found himself famous. We are informed
that nothing

"Can ennoble slaves, or fools, or cowards";

and that

"My days are in the yellow leaf,
The flowers and the fruit are gone";

Burton was pleasing himself with _phantasies_ sweet; Addison wedded
_misery_ in a noble wife; Wolsey had nothing more pathetic to say than
"Had I served my God as I served my King, He would not now have deserted
me"; and _King James_, contrary to all historic tradition and all the
probabilities of the case, "never said a foolish thing and never did a
wise one."

Here is a bit of concentrated history:--

"On one of the last Sundays in December, 1862, in the midst of a
dispirited city, and with a perplexed Senate and a beaten army as that
city's safeguards, Mr. Henry Ward Beecher asserted in the Puritan Church
in New York, that 'Generals were of no use; that God fought against the
North for upholding the slaves; that the time was come when wickedness
was to be "rooted out"; and, finally, that it was not only the province
of the preacher to condemn vice, but that he should "pluck it out by the
root," should "slay" wickedness, and that slavery and alcohol should be
put down by the arm of flesh and the sword of the preacher.'"

Now, frankly confessing that we have no knowledge whatever of the facts
in question and cannot therefore authoritatively deny a single
statement, we are yet willing, on "circumstantial evidence," to risk
both our intelligence and veracity by declaring our belief, first, that
Mr. Beecher did not say this in the Puritan Church, but in the Plymouth
Church; secondly, that it was not in New York, but in Brooklyn; and,
thirdly, that he never said it at all. We leave out of view the haze
which evidently beclouds this Gentle Brain regarding the location of the
Senate, and its prevailing impression that the Potomac flows nine times
around New York before it empties itself into Lake Pontchartrain.

We do not claim to display any superior learning in pointing out these
mistakes. We shall never set ourselves above our contemporaries for
corrections which--we will not say every school-boy, but--every
school-girl of ordinary literary aptitude is entirely competent to make.
There are many things which it is no credit to know, but a serious
discredit not to know; and when a man presumes to write a book, we have
at least a right to expect that he shall not stumble in the primer. The
Gentle Man claims to have been a stud