which, however, was firmly on the side of the North; it only started
during the final stages of the war,--a time when (be it said without any
derogation from the sincerity of the Pall-Mall Gazette) some other
papers also would probably, from the aspect of the times, have been
better inclined to take the same side, but for finding themselves
already up to the armpits in Secessionism. Passing now to the weekly
papers, of which we can name only two or three, we find the Conservative
"Press," the Anglican-Clerical "Guardian" the "Examiner,"--a
representative of a somewhat old-fashioned form of Liberalism or
"Whiggery,"--and the caustic, Liberal-Conservative "Saturday Review,"
(already mentioned,) on the side of the South; the advanced Liberal
"Spectator" on that of the North. It is a significant sign of the
widespread Southernism in all grades of town-society, especially the
young and exuberant, the man-about-town class, the club-men, the jolly
young bachelors, the tavern-politicians, that _all_ the "comic" papers
were on that side,--not only the now almost "legitimated" "Punch,"[C] a
staid grimalkin which has outgrown the petulances of kittenhood, or, as
it has been well nicknamed erewhile, "The Jackall of the Times," but
equally the more free-and-easy "Fun," the plebeian "Comic News," the
fashionable "Owl," and the short-lived "Arrow." Among the magazines, the
"Quarterly" and "Blackwood," with various others, not all of them
colleagues of these two in strict Conservatism, were for the South;
"Macmillan's Magazine," again an organ of the advanced and theoretic
Liberalism, consistently for the North, so far as it could be considered
to express aggregate, and not merely individual, views.

Of our leading writers, taken personally, Carlyle was of course against
the North, and perhaps one may say on the side of the South, as shown by
his epigram, "The American Iliad in a Nutshell,"--one of the few
instances (if I may trust my own opinion concerning so great a genius)
in which even his immense power of humor and pointed illustration has
fallen flat and let off a firework which merely fizzed without flashing.
Ruskin also would appear, from some occasional expressions in what he
has published, to have adopted the same view; as, indeed, he very
generally does "Carlylize" when Carlylean subject-matter engages his
pen. For the North three of the most distinguished and resolute writers
have been Mr. John Stuart Mill and Professors Cai