The rhetoric of hatred is disappearing from amongst us,—and we
are not sure whether, in such a world as the present. it is a good or bad sign, for hearty hatred and hearty love are very closely allied, and are apt to appear and disappear together,—but it sur- vives in the most perfect form in the rhetoric of M. Veuillot, the Ultramontane editor of the Univers, and probably one of the most brilliant masters of the particular rhetorical school to which we have alluded, in Europe. He has just published (in the Univers of the 27th of February) a letter to 1\1. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, which is certainly as finished a piece of bitter philippic as we have had since the time of Cicero,—(and it is open, by the way, to the same objection, that it is often so scurrilous as to overshoot its mark). But this letter to M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire,—the scientific liberal oppressed with two gigantic duties, "the first definitively to lower the official-chair of M. Thiers, the other definitively to overthrow the throne of the pontiff-king,"—is in his best style. M. Veuillot speaks of the statue of the dying Lais in one of the public gardens in the attitude of offering herself with a grand air to her proper work,—(" offrant au grand air comme it eat juste, son ventre k porter des batards " is M. Veuillot's coarse and fierce expression), as the proper and perfect symbol of modern Opinion. The whole letter, which in a literary point of view is quite unique, reminds us of the "gross and fierce Tertullian," though it is barbed with French rancour and brilliant with French wit.
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