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462 C. H. Lever »iore still more. Demos would buy and read the paper if it amused him, and so Bennett played the fool as well as the omniscient vizier to his majesty, the public. The audacious vanity and vulgarity with which he paraded his own private affairs before his readers kept the light-minded portion of the community in a guffaw and alert to know what Bennett would do next. At one time he discourses thus : "Amid all these thronging ideas hurrying across the mind, crowds of feelings fresh from the heart, and projects of the fancy stealing on the heels of each other as if by enchantment, there is one drawback, there is one sin, there is one piece of wickedness of which I am guilty, and with which my conscience is weighed down night and day ; I am a bachelor." Some time later he announced his engagement in a leading article under these headlines in flaming type: " To the readers of the Herald — Declaration of Love — Caught at last — Going to be married — New Movement in Civilization." The first and last stanzas of the wild rhapsody that follows are these : " I am going to be married in a few days. The weather is so beautiful, times are getting so good ; the prospects of political and moral re- form so auspicious that I cannot resist the divine instinct of honest nature any longer. ... I cannot stop in my career. I must fulfill that awful destiny which the Almighty Father has written against my name in the broad letters of life against the wall of heaven. . . . My ardent desire has been through life, to reach the highest order of human excellence by the shortest possible cut. Association, night and day, in sickness and in health, in war and in peace, with a woman of this highest order of excellence must produce some curious results in my heart and feelings, and these results the future will develop in due time in the columns of the Herald. Meantime I return my heartfelt thanks for the enthusias- tic patronage of the public, both of Europe and of America. The holy estate of wedlock will only increase my desire to be still more useful. God Almighty bless you all. James Gordon Bennett." The freedom with which the Herald related the annals of police courts and the particularity with which it recited scandals caused the greatest offense. The elder generation regarded Bennett as one who feared not God nor regarded man. Clergymen denounced him from the pulpit. Good men shook their heads over the prosperity of the Herald as an ominous sign of the times, and then read it to see what new iniquity it had been guilty of. " We can well remem- ber," says Barton, " when people bought the Herald on the sly and blushed when they were caught reading it ; and when the man in a country place who openly subscribed for it intended by that act dis-