composed always of the same old guard of supernumeraries and candle-snuffers, and which, by marching round and round the paper forest in the background, would make six men pass muster very well for sixty, did not the fatally regular recurrence of the hero whose cotton armor bunches at the knees, and the other whose legs insist on the un-Grecian eccentricity of being straight in profile and crooked in a front view, bring us back to calmer estimates.

We used the word indictments with design, both as appropriate to Mr. Choate’s profession and exactly descriptive of the thing itself.  For, as in an indictment for murder, in order to close every loophole of evasion, the prudent attorney affirms that the accused did the deed with an awfully destructive to-wit,—­with a knife, axe, bludgeon, pistol, bootjack, six-pounder, and what not, which were then and there in the Briarean hands of him the said What’s-his-name, so Mr. Choate represents the Republican Party to have attempted the assassination of the Constitution with a most remarkable medley of instruments.  He does not, indeed, use the words “Republican Party,” but it is perfectly clear from the context, as in the case of the “geographical President,” for whom the charges are intended.  Out of tenderness for the artist, let him for whom the garment is intended put it on, though it may not fit him,—­and for our own parts, as humble members of the Anti-slave-trade, Anti-filibuster, and Anti-disreputable-things-generally Party, we don our Joseph’s coat (for Mr. Choate could not make one that was not of many colors) with good-humored serenity.

Of course, Sectionalism is not forgotten.  The pumpkin-lantern, that had performed so many offices of alarm, though a little wrinkled now, was too valuable a stage-property to be neglected.  In the hands of so skilful an operator, its slender body flutters voluminous with new folds of inexpensive cotton, and its eyes glare with the baleful terrors of unlimited tallow.  Mr. Choate honestly confesses that sectional jealousies are coeval with the country itself, but it is only as fomented by Anti-slavery-extension that he finds them dreadful.  When South Carolina threatened disunion unless the Tariff of the party to which Mr. Choate then belonged were modified, did he think it necessary for the Protectionists to surrender their policy?  There is not, and there never was, any party numerically considerable at the North, in favor of disunion.  Were homilies on fraternal concessions the things to heal this breach, the South is the fitting place for their delivery; but mouth-glue, however useful to stick slight matters together, is not the cement with which confederacies are bound to a common centre.  There must be the gravitation of interest as well as of honor and duty.  We wonder that the parallel case of Scotland and England did not occur to Mr. Choate, in speaking upon this point.  Scotland was clamorous and England jealously contemptuous, for nearly a century.