“Ashburner allowed that it was rather unceremonious.
“‘By various similar acts, trivial, perhaps, individually, but forming a very disagreeable aggregate, these young men made themselves so unpopular, that one season the ladies, by common consent, refused to dance with any of them. But there is worse behind. These gentlemen, so stupid in a drawing-room, are sharp enough in borrowing money, and altogether oblivious of repaying it.’
“Ashburner remembered the affair of Ensign Lawless, and made up his mind to undergo another repetition of it.
“‘I don’t speak of my individual case; the thing has happened fifty times. I could tell of a dozen friends who have been victimized in this way during the last three years. In fact, I believe that your jeunes militaires have formed a league to avenge the Mississippi bondholders, and recover their lost money under the form of these nominal loans. You may think it poetic justice, but we New-Yorkers have no fancy to pay the Mississippians’ debts in this way.’”
It must be a strangely constituted mind that will, for spite at a single loss of an amount trifling to one so wealthy as Mr. Bristed is reputed to be, stoop to slander a whole class of men who have always, till he thought fit to liebel them, borne a reputation the world over, for strict honor; and whose bills are readily cashed the world over, on no recommendation save that of their being proved to be British officers—Lieutenant Law was not one when he swindled Mr. Charles Astor Bristed—the price of their commissions being responsible for their bills if unpaid.
It must be a strangely constituted mind that will stoop, for the sake of gaining pseudo popularity in a foreign country averse to slavery, to slander and abuse a whole section of his countrymen, every one of whom, we mean the gentlemen of the south, after all we have heard, is better born, better bred, better informed, better educated, if not so pedantically drilled to a little Latin and less Greek, than their egotistical slanderer.
But what cannot be expected of a man, who, after a disgraceful brawl, almost in a ball-room, has passed away, and been almost forgotten, has no better taste or sense of decency than to renew it in one-sided print, provoking fresh violence; and cowardly attacking by the pen which he himself wields, with some fluency, if with little force, an enemy unskilled to defend himself with that weapon.
Verily Mr. Pynnshurst was not so far out of the way, when in his wanderings and ways of thinking he embodied this epigram.
“The plume, you know,” says the lady, “is greater than the sword. I read that now in all the journals; what do you think it means?”
“That the pen is more brutal than the sword, with less danger to its wielder.”