by, what a miserable language is our English in
some respects; so awkward, so incompact! Look at the phrase 'unheard of,'
and compare it with the Latin '_inauditus_.' What a pity we were not born
Romans or Greeks, with Yankee notions! Tell your Gotham friends that if
they are speaking of a ruinous _brick_ wall, they must say _dilaterated_,
from 'later,' a brick, and not '_dilapidated_,' from 'lapis,' a stone. One
might as well say a man is 'stoned' to death with brick-bats.' . . . WHAT
sad and startling contrasts are presented to the eye and mind of one who
attentively looks over the illustrated newspapers of the British
metropolis! On one hand, pictures of triumphal processions, arches,
bonfires, illuminations, rich presents, gorgeous equipages, state-beds,
'royal poultry-houses, owleries, and pigeonries,' accompanied by elaborate
descriptions, arrest the attention; on the other, there is a picture of a
city 'Asylum for the Destitute,' where poor naked wretches find a
temporary refuge from the pitiless winter storm without: huddling round a
dim fire, or sunk exhausted upon the straw in the human 'stalls,' or
clutching at their bowls of pauper-soup; a scene whose true character is
enforced by accounts of poor women making shirts for _a farthing apiece_,
a hard day's work; sleeping four in a bed; purchasing with the scanty
pittance tea-leaves to boil over again! Hardly-entreated brothers and
sisters of humanity! not always shall the glaring inequality that
surrounds you, crush your spirits to the earth! . . . THERE is a pleasant
pen in our metropolitan '_Aurora_,' which occasionally dashes off
sententious paragraphs that flash and sparkle like snow-crust in a
moon-lit night in winter. There is evidently a FOSTER-ing hand over its
columns; and _through_ them (let us add, as it is _that_ of which we
especially wish to speak,) over the reputation of Mr. WILLIS. The remarks
in a late number of that journal, under the head of '_Mr. Willis's
Defence_' against a scurrilous attack on his private character in a
down-eastern print, were equally just and felicitous. Had it been
generally known in his native town who was the instigator of that attack,
we have good authority for saying that, gross as it was, Mr. WILLIS would
have considered it utterly beneath his notice. As it was, however, he
deemed it not amiss at one and the same time to punish skulking envy and
impotent malignity; to vindicate his reputation with his townsmen agains