Now, what we wish to secure is a word that shall contain within itself all the essential principles of downright abuse; the mere pronouncing of which in the public street would subject one to the inconvenience of being rent asunder by an infuriated populace-something so atrociously apt and so exquisitely diabolical that any person to whom it should be applied would go right away out and kick himself to death with a jackass.  We covenant that the inventor shall be slain the moment we are in possession of his infernal secret, as life would of course be a miserable burden to him ever afterward.

With a calm reliance upon the fertile scurrility of our readers, we leave the matter in their hands, commending their souls to the merciful God who contrived them.

....  We have received from a prominent clergyman a long letter of earnest remonstrance against what he is pleased to term our “unprovoked attacks upon God’s elect.”

We emphatically deny that we have ever made any unprovoked attacks upon them.  “God’s elect” are always irritating us.  They are eternally lying in wait with some monstrous absurdity, to spring it upon us at the very moment when we are least prepared.  They take a fiendish delight in torturing us with tantrums, galling us with gammon, and pelting us with platitudes.  Whenever we disguise ourself in the seemly toggery of the godly, and enter meekly into the tabernacle, hoping to pass unobserved, the parson is sure to detect us and explode a bombful of bosh upon our devoted head.  No sooner do we pick up a religious weekly than we stumble and sprawl through a bewildering succession of inanities, manufactured expressly to ensnare our simple feet.  If we take up a tract we are laid out cold by an apostolic knock straight from the clerical shoulder.  We cannot walk out of a pleasant Sunday without being keeled Over by a stroke of pious lightning flashed from the tempestuous eye of an irate churchman at our secular attire.  Should we cast our thoughtless glance upon the demure Methodist Rachel we are paralysed by a scowl of disapprobation, which prostrates like the shock of a gymnotus; and any of our mild pleasantry at the expense of young Squaretoes is cut short by a Bible rebuke, shot out of his mouth like a rock from a catapult.

Is it any wonder that we wax gently facetious in conversing of “the elect?”—­that in our weak way we seek to get even?  Now, good clergyman, go thou to the devil, and leave us to our own devices; or an offended journalist shall skewer thee upon his spit, and roast thee in a blaze of righteous indignation.

....  The New York Tribune, descanting upon the recent national misfortune by which the writer’s red right hand was quietly chewed by an envious bear, says it cannot commend the writer’s example, but hopes “his next appearance in print may edify his readers on the dangers of such a practice.”