What terrible fellows our ancestors were for calling names,—­particularly the gentlemen of the press!  If they had been natives of the Island of Frozen Sounds, along the shore of which Pantagruel and Panurge coasted, they would have stood up to their chins in scurrilous epithets.  The comical sketch of their rhetoric in “Salmagundi” is literally true:—­“Every day have these slangwhangers made furious attacks on each other and upon their respective adherents, discharging their heavy artillery, consisting of large sheets loaded with scoundrel, villain, liar, rascal, numskull, nincompoop, dunderhead, wiseacre, blockhead, jackass.”  As single words were not always explosive enough to make a report equal to their feelings, they had recourse to compounds;—­“pert and prating popinjay,” “hackneyed gutscraper,” “maggot of corruption,” “toad on a dung-heap,” “snivelling sophisticating hound,” are a few of the chain-shot which strike our eyes in turning over the yellow faded files.  They are all quiet now, those eager, snarling editors of fifty years since, and mostly forgotten.  Even the ink which records their spiteful abuse is fading away;—­

  “Dunne no more the halter dreads,
  The torrent of his lies to check,
  No gallows Cheetham’s dreams invades,
  Nor lours o’er Holt’s devoted neck.”

Emerson’s saying, that involuntarily we read history as superior beings, is never so true as when we read history before it has been worked up for the public, in the raw material of letters, pamphlets, and newspapers.  Feverish paragraphs, which once excited the enthusiasm of one party and the fiercest opposition of the other, lie before us as dead and as unmeaning as an Egyptian mummy.  The passion which once gave them life is gone.  The objects which the writers considered all-important we perceive to have been of no real significance even in their day.  We read on with a good-natured pity, akin to the feeling which the gods of Epicurus might be supposed to experience when they looked down upon foolish mortals,—­and when we shut the book, go out into our own world to fret, fume, and wrangle over things equally transitory and frivolous.

When it became evident that the Administration party ran the risk of being beaten in the election of 1800, their trumpeters sounded the wildest notes of alarm.  “People! how long will you remain blind?  Awake! be up and doing!  If Mr. Jefferson is elected, the equal representation of the small States in the Senate will be destroyed, the funding system swept away, the navy abolished, all commerce and foreign trade prohibited, and the fruits of the soil left to rot on the hands of the farmer.  The taxes will all fall on the landed interest, all the churches will be overturned, none but Frenchmen employed by government, and the monstrous system of liberty and equality, with all its horrid consequences, as experienced in France and St. Domingo, will inevitably be introduced.”  Thus they shouted, and no doubt many of the shouters sincerely believed it all.  Nevertheless, and in spite of these alarums, the Revolution of ’99, as Mr. Jefferson liked to call it, took place without bloodshed, and in 1801 that gentleman mounted the throne.