o you as a
man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are
plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water
that threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed these two
propositions:--

I. _Tongues were given us to be held._

II. _Dumbness sets the brute below the man: Silence elevates the man
above the brute._

Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than
that of a hundred men gathering samphire. And when we take into account
how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be
commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception
is positively stunning.

Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late
Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, "VOX ET PRAETEREA
NIHIL," as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general.
_He_, at least, never betrayed his clients. As it is, there is no end to
it. We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal
Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same
ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man
had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.
We are the victims of a droll antithesis. Daniel would not give in to
Nebuchadnezzar's taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down
and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have
gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor. I do not
think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one is
so apt to encounter;--I met one once at an evening party. But I would be
thrown into a den of them rather than sleep in the same room with that
statue. Posterity will think we cut pretty figures indeed in the
monumental line! Perhaps there is a gleam of hope and a symptom of
convalescence in the fact that the Prince of Wales, during his late
visit, got off without a single speech. The cheerful hospitalities of
Mount Auburn were offered to him, as to all distinguished strangers, but
nothing more melancholy. In his case I doubt the expediency of the
omission. Had we set a score or two of orators on him and his suite, it
would have given them a more intimidating notion of the offensive powers
of the country than West Point and all the Navy Yards put together.

In the name of our common humanity, consider, too, what shifts our
friends in the sculpin line (as we sh