Moreover, as an author, I protest in the name of universal Grub Street against a unanimity in goodness.  Not to mention that a Quaker world, all faded out to an autumnal drab, would be a little tedious,—­what should we do for the villain of our tragedy or novel?  No rascals, no literature.  You have your choice.  Were we weak enough to consent to a sudden homogeneousness in virtue, many industrious persons would be thrown out of employment.  The wife and mother, for example, with as indeterminate a number of children as the Martyr Rogers, who visits me monthly,—­what claim would she have upon me, were not her husband forever taking to drink, or the penitentiary, or Spiritualism?  The pusillanimous lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the curse of Adam.  But do not let us be disheartened.  Nature is strong; she is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us.  Some ancestral Cromwellian trooper leaps to life again in Nathaniel Greene, and makes a general of him, to confute five generations of Broadbrims.  The Puritans were good in their way, and we enjoy them highly as a preterite phenomenon:  but they were not good at cakes and ale, and that is one reason why they are a preterite phenomenon.

I suppose we are all willing to let a public censor like P.V. run amuck whenever he likes,—­so it be not down our street.  I confess to a good deal of tolerance in this respect, and, when I live in Number 21, have plenty of stoicism to spare for the griefs of the dwellers in No. 23.  Indeed, I agreed with our young Cato heartily in what he said about Statues.  We must have an Act for the Suppression, either of Great Men, or else of Sculptors.  I have not quite made up my mind which are the greater nuisances; but I am sure of this, that there are too many of both.  They used to be rare, (to use a Yankeeism omitted by Bartlett,) but nowadays they are overdone.  I am half-inclined to think that the sculptors club together to write folks up during their lives in the newspapers, quieting their consciences with the hope of some day making them look so mean in bronze or marble as to make all square again.  Or do we really have so many?  Can’t they help growing twelve feet high in this new soil, any more than our maize?  I suspect that Posterity will not thank us for the hereditary disease of Carrara we are entailing on him, and will try some heroic remedy, perhaps lithotripsy.