'
The predictions of the English reviewer are fulfilled already. The
prescribed century has not elapsed, and in a decade the 'Yankee satires'
are comprehended as perhaps even their author failed to comprehend as he
created them. There is something positively startling and uncanny in his
prophetic insight into the passions that have attained their majority in
this present year of grace,--passions that,
'Like aconite, where'er they spread, they kill.'
He does not approach with the old show of superstitious reverence the
altar of our vaunted destiny, where men have sung their
in-secula-seculorums, while pagans at the chancel rail have been
distributing to infidel hordes the relics of their holiest saints, and
threatening the very fane itself with fire. Mere words will never strike
him dumb. He does not bow to the shadow of Justice or kneel with the
ignorant and unsuspicious at the shrine of every plausible Madonna by
the roadside. Hear him on the constitutional pillars that heaven and
earth are now moved to keep in place, and let us commiserate what must
now be the distracting dread of Increse D. O'Phace, Esquire, lest some
Samson in blind revenge entomb himself in the ruins of the Constitution.
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