Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/118

Rh suspected there was the slightest connection between Love and Slander? yet there is. Read this scrap, which I cut from a paper many years ago, and then to the proof:—

"The slanderer is a pest; an incubus to society, that should be subjected to a slow cauterization, and then be lopped off like a disagreeable excrescence. Like the viper, he leaves a shining trail in his wake. Like a tarantula, he weaves a thread of candor with a web of wiles, or, with all the mendicity of hints, whispers forth his tale, that, like the fabling Nile, no fountain knows. The dead—ay, even the dead—over whose pale, sheeted corpse sleeps the dark sleep no venomed tongue can wake, and whose pale lips have then no voice to plead, are subjected to the scandalous attacks of the slanderer—

"I think it is Pollock who says the slanderer is the foulest whelp of sin, whose tongue was set on fire in hell, and whose legs were faint with haste to circulate the lie his soul had framed.

"There is no animal I despise more than these moths and scaraps of society, the malicious censurers—

"Oh, who would disarrange all society with their false lapwing cries! The slanderer makes few direct charges and assertions. His long, envious finger points to no certain locality. He has an inimitable shrug of the shoulders, can give peculiar glances—

"He seems to glory in the misery he entails. The innocent wear the foulest impress of his smutty palm, and a soul pure as 'arctic