Page:The Southern Literary Messenger - Minor.djvu/32

 22 alone will impart an additional interest to the natural and unstudied effusions of her muse." Several of those effusions are presented, some of which were composed as far back as 1808.

Judge N. B. Tucker furnishes a note on Blackstone, Volume I, page 523, on Slavery, and thus opens the discussion of a subject in which the Messenger was bound to take a leading part for several years. The Judge was replied to in the next number; but in the present one the editor says: "Whilst we entirely concur with him that slavery as a political, or social, institution is a matter exclusively of our own concern, as much so as the laws which govern the distribution of property, we must be permitted to dissent from the opinion that it is either a moral or political benefit. We regard it, on the contrary, as a great evil, which society sooner or later will find it not only to its interest to remove or mitigate, but will seek its gradual abolition, or amelioration, under the influence of those high obligations imposed by an enlightened Christian morality." The aggressions of abolition and fanaticism caused the Messenger to reverse its position.

There is quite a difference of opinion in regard to Bulwer. In a notice of his "Last Days of Pompeii," ostensibly editorial, it is said: "We are free to confess that it has raised Mr. Bulwer 50