.... We are tolerably phlegmatic and notoriously hard to provoke. We
look on with considerable composure while our favourite Chinaman is
being dismembered in the streets, and our dog publicly insulted.
Detecting an alien hand in our trousers pocket excites in us only a
feeling of temperate disapprobation, and an open swindle executed upon
our favourite cousin by an unscrupulous shopkeeper we regard simply as
an instance of enterprise which has taken an unfortunate direction.
Slow to anger, quick to forgive, charitable in judgment and to mercy
prone; with unbounded faith in the entire goodness of man and the
complete holiness of woman; seeking ever for palliating circumstances
in the conduct of the blackest criminal—we are at once a model of
moderation and a pattern of forbearance.
But if Mrs. Victoria Woodhull and her swinish crew of free lovers had
but a single body, and that body lay asleep under the upturned root of
a prostrate oak, we would work with a dull jack-knife day and
night—month in and month out—through summer’s sun and winter’s storm—to
sever that giant trunk, and let that mighty root, clasping its mountain
of inverted earth, back into the position assigned to it by nature and
by nature’s God!
.... We like a liar—a thoroughly conscientious, industrious, and
ingenious liar. Not your ordinary prevaricator, who skirts along the
coast of truth, keeping ever within sight of the headlands and
promontories of probability—whose excursions are limited to short,
fair-weather reaches into the ocean of imagination, and who paddles for
port as if the devil were after him whenever a capful of wind threatens
a storm of exposure; but a bold, sea-going liar, who spurns a
continent, striking straight out for blue water, with his eyes fixed
upon the horizon of boundless mendacity.
We have found such a one, and our hat is at half-mast in token of
profound esteem and conscious inferiority. This person gravely tells us
that at the burning of the Archiepiscopal Palace at Bourges, among
other valuable manuscripts destroyed was the original death-warrant of
Jesus Christ, signed at Jerusalem by one Capel, and dated U. C. 783.
Not only so, but he kindly favours us with a literal translation of it!
One cannot help warming up to a man who can lie like that. Talk about
Chatterton’s Rowley deception, Macpherson’s Ossian fraud, or Locke’s
moon hoax! Compared with this tremendous fib they are as but the stilly
whisper of a hearth-stone cricket to the shrill trumpeting of a wounded
elephant—the piping of a sick cocksparrow to the brazen clang of a
donkey in love!
.... For the memory of the late John Ridd, of Illinois, we entertain
the liveliest contempt. Mr. Ridd recently despatched himself with a
firearm for the following reasons, set forth in a letter that he left
behind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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