It is utter demoralization to write "pride in his port and fire in his eye." Indeed, the singular fatality which attends these quotations has something of the sublime. If a sentiment _can_ be reproduced with all its sparkle extinguished, our Gentle Man is the one to do it. Diffuse everywhere else, he is compact in erring, and crowds more mistakes into a paragraph than are often met on a page. He says incidentally, "Lord Byron wrote a very pretty song, conveying the idea in its refrain 'that the day of my destiny _is_ over, the star of my hope has declined.' Now it is not a song, as he uses the word; the idea, if it is an idea, is not in the refrain; there is no refrain in the piece; and there is nothing said in the piece about the star of his hope. Lord Burleigh's fulsome she-fool is euphemized into an irksome female fool, and Lord Byron _jumped up_ one morning and 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.