In these days, when everybody’s correspondence is published as soon as he is dead,—­or during his life, if he is unfortunate enough to be the Director of an Observatory, and there is a chance of injuring him by the breach of confidence,—­we cannot help thinking that the forms we have given above are not only more compendious, but safer, than Mr. Cushing’s.  If his method should come into vogue, posterity would be deprived of the letters of this generation for nearly a century by the time necessary to print them, and then, allowing for the imperious intervals of sleep, would hardly contrive to get through them in less than a couple of centuries more.  We leave to those who have read Mr. Cushing’s reply to the Craytonville invitation the painful task of estimating the loss to the world from such a contingency.  Meanwhile, the perplexing question arises,—­If such be the warrior-statesman’s measure of gratitude for a dinner, what would be his scale for a breakfast or a dish of tea?  Caesar announced a victory in three words; but in this respect he was very inferior to Mr. Cushing, whose style is much more copious, and who shows as remarkable talents in the command of language as the other general did in the command of troops.

On first reading Mr. Cushing’s letter, its obscurity puzzled us not a little.  There are passages in it that would have pleased Lycophron himself, who wished he might be hanged if anybody could understand his poem.  Dilution was to be expected in a production whose author had to make three columns out of “Thank you, can’t come.”  Even a person overrunning with the milk of human kindness, as Mr. Cushing, on so remarkable an occasion, undoubtedly was, might be pardoned for adopting the shift of dealers in the dearer vaccine article, and reinforcing his stores from a friendly pump.  The expansiveness of the heart would naturally communicate itself to the diction.  But, on the other hand, repeated experiments failed to detect even the most watery flavor of conviviality in the composition.  The epistles of Jacob Behmen himself are not farther removed from any contamination with the delights of sense.  Was this, then, a mere Baratarian banquet, a feast of reason, to which Mr. Cushing had been invited?  Or did he intend to pay an indirect tribute of respect to his ancestry by sending what would produce all the hilarious effect of one of those interminable Puritan graces before meat?  No, the dinner was a real dinner,—­the well-known hospitality of South Carolina toward Massachusetts ambassadors forbids any other supposition,—­and Mr. Cushing’s letter itself, however dark in some particulars, is clear enough in renouncing every principle and practice of the founders of New England.  We must find, therefore, some other reason why the Ex-Commander of the Palmetto Regiment, when the Carolinians ask the pleasure of his society, gives them instead the agreeable relaxation of a sermon,—­an example which, we trust, will not prove infectious among the clergy.