Page:Rural Hours.djvu/529

Rh into which the counties are divided, an outrageously absurd jumble of words has been fastened upon too many of them. It ought to be a crime little short of high treason, to give such names to habitable places; we have Ovids and Milos, Spartas and Hectors, mixed up with Smithvilles, and Stokesvilles, New Palmyras, New Herculaneums, Romes and Carthages, and all these by the dozen; for not content with fixing an absurd name upon one spot, it is most carefully repeated in twenty more, with the aggravating addition of all the points of the compass tacked to it.

We cannot wonder that such gratuitous good-nature in providing a subject of merriment to the Old World should not have been thrown away. The laugh was early raised at our expense. As long ago as 1825, some lines in heroic verse, as a model for the imitation of our native poets, appeared in one of the English Reviews.

Retaliation is but an indifferent defence, and is seldom needed,