which had no auditors, and repeatedly asked questions to which no
answer was made. Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a
voice made up of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like
a crescendo of Rossini's. Insidious toasts, swagger, and challenges
followed.

Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise
enough for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their
masters all talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested,
doubtless, by the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician
would have been amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in
the melee of words or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths,
grotesquely caparisoned, met in conflict across the uproar of brawling
judgments, of arbitrary decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells,
and grapeshot are hurled across a battlefield.

It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe
as long as Time's own; and you might have found it hard to decide
whether it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown
sober and clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds,
like the sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws
which confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously
fulfilling the will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in
nature, and reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself.
A frantic travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects.
Between the dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the
inauguration of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at