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 No. 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.

Nor was I troubled by what Mr. Vandal said about the late Benjamin Webster.  I am not a Boston man, and have, therefore, the privilege of thinking for myself.  Nor do I object to his claiming for women the right to make books and pictures and (shall I say it?) statues,—­only this last becomes a grave matter, if we are to have statues of all the great women, too!  To be sure, there will not be the trousers-difficulty,—­at least, not at present; what we may come to is none of my affair.  I even go beyond him in my opinions on what is called the Woman Question.  In the gift of speech, they have always had the advantage of us; and though the jealousy of the other sex have deprived us of the orations of Xantippe, yet even Demosthenes does not seem to have produced greater effects, if we may take the word of Socrates for it,—­as I, for one, very gladly do.