e coasted, they would have stood up to their
chins in scurrilous epithets. The comical sketch of their rhetoric in
"Salmagundi" is literally true:--"Every day have these slangwhangers
made furious attacks on each other and upon their respective adherents,
discharging their heavy artillery, consisting of large sheets loaded
with scoundrel, villain, liar, rascal, numskull, nincompoop, dunderhead,
wiseacre, blockhead, jackass." As single words were not always explosive
enough to make a report equal to their feelings, they had recourse to
compounds;--"pert and prating popinjay," "hackneyed gutscraper," "maggot
of corruption," "toad on a dung-heap," "snivelling sophisticating
hound," are a few of the chain-shot which strike our eyes in turning
over the yellow faded files. They are all quiet now, those eager,
snarling editors of fifty years since, and mostly forgotten. Even the
ink which records their spiteful abuse is fading away;--

"Dunne no more the halter dreads,
The torrent of his lies to check,
No gallows Cheetham's dreams invades,
Nor lours o'er Holt's devoted neck."

Emerson's saying, that involuntarily we read history as superior beings,
is never so true as when we read history before it has been worked
up for the public, in the raw material of letters, pamphlets, and
newspapers. Feverish paragraphs, which once excited the enthusiasm of
one party and the fiercest opposition of the other, lie before us as
dead and as unmeaning as an Egyptian mummy. The passion which once
gave them life is gone. The objects which the writers considered
all-important we perceive to have been of no real significance even in
their day. We read on with a good-natured pity, akin to the feeling
which the gods of Epicurus might be supposed to experience when they
looked down upon foolish mortals,--and when we shut the book, go out
into our own world to fret, fume, and wrangle over things equally
transitory and frivolous.

When it became evident that the Administration party ran the risk of
being beaten in the election of 1800, their trumpeters sounded the
wildest notes of alarm. "People! how long will you remain blind? Awake!
be up and doing! If Mr. Jefferson is elected, the equal representation
of the small States in the Senate will be destroyed, the funding
system swept away, the navy abolished, all commerce and foreign trade
prohibited, and the fruits of the soil left to rot on the hands of the
farmer. The taxes will all fall