can send us bronze enough for regiments of statues? I go
back to my first plan of a prohibitory enactment. I had even gone so far
as to make a rough draught of an Act for the Better Observance of the
Second Commandment; but it occurred to me that convictions under it
would be doubtful, from the difficulty of satisfying a jury that our
g