So wrote Cowper in his "Conversation," nearly a century ago, when duelling was beginning to go out of fashion, even among men who did not look upon it from a religious point of view. There is no doubt that the passage which these lines introduce did much to bring the custom of settling personal quarrels by single combat into disrepute. Cowper, the moral poet _par excellence_ of the English language, attained this eminence chiefly because he wrote, not like a fanatic, or a canting pietist, but like a Christian gentleman and a man of sense. A man of family, he thought and felt as a gentleman, and addressed himself to gentlemen; and indeed, in his day poetry, at least of the quality that he produced, had very few readers outside the pale of gentry. His view of duelling is the one which now prevails in most communities of English blood in all parts of the world. Germans and Frenchmen and the Latin races generally still fight upon personal provocation, and in our late slave States and among the rude and fierce men who guard and extend our western borders, "misunderstandings" are settled by the bullet or the knife, and if not on the spot, with the weapon at hand, then in a regularly arranged duel in which the forms are entirely subordinate to the essentials of a bloody and vindictive contest. With these exceptions, however, duelling among the English-speaking people has come to be regarded as both folly and crime. Nothing could evince more strongly the change that has taken place in the moral sense of the world; for to resent an insult by a challenge to fight, and to accept such a challenge without a moment's hesitation, were once the highest duties of a gentleman. There was a reason for this; and without advocating or defending the practice of duelling, it may be questioned whether that reason has entirely disappeared. * * * * * --Our readers need not fear that we are about to defend or to palliate the conduct of either of the parties to the recent affair which began in Fifth Avenue in New York and ended on the Maryland border; but the fact that that occurrence or series of occurrences has attracted the attention of the whole country, makes it a proper occasion of remark upon the questions involved in such encounters. And first we must set aside the Cowper view of the subject, not in its conclusion, but in its reasoning. For however Christian in sentiment and sound in its final judgment the passage in the "Conversation" may be, its author's position is not logically impregnable. For it rests upon the assumption embodied in the couplet-- Amoral, sensible, and well-bred man Will not affront me, and no other can.