Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 75, No. 461, March, 1854 by Various

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BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLXI.      MARCH, 1854.      Vol. LXXV.
Compliments are of various kinds. It is not always necessary that they should assume a laudatory form—they may be conveyed quite as powerfully through the medium of abuse. Some men there are whose eulogy is in itself a disgrace. Few would have cared to see their characters upheld in the columns of the Age or the Satirist —fewer still would like to hear a panegyric on their morals delivered from a hustings by the lips of Mr Reynolds. If we had to choose between total obscurity, and a reputation founded only upon the testimony of Mr Cobden, we should not, for one moment, hesitate to embrace the first alternative. To be designated in the polite circle of a sporting tavern as a “nobby cove,” or a “real swell,” is not, according to our ideas, a high object of ambition; and we should feel somewhat dubious of the real character of the individual whose praise was in the mouths of all the cabmen.