The Americans are usually subtle even in their grossest extra-
vagancies of speech. The Times New York correspondent narrates a form of blasphemous invective used by one Republican to another,—the Times seldom tells tales of Democrats,—which has, as it seems to us, more subtlety than force. This Republican said of his enemy, " I believe God never made a baser man, and indeed, I sometimes think that God never made him, but let him out to the lowest bidder, like the Custom House, and that the Devil was the lowest bidder." The notion of accounting for a man's badness by supposing that his creation was done by contract, and on terms so low that the work was necessarily scamped, and that, too, not without design on the part of the diabolic contractor, is certainly a triumph of the jobbing imagination. But there is no real anger in that sort of invective. Only the cold subtlety of a freakish imagination, enjoying its own extravagance, and with a decided taste for blasphemy, could have bit upon such a feat of morbid epicurism in invective,—such an oratorical pdti de foie Bras.
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