’The productions of Mr. B. have been stigmatized in some quarters as unpatriotic; but I can vouch that he loves his native soil with that hearty, though discriminating, attachment which springs from an intimate social intercourse of many years’ standing.  In the ploughing season, no one has a deeper share in the well-being of the country than he.  If Dean Swift were right in saying that he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before confers a greater benefit on the state than he who taketh a city, Mr. B. might exhibit a fairer claim to the Presidency than General Scott himself.  I think that some of those disinterested lovers of the hard-handed democracy, whose fingers have never touched anything rougher than the dollars of our common country, would hesitate to compare palms with him.  It would do your heart good, respected Sir, to see that young man mow.  He cuts a cleaner and wider swath than any in this town.

’But it is time for me to be at my Post.  It is very clear that my young friend’s shot has struck the lintel, for the Post is shaken (Amos ix. 1).  The editor of that paper is a strenuous advocate of the Mexican war, and a colonel, as I am given to understand.  I presume, that, being necessarily absent in Mexico, he has left his journal in some less judicious hands.  At any rate, the Post has been too swift on this occasion.  It could hardly have cited a more incontrovertible line from any poem than that which it has selected for animadversion, namely,—­

  “We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage.”

’If the Post maintains the converse of this proposition, it can hardly be considered as a safe guide-post for the moral and religious portions of its party, however many other excellent qualities of a post it may be blessed with.  There is a sign in London on which is painted,—­“The Green Man.”  It would do very well as a portrait of any individual who should support so unscriptural a thesis.  As regards the language of the line in question, I am bold to say that He who readeth the hearts of men will not account any dialect unseemly which conveys a sound, and pious sentiment.  I could wish that such sentiments were more common, however uncouthly expressed.  Saint Ambrose affirms, that veritas a quocunque (why not, then, quomodocunque?) dicatur, a, spiritu sancto est.  Digest also this of Baxter:  “The plainest words are the most profitable oratory in the weightiest matters.”

’When the paragraph in question was shown to Mr. Biglow, the only part of it which seemed to give him any dissatisfaction was that which classed him with the Whig party.  He says, that, if resolutions are a nourishing kind of diet, that party must be in a very hearty and flourishing condition; for that they have quietly eaten more good ones of their own baking than he could have conceived to be possible without repletion.  He has been for some years past (I regret to say) an ardent opponent of those