It was a charge, of which there was not only no proof or probability, but which was in itself wholly impossible to be true.  No man of common information ever believed a syllable of it.  Yet it was of that class of falsehoods, which, by continued repetition, through all the organs of detraction and abuse, are capable of misleading those who are already far misled, and of further fanning passion already kindling into flame.  Doubtless it served in its day, and in greater or less degree, the end designed by it.  Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies.  It is the very cast-off slough of a polluted and shameless press.  Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer, lifeless and despised.  It is not now, Sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency, by attempting to elevate it, and to introduce it into the Senate.  He cannot change it from what it is, an object of general disgust and scorn.  On the contrary, the contact, if he choose to touch it, is more likely to drag him down, down, to the place where it lies itself.

But, Sir, the honorable member was not, for other reasons, entirely happy in his allusion to the story of Banquo’s murder and Banquo’s ghost.  It was not, I think, the friends, but the enemies of the murdered Banquo, at whose bidding his spirit would not down.  The honorable gentleman is fresh in his reading of the English classics, and can put me right if I am wrong:  but, according to my poor recollection, it was at those who had begun with caresses and ended with foul and treacherous murder that the gory locks were shaken.  The ghost of Banquo, like that of Hamlet, was an honest ghost.  It disturbed no innocent man.  It knew where its appearance would strike terror, and who would cry out, A ghost!  It made itself visible in the right quarter, and compelled the guilty and the conscience-smitten, and none others, to start, with,

    “Pr’ythee, see there! behold!—­look! lo,
    If I stand here, I saw him!”

THEIR eyeballs were seared (was it not so, Sir?) who had thought to shield themselves by concealing their own hand, and laying the imputation of the crime on a low and hireling agency in wickedness; who had vainly attempted to stifle the workings of their own coward consciences by ejaculating through white lips and chattering teeth, “Thou canst not say I did it!” I have misread the great poet if those who had no way partaken in the deed of the death, either found that they were, or feared that they should be, pushed from their stools by the ghost of the slain, or exclaimed to a spectre created by their own fears and their own remorse, “Avaunt! and quit our sight!”