On with the war! Drive it, push it, send it howling and hissing on like the wild tornado, like the mad levin-brand, right into the foe! Pay the soldier—promise—pledge—do any thing and every thing; but raise an overwhelming force, and end the war.
Up and fight!
It is better to die now than see such disaster as awaits this country if war become a fixed disease.
VOLUNTEER BOYS. [1750.]
'Hence with the lover who sighs o'er his wine,
Chloes and Phillises toasting;
Hence with the slave who will whimper and whine,
Of ardor and constancy boasting;
Hence with Love's joys,
Follies and noise.
The toast that I give is: 'The Volunteer Boys!''
AUTHOR-BORROWING.
Bulwer, in narrating the literary career of a young Chinese, states how one of his works was very severely handled by the Celestial critics: one of the gravest of the charges brought against it by these poll-shaved, wooden-shod, little-foot-worshiping, Great-Wall-building mandarins of literature being its extreme originality! They denounced Fihoti as having sinned the unpardonable literary sin of writing a book, a large share of whose ideas was nowhere to be found in the writings of Confucius.
But how strange such a charge would sound in our English ears! With us, if between two authors the most remote resemblance of idea or expression can be detected, straightway some ultraist stickler for originality—some Poe—shrieks out, 'Some body must be a thief!' and forthwith, all along the highways of reviewdom, is sent up the hue and cry: 'Stop thief! stop thief!' For has not the law thundered from Sinai, 'Thou shalt not steal'? True, plagiarism is nowhere distinctly forbidden by Moses; but have not critics judicially pronounced it author-theft? Has not metaphor been sounded through every note of its key-board, to strike out all that is base whereunto to liken it? Have not old Dr. Johnson's seven-footed words—the tramp of whose heavy brogans has echoed down the staircase of years even unto our day—declared plagiarists from the works of buried writers 'jackals, battening on dead men's thoughts'?