Nothing is more disgusting than those individuals, whose sight being not longer than a span, pretend to judge of distances which they cannot see: and because they have never been better, thinking mankind a race incapable of moral perfection, or improvement, they call Plato, Rousseau, Bentham, and Fourier the dreamers of the ages, in which they lived, and of those to come, while they do not perceive that, had men never attempted to ameliorate human frailties, we would be still nothing better, than our ancient fathers--the cannibals. Because we have not arrived at perfection, shall we stop on our half civilization?--This is my firm belief: Unless we practice that, which we profess in theory, we will never be able to describe in writing, nor speaking, the honest delineaments of morals, or integrity. The man, who does not feel nobility under his skin, cannot speak, or write with propriety of the attributes of a Divinity. It is an axiom: that which is not felt, can not be expressed. _Si vis me flere dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi; tunc tua me infortunia lædent, Telephe, vel Peleu: male si mandata loqueris, Aut dormitabo, aut ridebo._ Could Horace rise from the dead, he would not wonder a little in finding out, some men still doubting the above uncontrovertible quotation. Our boasting nineteenth century, may be properly called the raging time of scribblers, in which confusion of papers, true men of letters are neglected. When demagogues become the fashionable leading party of a community, the worst scribblers, whose money renders editors good enough to praise what they did not read, or could not understand, are generally read by a plurality of apes, who buy the new works, in order to be able, at the first evening party, to echo in the ears of a belle, the praising criticism of their newspapers. And these individuals sustain before their admirers, that a man may be either philosopher, orator, or poet, and at the same time, be quite a stranger to virtue! And while we call ourselves a civilized people, such empty minds, nursed with empty words, endeavor to confound literary men with demagogues, wisdom with ignorance, piety with hypocrisy, virtue with vice; and place into the asylums of lunatics every one, who would dare to contradict them. Such scribblers who live by writing the _interesting_ murders of the day, and all the awful--excuse the epithet! the _interesting_ calamities, I wanted to say, of this unpitying globe, are the only individuals who can make money out of their pen.