such acts of ferocity and impiety as were calculated to nourish the war spirit. A silly child of eleven years was said to have written a letter to one of the Generals, asking to be employed against the Mexicans, and boasting that he had money enough to buy a imir oj pistols and a dagger ; and the epistle of this little boy was paraded in the papers, headed " THE RIGHT KI^D OF SPIRIT." Auecdotcs of officers, Which, if true, could not fail to disgust all who reverence the awful realities of Christianity, have been loudly trumpeted as instances of American "patriotism and hero- ism. Thus we have had an account of a captain mortally wounded, and just expiring. " The whole of his lower jaw, with a part of his tongue and palate, is shot away by a grape shot ; he communicated his thoughts by writing on a slate. H6 does not desire to live. He colicluded an answer to some inquiries concerning the battle of the 9th, by writing ' ive gave the Mexicans hell f ' ^ These words so peculiarly horrible, as uttered by a dying man, became with a certain class a slang phrase, and to give the Mexicans hell, seemed to be the glorious privilege, as well as duty, of American Christians. A Mississippi paper adopted it, with a blasphemous addition :—" By some mistake a piece of poetry headed 'Song of the Sword,'^ appears on our first, page. It seems that in our absence, when, it may be, the boys were out of copy, this song was selected to fill up a place. We never saw it till it was too late to make the correction. It does not * An English poem on war, liaviiig no allusion to tins countrv.
REVIEW OF THE JNIEXICAN WAR. 261 express our sentiments. It is Whiggish, and very bad poetry withal. We go for giving the Mexicans hell, whether Christ be our guide or not."
Under the caption, " noble exploit," we are told of a soldier mortally wounded, remonstrating against being carried off the field, exclaiming, " he was a dead man, and damned if he did not want to kill some of them." Some comment having been excited by certain profane expressions, untruly we hope^ alleged to have escaped from General Taylor, in the heat of battle, a New Or- leans paper replied : " It is a paltry affectation in