The occasion did not pass without "improvement" by the leading journals;
and Philip preserved the editorial comments of three or four of them
which pleased him most. These he used to read aloud to his friends
afterwards and ask them to guess from which journal each of them had been
cut. One began in this simple manner:--
History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of
the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken
fragments of antique legends. Washington is not Corinth, and Lais,
the beautiful daughter of Timandra, might not have been the
prototype of the ravishing Laura, daughter of the plebeian house of
Hawkins; but the orators add statesmen who were the purchasers of
the favors of the one, may have been as incorruptible as the
Republican statesmen who learned how to love and how to vote from
the sweet lips of the Washington lobbyist; and perhaps the modern
Lais would never have departed from the national Capital if there
had been there even one republican Xenocrates who resisted her
blandishments.
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