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
graven 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 lawgivers 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 Leavin