raven images did really present a likeness to any of the objects
enumerated in the divine ordinance. Perhaps a double-barrelled statute
might be contrived that would meet both the oratorical and the
monumental difficulty. Let a law be passed that all speeches delivered
more for the benefit of the orator than that of the audience, and all
eulogistic ones of whatever description, be pronounced in the chapel of
the Deaf and Dumb Asylum, and all statues be set up within the grounds
of the Institution for the Blind. Let the penalty for infringement in
the one case be to read the last President's Message, and in the other
to look at the Webster statue one hour a day, for a term not so long as
to violate the spirit of the law forbidding cruel and unusual
punishments.

Perhaps it is too much to expect of our legislators that they should
pass so self-denying an ordinance. They might, perhaps, make all oratory
but their own penal, and then (who knows?) the reports of their debates
might be read by the few unhappy persons who were demoniacally possessed
by a passion for that kind of thing, as girls are sometimes said to be
by an appetite for slate-pencils. _Vita brevis, lingua longa_. I protest
that among law-givers I respect Numa, who declared, that, of all the
Camenae, Tacita was most worthy of reverence. The ancient Greeks also
(though they left too much oratory behind them) had some good notions,
especially if we consider that they had not, like modern Europe, the
advantage of communication with America. Now the Greeks had a Muse of
Beginning, and the wonder is, considering how easy it is to talk and how
hard to say anything, that they did not hit upon that other and more
excellent Muse of Leaving-off. The Spartans, I suspect, found her out
and kept her selfishly to themselves. She were indeed a goddess to be
worshipped, a true Sister of Charity among that loquacious sisterhood!

Endlessness is the order of the day. I ask you to compare Plutarch's
lives of demigods and heroes with our modern biographies of deminoughts
and zeroes. Those will appear but tailors and ninth-parts of men in
comparison with these, every one of whom would seem to have had nine
lives, like a cat, to justify such prolixity. Yet the evils of print are
as dust in the balance to those of speech.

We were doing very well in Chesumpscot, but the Lyceum has ruined all.
There are now two debating-clubs, seminaries of multiloquence. A few of
us old-fashioned