infamous art. I repeat it again, good or bad
characters may be blended in a novel, comedy, or tragedy, where the
characters, though taken from nature, cannot offend any private
individual; but, the names, or exact characters, should not be exposed by
writers, unless the individuals are notorious, or had already become a
part of history.

Like immoral writers have, now a days, become so fashionable for which,
loosing all respect which man ought to have for man, we see dandies
ridiculing not only private characters; they write of nations, as if their
cat-like brain could judge that of an elephant. That part, or that half of
a man, whose life was spent in setting his cravat without a fault, as soon
as he visits a strange country, where the cravat is tied _a la sans
facon_, such a half man calls all those people a set of fools. He who did
never live in the luxury of a palace, finds that his two story house,
built without knowledge of architecture, is by far more comfortable than
the palace built by Michael Angelo. The protestant finds nothing reasonable
in a catholic country; and the catholic nothing reasonable in a protestant
one. He whose life was spent in contending parties, cannot understand how
the citizens of another country go so quietly to their own private
business, without meddling with the ruling power. The subject of England
calls the americans free fools; and the turk calls barbarous those nations
condeming a man to a forced labor for bigamy, or polygamy. These, while
they do not permit divorce, connive at a man living with another woman, as
far as he does not marry in church the second, as he did the former still
living. Because that country educates, and brings them up, all the
children from poor parents, this other traveler, who had never read the
laws of Sparta, blames all poor, who marry in his country, because his
legislators did no more provide for them, than they had for the flies
which pester his luxurious table.

I might blend here, and multiply the prejudices as well as the good
reasons of travelers to infinity, almost: but, unless the dandy ceases
from being a dandy; the religious from being a superstitious man; I mean,
as far as the writer does not look at things with a charitable, and
unprejudiced eye, the too many writers of our day, not only injure our
literature; they degrade it. And why, instead of cavils, frivolous
misrepresentations of persons and nations, writers do not place themselves
as