ing the Scriptures_. I was in attendance, and listened to you
with all the attention and impartiality I was capable of exercising. I
thought it a little _presumptuous_ for any one man to assume to teach
more than one hundred able ministers how to read and pronounce the
inspired writings; and the more so, when I knew that several of the
number were presidents and professors in different male and female
colleges, and that many others of them were graduates of the best
literary institutions in the South. Still, my apology for you was, that
you was a vain old gentleman, and that to listen to you, respectfully,
was to obey the Divine teaching of one who has taught us to "bear the
infirmities of the weak." Your _samples_, both of reading and
pronunciation, were amusing and novel to me. And so far as I could
gather the prevailing sentiment, it was, that to adopt your style would
render the reading of the Scriptures perfectly ridiculous.

In your address to "Methodist Know-Nothing Preachers," I discover that
you are still the man you were at Madison, in 1847: you have a great
deal to say about _yourself_, and make free use of the personal pronoun
I! _I_ advise--_I_ believe--_I_ am satisfied--_I_ will not agree--_I_
warn and caution--_I_ fear, or _I_ apprehend, etc. To parse the
different sentences in your partisan harangue syntactically, little else
is necessary but to understand the _first person singular_, and to
repeat the rule as often as it occurs: a peculiarity which characterizes
every paragraph in your labored address. Beside, the frequent use of the
pronouns _I_, _me_, _my_, _mine_, etc., too frequently occur to be worth
estimating. And it will be seen, upon examination, that not merely the
verbiage, but the sentiment, is thus egotistic throughout, exhibiting a
degree of arrogance and self-importance, only to be met with in a
_Clerical Locofoco_, used by bad men for ignoble purposes. To carry out
the idea of your _vanity_, you say in the winding up of your address:

"And now, brethren, have _I_ or Mr. Wesley hit upon one good
reason why you should not have joined the Know-Nothings? If
either of _us_ have, then _I_ beseech you to come from among
them. If _we_ have not, there is yet another in reserve which,
if it does not prevail will show--or prove to my satisfaction
at least--that if _an angel from heaven_ were to denounce your
order, you would cleave to it still."

Any other man b