n the relations of the sexes
or the habits of the young. "The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the
hands are the hands of Esau." He is two and more, as we all are, while
he is one, and must not be blamed on his own score alone. The London
"Times," already mentioned, is called the _Thunderer_; but, like the man
behind the scenes at the theatre with his machinery, it thunders as it
is told. How sympathetic are the countless brood of falsehoods
respecting our country in foreign publications is evident from the
cases, too few, of periodicals which, with the same means of
information, rise to a noble accuracy and justice. While the more
virulent, like the "Saturday Review," servile to its peculiar customers,
make a show of holding out against the ever more manifest truth, others,
among which is even the "Times" itself, learn the prudence of an altered
style. When the wind is about to change, an uncertain fluttering and
swinging to and fro may be observed in the vanes. So do many organs
prove what pure indicators they are, as they shake in the breeze of
public opinion. "Stop my paper" is a cry whose real meaning is for the
constituency which the paper represents.

It is a more shameful illustration of the same weakness, when the pens
of literary men, not dependent on local support, are subsidized by the
prejudice or sold to the pride and wealth of the society in which they
live. "I believe in testifying," once said a great man; and we have,
among the philosophic and learned, noble witnesses for the equity of our
national case. But what a spectacle of degraded functions, when poets,
historians, and religious thinkers bow the knee to an aristocracy so
vilely proud to stretch forth its hand of fellowship to a slaveholding
brotherhood beyond the sea! We need not denounce them. The ideas they
pretend to stand for hold them in scorn. The imagination whose pictures
they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote
themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales
of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own
reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not
their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the
world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there
was a grand old republican in the realm of letters, John Milton by name,
whose shade must be terrible to their thoughts. Let them beware of
making of thems