'Sir, I supposed that your common perception of what is due to the ordinary courtesies of epistolary intercourse rendered it unnecessary for me to desire you not to publish any thing of a personal nature. What is to become of our 'areas and focus,' of our altars and fires? what is to become of the bonds of social faith, the cherished sentiments of domestic communion, the implicit confidence between man and man, if delicate matters of peculiar and single interest are thus to be blurted by an unreflecting conductor of a journal into the face of all mankind and half New-York? To use the emphatic expression of the western settler, who returned from hunting to find his house and family rifled, (rifled in both senses,) and the walls of his cabin plastered with the brains of his wife and children, it is 'a little too ridiculous.'
'The mischief, however, is done, and is past recall. The least you can do is to make what pecuniary compensation you consider due to my outraged sensibilities. Your Magazine is reputed to be profitable, and for the pile of correspondence which I have placed at your disposal the remuneration ought to be generous. I am no judge of poetry, but the quality of the article which I have sent you I have several times heard spoken of as first-rate.
'If you will enclose a draft through the post to the address of 'A. B. C. D. E. F.,' a portion of the fund shall go to soothe the lacerated feelings of my friend in Bleecker-street, and the rest shall be devoted to charitable purposes, or to the temperance cause.
'I had intended to write more fully upon this very vexatious subject, but as the ladies are waiting for me to attend a revival at the Tabernacle this evening, you must allow me to subscribe myself,
'Yours, truly mortified, —— ——.'
Fearless in the discharge of our duties to the public, as an 'able editor,' we have no hesitation in following the example of all able editors, and give to our readers whatever we think will be considered as a fair part of their money's worth. It is very odd that our sensitive correspondent, so keenly alive to the sufferings of his friend, the talented but lacerated financier of Bleecker-street, does not see that the same sympathy which he insists upon would equally apply to the persons abroad, whose letters he has 'so unwarrantably' made public. This, however, is in the true spirit of the age, which is so remarkably obtuse to that proverbial fact in natural history, that the same sauce which suits the female gander is equally adapted to the male goose.