riend. I cannot help thinking of Walter Mapes's jingling
paraphrase of Petronius,--

'Dummodo sim splendidis vestibus ornatus,
Et multa familia sim circumvallatus,
Prudens sum et sapiens et morigeratus,
Et tuus nepos sum et tu meus cognatus,'--

which I may freely render thus:--

So long as I was prosperous, I'd dinners by the dozen,
Was well-bred, witty, virtuous, and everybody's cousin;
If luck should turn, as well she may, her fancy is so flexile,
Will virtue, cousinship, and all return with her from exile?

There was nothing in all this to exasperate a philosopher, much to make
him smile rather; but the earth's surface is not chiefly inhabited by
philosophers, and I revive the recollection of it now in perfect
good-humour, merely by way of suggesting to our _ci-devant_ British
cousins, that it would have been easier for them to hold their tongues
than for us to keep our tempers under the circumstances.

The English Cabinet made a blunder, unquestionably, in taking it so
hastily for granted that the United States had fallen forever from their
position as a first-rate power, and it was natural that they should vent
a little of their vexation on the people whose inexplicable obstinacy in
maintaining freedom and order, and in resisting degradation, was likely
to convict them of their mistake. But if bearing a grudge be the sure
mark of a small mind in the individual, can it be a proof of high spirit
in a nation? If the result of the present estrangement between the two
countries shall be to make us more independent of British twaddle
(_Indomito nec dira ferens stipendia Tauro_), so much the better; but if
it is to make us insensible to the value of British opinion in matters
where it gives us the judgment of an impartial and cultivated outsider,
if we are to shut ourselves out from the advantages of English culture,
the loss will be ours, and not theirs. Because the door of the old
homestead has been once slammed in our faces, shall we in a huff reject
all future advances of conciliation, and cut ourselves foolishly off
from any share in the humanizing influences of the place, with its
ineffable riches of association, its heirlooms of immemorial culture,
its historic monuments, ours no less than theirs, its noble gallery of
ancestral portraits? We have only to succeed, and England will not only
respect, but, for the first time, begin to understand us. And let us
not, in our justifiable indignation at wanton insult