Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/390

 t. Scotland was clamorous and England jealously contemptuous, for nearly a century. Twice since the union, the land of cakes has been in rebellion; but as long as a pound Scots was only a twentieth part of a pound English,--as long as the treasury was filled chiefly from south the Tweed, and the sons of poor and proud Scottish lairds could make glittering abstractions from it,--as long as place was to be won or hoped for,--there was no danger. So with us,--though Jacob and Esau quarrelled already in the womb, yet, so long as the weaker and more politic brother can get the elder brother's portion, and simple Esau hunts his whales and pierces his untrodden forests, content with his mess of pottage,--honestly abiding by his bargain, though a little puzzled at its terms,--we think that fratricide, or the sincere thought of it, is very far off. *      *       *       *       *

We should be glad to extract some passages of peculiar force and beauty,--such as that where Mr. Choate rebukes the undue haste of reformers, and calls to mind the slow development and longevity of states and ideas. But our duty is the less pleasing one of pointing to some of the sophistries of the argument and some of the ill-advised ebullitions of the orator. We leave his exegesis of "Render unto Cæsar" to answer itself; but what can be worse than this,--worse in taste, in temper, in reason?

"There is a cant of shallowness and fanaticism which misunderstands and denies this. There is a distempered and ambitious morality which  says civil prudence is no virtue. There is a philanthropy,--so it  calls itself,--pedantry, arrogance, folly, cruelty, impiousness, I  call it, fit enough for a pulpit, totally unfit for a people,--fit  enough for a preacher, totally unfit for a statesman."

Think of it!--fit enough for St. Augustine and St. Francis, (to mention no greater names,) fit enough for Taylor and Barrow, for Bossuet and Fénelon, but not for Mr. Buchanan or Mr. Cushing!

In another place Mr. Choate says, "that even the laughter of fools, and children, and madmen, little ministers, little editors, and little politicians, can inflict the mosquito-bite, not deep, but stinging." As this is one of the best of his sarcasms, we give it the advantage of the circulation of the "Atlantic,"--generous and tidal circulation, as he himself might call it. We do not think the mosquito image new,--if we remember, the editor of the Bungtown Copperhead uses it weekly against "our pitiful contemporary,"--though the notion of a mosquito-bite inflicted by a laugh is original with Mr. Choate, unless Lord Castlereagh may have used it before. But we would seriously ask Mr. Choate who the big ministers of the country are, if the Beechers, if Wayland, Park, Bushnell, Cheever, Furness, Parker, Hedge, Bellows, and Huntington are the little ones?

There is an amusing passage in which Mr. Choate would seem to assume to himself and those who agree with him the honors of martyrdom. This shows a wonderful change in public opinion; though the martyrs in the "Legenda Aurea" and Fox seem to have had a harder time of it than we supposed to be the case with Mr. Choate.

We have not space to follow him farther, and only the reputation of the man, and the singularity of the occasion, which gave a kind of national significance to the affair, would have tempted us to intrude upon the select privacy of the Young Men's Democratic Association.

Finally, as Mr. Choate appears to have a very mean opinion of the understandings and the culture of those opposed to him in politics, we beg to remind him, since he has been led out, like Balaam, to prophesy against the tents and armies of the Republican Israel, and has ended by proving their invincibility, that it was an animal in all respects inferior to a prophet, and in some to a politician, who was first aware of the presence of the heavenly messenger; and it may be that persons incapable of a generalization--as that patient creature undoubtedly was--may see as far into the future as the greatest philosopher who turns his eyes always to the past.

Footnote 1: We may be allowed to wonder, however, at his speaking of "memories that burn and revel in the pages of Herodotus,"--a phrase which does injustice to the simple and quiet style of the delightful Pepys of Antiquity.