Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by Wendell Phillips.

LETTERS. 18
up in places too loathsome and horrid for the wvorst
of criminals.
Ile says had any one told bim such things as he
has seen and heard, he should have considered it excessive exaggeration. Yet we talk of mild epithets,,and tenderness toward our Southern brethren. Curse
on the " smooth barbarity of courts." Of the various
cants now in fashion, the cant of charity is to me the
most disagreeable. Charity, -which. thinks to make
wrong righ-t by baptizing it with'a sonorous name;
that covers selfishness with the decent mantle of prudence; that glosses over iniquity wvith the shining
varnish of virtuous professions; that makes a garland
bridge over the bottomlless pit, ancl calls the devil an
Arcllhangel ruined."
if evil would mauifest itself as it really is, how,asv it would be to overcome it; but this it cannot
do, simply because it i.s evil.
TO THE SAMIE.
BOSTON, July 27, IS34.
I have at, last obtained the " Christian Examiner,".
and read your article. As the old Quaker wrote me
about the "1 -Mother's Book," "I am free to say to thee,
it is a most excellent thling." I think I never lead
a better article in my life; not even excepting the
"Edinburgh." I was (lelightedit with it.
You bow most reverently to Wordsworth, "that
great poet," that confidant of angels," as Lavater says
of Klopstock. Did not your conscience twinge you
for throwing Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy in my
teeth so often, and for laughing me to scorn when t
said M'Iilton's fame was the sure inheritance of Wordsworth?