Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, Number 371, September 1846

EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed. SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH.
Sabloniere Hotel, Leicester Square, London, July 27th, 1846 .
Messrs Blackwood and Sons,
Gentlemen,—Scarcely arrived in London, on my annual visit to this capital, a fiend put into my hands a copy of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for June 1846, in which I observe an article entitled “ Rogues in Outline .” The writer of this article, in a section headed “ Birbone—Baseggio ,” has taken most unwarrantable liberties with my character, mixing them up with some false details respecting my private life. The latter impertinences I treat with contempt: not so the titles applied to me of “ Old Rogue B—— ” and “ Birbone Baseggio ,” with the insinuation that I make a practice of selling modern objects for antiques.
If your correspondent had taken the trouble to inquire of any of his well-informed countrymen at Rome or in England, he certainly never would have committed you, or himself, by the publication of the calumny he so wantonly seeks to inflict on my character. Luckily for me, there are now here many respectable persons of rank and reputation who will take a pleasure in attesting, if necessary , the habitual fairness and straight-forwardness of my dealings. I expect equal fairness from you, and that you will lose no time in affording me the reparation of a wrong you have (I trust unconsciously) done me, by at least publishing this letter in your next Number, giving me in the mean time an assurance to that effect. I await your answer, and remain your obedient servant,
JOSEPH BASEGGIO.
Man must be content to follow the steps of Providence tardily, timidly, and uncertainly; but he can have no pursuit more worthy of his genius, his wisdom, or his virtue. Why one half of the globe remained hidden from the other during the four or five thousand years after its creation, is among the questions which we may long ask without obtaining an answer. Why the treasures, the plants, and the animals of America should have been utterly unknown, alike to the adventurous expeditions of Tyre and Sidon, to the nautical skill of the Carthaginian, to the brilliant curiosity of the Greek, and to the imperial ambition of the Roman; while their discovery was reserved for a Genoese sailor in the fifteenth century, is a problem perhaps inaccessible of solution by any human insight into the ways of the Great Disposer of all things. Yet may it not be conjectured that the knowledge was expressly withheld until it could be of practical use to mankind; that if America had been discovered a thousand years before, it would have been found only a vast wilderness in both its southern and northern divisions, for it was then almost wholly unpeopled; that with the chief interest of imperial Rome turned to European possession or Eastern conquest, the discovery would have been nearly thrown away; that there was hitherto no superflux of European population to pour into this magnificent desert; and that even if Roman adventure had dared the terrors of the ocean, and the perils of new climates, at an almost interminable distance from home, the massacres and plunders habitual to heathen conquest must have impeded, if not wholly broken up, the progress of the feeble population already settling on the soil; or perhaps trained that population to habits of ferocity like their own, and turned a peaceful and pastoral land into a scene of slaughter and misery?