s, that the principle of personal honour, well
understood, cannot require this satisfaction for its wounds. For the
present I shall say nothing on the former head, but not for want of
something to say. With respect to the latter, it is a profound mistake,
founded on inacquaintance with the manners and the spirit of manners
prevalent amongst these imperfectly civilised nations. Honour was a
sense not developed in many of its modifications amongst either Greeks
or Romans. Cudgelling was at one time used as the remedy in cases of
outrageous libel and pasquinade. But it is a point very little to the
praise of either people, that no vindictive notice was taken of any
possible personalities, simply because the most hideous license had been
established for centuries in tongue license and unmanly Billingsgate.
This had been promoted by the example hourly ringing in their ears of
vernile scurrility. _Verna_--that is, the slave born in the family--had
each from the other one universal and proverbial character of
foul-mouthed eloquence, which heard from infancy, could not but furnish
a model almost unconsciously to those who had occasion publicly to
practise vituperative rhetoric. What they remembered of this vernile
licentiousness, constituted the staple of their talk in such situations.
And the horrible illustrations left even by the most accomplished and
literary of the Roman orators, of their shameless and womanly fluency in
this dialect of unlicensed abuse, are evidences, not to be resisted, of
such obtuseness, such coarseness of feeling, so utter a defect of all
the gentlemanly sensibilities, that no man, alive to the real state of
things amongst them, would ever think of pleading their example in any
other view than as an object of unmitigated disgust. At all events, the
long-established custom of deluging each other in the Forum, or even in
the Senate, with the foulest abuse, the precedent traditionally
delivered through centuries before the time of Caesar and Cicero, had so
robbed it of its sting, that, as a subject for patient endurance, or an
occasion for self conquest in mastering the feelings, it had no merit at
all. Anger, prompting an appeal to the cudgel, there might be, but sense
of wounded honour, requiring a reparation by appeal to arms, or a
washing away by blood, no such feeling could have been subdued or
overcome by a Roman, for none such existed. The feelings of wounded
honour on such occasions, it will be all