Such was the beginning of a correspondence of over a hundred letters, and continuing nearly a year. A careful perusal of all of them, in the order in which they were penned, indicates most clearly the phases of an attachment as fatal to an innocent, unfortunate girl, as it was heartless and betraying on the part of Maxwell. The first impulses of their affections were doubtless mutually sincere. Afterwards the feeling of Theodore changed, or his lust triumphed over the better qualities of his nature. And the truth is not here to be disguised, that the love of a man long immersed in the vices of slavery, and nurtured in slavery’s very lap, (as Maxwell had been, from birth,) cannot be reckoned but as the offspring of unmitigated sensuality. The infamy of such a life is seldom surpassed by the atrocities of ocean piracy. A slaveholder cannot appreciate the sublimity and purity of the guardian angel, Virtue. Deadened in feeling by long familiarity with vice, and steeled to all substantial goodness by the inhumanity of the traffic in female loveliness, he desires no higher or purer delight than sensual indulgence. Where earthly prospects are full of promise, the dark demon of lust intrudes, and, strengthened by possession, flaps his wings in exultation that the laws of a _Christian community_ are inadequate to prevent the accomplishment of his dark designs. He riots in the possession of numberless victims to his rapacious appetite! Youth, innocence and beauty are immolated, at his bidding, on the altars of licentiousness! Wo to the fair daughter of the North, whose pure soul is at the mercy of the Southern hyena! Wo to that spirit of slavish reverence for wealth, which winks at any crime, if the criminal be only a man of wealth! In this penurious and licentious age, money is the arch destroyer of female chastity. Wo to the female votaries of Wealth and Fashion, whose feet are in the snares of the soul-destroying seducer! Better to pine in want till the coming of grey hairs, and die unbefriended, than yield thy honor, poor worldling, to the exacting blandishments of wealth! The letter of young Maxwell, as above given, may be regarded not only as a fair specimen of the literature of slavery, but likewise as an ebullition of that chivalric spirit which is the peculiar boast of the Southron. Love, pistols, seduction, murder, dogs, horses, alligators, and _improvident indolence_, are the ingredients of Southern chivalry. All the letters of Theodore to Maria, now in our possession, abound in the same swaggering emptiness. Many of them are filled with the grossest obscenity. It would be foreign to our purpose to insert them here; our history is sufficiently blackened with human frailty, without them.