My mind has been much exercised of late on the subject of two epidemics, which, showing themselves formerly in a few sporadic cases, have begun to set in with the violence of the cattle-disease:  I mean Eloquence and Statuary.  They threaten to render the country unfit for human habitation, except by the Deaf and Blind.  We had hitherto got on very well in Chesumpscot, having caught a trick of silence, perhaps from the fish which we cured, more medicorum, by laying them out.  But this summer some misguided young men among us got up a lecture-association.  Of course it led to a general quarrel; for every pastor in the town wished to have the censorship of the list of lecturers.  A certain number of the original projectors, however, took the matter wholly into their own hands, raised a subscription to pay expenses, and resolved to call their lectures “The Universal Brotherhood Course,”—­for no other reason, that I can divine, but that they had set the whole village by the ears.  They invited that distinguished young apostle of Reform, Mr. Philip Vandal, to deliver the opening lecture.  He has just done so, and, from what I have heard about his discourse, it would have been fitter as the introductory to a nunnery of Kilkenny cats than to anything like universal brotherhood.  He opened our lyceum as if it had been an oyster, without any regard for the feelings of those inside.  He pitched into the world in general, and all his neighbors past and present in particular.  Even the babe unborn did not escape some unsavory epithets in the way of vaticination.  I sat down, meaning to write you an essay on “The Right of Private Judgment as distinguished from the Right of Public Vituperation”; but I forbear.  It may be that I do not understand the nature of philanthropy.

Why, here is Philip Vandal, for example.  He loves his kind so much that he has not a word softer than a brickbat for a single mother’s son of them.  He goes about to save them by proving that not one of them is worth damning.  And he does it all from the point of view of an early (a knurly) Christian.  Let me illustrate.  I was sauntering along Broadway once, and was attracted by a bird-fancier’s shop.  I like dealers in out-of-the-way things,—­traders in bigotry and virtue are too common,—­and so I went in.  The gem of the collection was a terrier,—­a perfect beauty, uglier than philanthropy itself, and hairier, as a Cockney would say, than the ’ole British hairystocracy.  “A’n’t he a stunner?” said my disrespectable friend, the master of the shop.  “Ah, you should see him worry a rat!  He does it like a puffic Christian!” Since then, the world has been divided for me into Christians and perfect Christians; and I find so many of the latter species in proportion to the former, that I begin to pity the rats.  They (the rats) have at least one virtue,—­they are not eloquent.