of a Saturday, under the semblance of a wealthy member of my congregation.  It were a great blessing, if every particular of what in the sum we call popular sentiment could carry about the name of its manufacturer stamped legibly upon it.  I gave a stab under the fifth rib to that pestilent fallacy,—­’Our country, right or wrong,’—­by tracing its original to a speech of Ensign Cilley at a dinner of the Bungtown Fencibles.—­H.W.]

No.  III

WHAT MR. ROBINSON THINKS

[A few remarks on the following verses will not be out of place.  The satire in them was not meant to have any personal, but only a general, application.  Of the gentleman upon whose letter they were intended as a commentary Mr. Biglow had never heard, till he saw the letter itself.  The position of the satirist is oftentimes one which he would not have chosen, had the election been left to himself.  In attacking bad principles, he is obliged to select some individual who has made himself their exponent, and in whom they are impersonate, to the end that what he says may not, through ambiguity, be dissipated tenues in auras. For what says Seneca? Longum iter per praecepta, breve et efficace per exempla.  A bad principle is comparatively harmless while it continues to be an abstraction, nor can the general mind comprehend it fully till it is printed in that large type which all men can read at sight, namely, the life and character, the sayings and doings, of particular persons.  It is one of the cunningest fetches of Satan, that he never exposes himself directly to our arrows, but, still dodging behind this neighbor or that acquaintance, compels us to wound him through them, if at all.  He holds our affections as hostages, the while he patches up a truce with our conscience.

Meanwhile, let us not forget that the aim of the true satirist is not to be severe upon persons, but only upon falsehood, and, as Truth and Falsehood start from the same point, and sometimes even go along together for a little way, his business is to follow the path of the latter after it diverges, and to show her floundering in the bog at the end of it.  Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire.  There is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.  The danger of the satirist is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the force of language.  He becomes more and more liable to strike harder than he knows or intends.  He may be careful to put on his boxing-gloves, and yet forget that, the older they grow, the more plainly may the knuckles inside be felt.  Moreover, in the heat of contest, the eye is insensibly drawn to the crown of victory, whose tawdry tinsel glitters through that dust of the ring which obscures Truth’s wreath of simple leaves.  I have sometimes thought that my young friend, Mr. Biglow, needed a monitory hand laid on his arm,—­aliquid sufflaminandus