Page:Criticism on the Declaration of independence, as a literary document (IA criticismondecla00seld).pdf/36

 we have never seen any thing of it from that day to this. But the fact that they account their honor "sacred," in some measure accounts for their deifying themselves. For is it but fair that beings who found they possessed one sacred attribute, should thereupon presume they were entitled to a post among the "Dii minores gentium." But self-sanctification and self-deification do not appear sufficient to satisfy the generous cravings of the chivalry. The Dii minores gentium stoop from their celestial tripods to appropriate terrestrial virtues. They call themselves the "generous south." It is not much to be wondered at, that they should covet the virtue of generosity. For it would be a very easy one for those to practise who never pay their debts.

But the chivalry can afford to be generous in the matter of pledges if in nothing else. They can pledge their lives, because understanding them to be "unalienable," there is of course no risk. It is cheaper to do any thing else with them, than to lead them. They can pledge their fortunes with similar safety, for these are for the most part desperate, and are as well got rid of as kept. And lastly, they may pledge their "sacred honor" from Maine to California, and from independence to doomsday, without a shadow of risk; for no man will ever take it who knows what it is.

The expression "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor," I cannot but contemplate as verbiage of the poorest sort. Nothing is added to the idea after the word "lives." Had the sentence of which we have quoted a part, been written thus—"and for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives" it would have expressed all the meaning it does as it stands. But sound!! sound!! the Jupiter-tonans and the ding-dong it would not have had. These, to chivalric ears, are of more consequence than sense; therefore those insipid and profitless appendages are affixed to a sentence, which but for them would have been sublime.

Men in the strong agonies of death, make no parade of rhetoric, And in the trying emergencies of life, public or private, when the strain of rigorous necessity brings us to as straight a condition; a brevity as rigid as the condition we are in, is the first, last, and