وو derous pamphlets and speeches of those times have been forgotten, while the apparently ephemeral pieces, intended for a transient end, are still read and admired and laughed over. Not a tithe of those who have roared over "The Needy Knife-Grinder have. read Burke's "Letter on the French Revolution;" while such works as Darwin's "Loves of the Plants" and Payne Knight's "Progress of Civil Society" survive only in their parodies. The old monarchy of France was defined as a despotism tempered by epigrams; and even during the Revolution, when men were not in the mood for merriment, the contending factions made use of this weapon. Notwithstanding the efficacy of that fearful political engine, the guillotine, Chamfort, who had abundant opportunity for observation, has declared that Il n'y a rien qui tue comme un ridicule. Why, then, we repeat, have we now comparatively few epigrams? Doubtless an explanation of their dearth is to be found in the fact, first, that authors are less jealous of each other than in the days of Pope and Dryden; they are no longer divided into hostile cliques, but rejoice in each other's success, and feel that they are members of a common guild. Political contests are less personal than of yore, and indignant lampoons have disappeared with duelling and revengeful party feelings. The epigram was perfected in an age when manners were starched and formal,—an age of minuets, and hoops, and pomatum, and powdered cues, and purple velvet doublets, and flesh-colored stockings;- when, too, the classics were studied and imitated more than now, and the antithetical poetry of Pope, Swift, and Dryden, imitated by all, made epigrammatic writing easy and fashionable. The result is that, by a process of natural selection or adaptation, our venom bags have been absorbed, and men are born without them. Occasionally hybrid specimens of the epigram appear in Punch, or flower in the backward season and classical air of the English universities; and now and then you are startled by an epigram, at once pithy, pointed, and exquisitely finished, in some American journal; but generally they have lost their flavor, and degenerated into vehicles for jokes and puns. On the whole, the change is not to be regretted; for, however agreeable it may be to read epigrams and impromptus, no one could ever have liked to be their victim,- to be a target for gibes and sarcasms. To become a martyr "for the truth's sake" has been the ambition and "last infirmity" of many noble minds; but no one likes to be a butt of ridicule in order to testify the sincerity of his convictions. It has often been remarked that men would rather be deemed villains than fools; and it is certainly more pleasing to our vanity to be hated than to be despised. Human nature was the same in Queen Anne's time as to-day; and to no man, however thick-skinned, could it ever have been pleasant to have his little personal peculiarities, his "peccadilloes or scapes of infirmity," some faux pas, or unlucky blunder, or petty social sin, or "virtuous vice," done into verse, and handed round the breakfast or tea-tables of his particular circle, to amuse his friends and give their cheeks a holiday. Nowadays, if a man's conduct is satirized by a review or newspaper, he reflects, with Bentley, that no man was ever written down except by himself; or reasons, with Abraham Lincoln, that "if the end brings him out right, what is said against him won't amount to anything, if the end brings him out wrong, ten angels swearing he is right would make no difference;" and so he laughs at the jest if it is a good one, and if otherwise, lets it hum and buzz itself asleep. Not so with the terse and biting epigram of two to eight lines, which was first confidentially whispered from friend to friend, and then handed about in manuscript long before it was caught up by the press. This insect libel seemed never to die; it stuck to its victim like a gnat, teased him his life long, and oftentimes clung to his memory long after he had been fretted and worried into his grave. It must not be supposed that the exquisite polish and the razor-like sharpness of the jest made it more endurable. Men do not stand still to be stabbed or shot, in mute admiration of the splendid weapons with which they may be assailed. Few persons have the equanimity which Chesterfield manifested when he read Johnson's stinging letter, and can coolly point out and commend the happy conceits, the exquisite turns of expression, in a satirical production every sentence of which is a stab at themselves. It is true an epigrammatist has said that, As in smooth oil the razor best is whet, So wit is by politeness sharpest set; Their want of edge from their offence is seen,- But we believe the very reverse is true, that both cut more deeply, and leave scars that are longer in healing. Johnson was right when he declared that "the vehicle of wit and delicacy" only makes the satire more stinging. Compared with ordinary abuse, the difference, he said, is between being bruised with a club and being wounded with a poisoned arrow. POPULAR FALLACIES. OME writer remarks that there is a wonderful vigor SOME of constitution in a popular fallacy. When once the world has got hold of a lie, it is astonishing how hard it is to get it out of the world. You beat it about the head, and it seems to have given up the ghost; and lo! the next day,-like Zachary Taylor, who did not know when he was whipped by Santa Anna,it is alive, and as lusty as ever. Proofs of the truth of this observation will suggest themselves to every one. Of the scores of fine sayings that have the advantage of being fallacies, one of the most popular is the assertion that "a boaster is always a coward." It would be very agreeable to find this so; but so far is it from being true, that among the bravest people on earth are the Gascons, who are such boasters that we have derived a contemptuous epithet from their name. They are unquestionably the most courageous and fiery-spirited of the Frankish race,-" saucy, full of gibes, and quarrelsome as a weasel," and their valor and coolness in danger, their immense vanity, and "mountainous ME," as Emerson would term it, are so notorious that they are almost invariably selected for heroes by some of the best French novelists. Was Achilles, or any one of Homer's heroes, a coward? Yet the great father of poetry, who dissected the human heart as keenly as any modern anatomist, makes his champions "crow like Chanticleer" over their achievements on all possible occasions. Who is ignorant, too, that Milton's Satan, whose sublimest characteristic is his "unconquerable will, the resolution not to submit or yield," brags incessantly, in the most sarcastic and biting language, of the "fell rout" with which he has visited the hosts of heaven? With a few exceptions, the Southern rebels were all insufferable boasters, from Jeff. Davis downward; yet did they often show the white feather on the field? Did ever a braver man draw sword than General Wolfe? Yet we are told that dining with Pitt, the British Minister, on the day before his embarkation for America, he broke, as the evening advanced, into a disgusting strain of gasconade and bravado. Drawing his sword, he rapped the table with it, flourished it around the room, and talked of the mighty things which that sword was to achieve, till the two Ministers, Pitt and Temple, stood aghast; and when Wolfe had taken his leave, and his carriage was heard to roll from the door, the former, shaken for the moment in the high opinion which his deliberate judgment had formed of the soldier, lifted up his eyes and arms, and exclaimed to the latter: "Good God! that I should have entrusted the fate of the country and the Administration to such hands!" It is said that "a barking dog doesn't bite;" but those persons who, relying upon this saw, have provoked a bull-dog to plant his teeth in their calves, know better. Read the life of that bravest and most braggart of artists, Benvenuto Cellini, compared with whom Falstaff was an incarnation of humility, and you will abandon the popular but foolish notion that real talent is never vain, and real courage never boastful. Akin to the foregoing hackneyed fallacy, is another |