It has been a refreshment to many nice consciences to know that our Chief Magistrate would not regard with eyes of approval the (by many esteemed) sinful pastime of dancing, and I own myseif to be so far of that mind, that I could not but set my face against this Mexican Polka, though danced to the Presidential piping with a Gubernatorial second.  If ever the country should be seized with another such mania pro propaganda fide, I think it would be wise to fill our bombshells with alternate copies of the Cambridge Platform and the Thirty-nine Articles, which would produce a mixture of the highest explosive power, and to wrap every one of our cannon-balls in a leaf of the New Testament, the reading of which is denied to those who sit in the darkness of Popery.  Those iron evangelists would thus be able to disseminate vital religion and Gospel truth in quarters inaccessible to the ordinary missionary.  I have seen lads, unimpregnate with the more sublimated punctiliousness of Walton, secure pickerel, taking their unwary siesta beneath the lily-pads too nigh the surface, with a gun and small shot.  Why not, then, since gunpowder was unknown in the time of the Apostles (not to enter here upon the question whether it were discovered before that period by the Chinese), suit our metaphor to the age in which we live, and say shooters as well as fishers of men?

I do much fear that we shall be seized now and then with a Protestant fervor, as long as we have neighbor Naboths whose wallowings in Papistical mire excite our horror in exact proportion to the size and desirableness of their vineyards.  Yet I rejoice that some earnest Protestants have been made by this war,—­I mean those who protested against it.  Fewer they were than I could wish, for one might imagine America to have been colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African animals the Aye-Ayes, so difficult a word is No to us all.  There is some malformation or defect of the vocal organs, which either prevents our uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation as to be unintelligible.  A mouth filled with the national pudding, or watering in expectation thereof, is wholly incompetent to this refractory monosyllable.  An abject and herpetic Public Opinion is the Pope, the Anti-Christ, for us to protest against e corde cordium.  And by what College of Cardinals is this our God’s-vicar, our binder and looser, elected?  Very like, by the sacred conclave of Tag, Rag, and Bobtail, in the gracious atmosphere of the grog-shop.  Yet it is of this that we must all be puppets.  This thumps the pulpit-cushion, this guides the editor’s pen, this wags the senator’s tongue.  This decides what Scriptures are canonical, and shuffles Christ away into the Apocrypha.  According to that sentence fathered upon Solon, [Greek:  Onto daemosion kakon erchetai oikad ekasto] This unclean spirit is skilful to assume various shapes.  I have known it to enter my own study and nudge my elbow