The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1872-01-14

The earth Will scarcely nave settled over
the grave Of the assassinated Fisk before the
long and troubled story of the besetting sin
which tortured his life and brought about his
death will be read by the public. The love
letters to Josephine Mansfield which We pub
lish in this number of the HERALD are those
against the publication of which Fisk fought
in the courts as long as he had life.
Read now, they will be pondered
over as painful pen picture
Of the man, taken by himself. In what they
add to or take away from the opinion already
formed of the unfortunate being snatched so
suddenly from the life at times 80 bitter or
80 sweet to him will much depend on the
point of view from which we read them. They
can make him no worse in the eyes of those
who gauge the enormity of guilt by the severe,
immutable standard Of the Decalogue; but 1t
will be discovered that, if he invoked the
vengeance of Heaven by his SHINING there
was q symptom Of strong affection in it,
the shamefulness and social risk of which
he knew, which, however, will find some pal
liation among the morbid sentimentalsts of
ters of man hard and sharp in business,
multifarious in designs and not over scrupu-
l0us or faithful in anything of civil life, ask a
curious question in themselves-namely, to
what corner of the brain has modern
civilization relegated the region of romance9
Last year Laura d. Fair shot down
Judge Crittenden beside his wife and
~ &Ho
trial which followed, long, fervid letters were
read, wherein that old man of the world
poured forth an avalanche of endearment on
the unclean woman who slew him in the end.
The parallel between the two cases is not so
far astray. It was not the woman herself
who killed Fisk, but the rival-who shall not
say, goaded by the woman? We can look
back over centuries and find that love letters,
the outpourings of two understanding souls,
have been famous since the art of writing was
invented. Away in the twelfth century,
through medieval dust and darkness, the
names of Abelard and Heloise stand out from
the semi gloom around them. Abelard, the
wondrous logican, the powerful instructor,
the deeply learned, whose theses and
declarations of faith Numbered up
to the very gates of all-powerful
Rome, whose pupils were numbered by
thousands, and the light of whose genius out
shone all others of the time, is better remem-
bered to-day through the pages OF his love
letters than the ponderous Latin tones of his
logic. Men busy in the world, plotting not
r,,Ii ~ lie nd CHI hold y>r<
empire of the earth, with its people for their
slaves, have turned in the midst of all
their struggles, violence and intrigue
to talk ''sweet nothings" with women,
those women, too, not their wives. 1t is
eighteen hundred years and more since the
saw the gorgeous galley of the Egyptian
Queen floating on the waters of the Cydnus
and became her slave. How he flung
away his wife Octavia and with the insensate
idolatry of love-lorn fool surrendered to Cleo
patra his very soul We can see him in all
his Parthian wars turning to her through the
blood and fight to pour his wild admiration in
the ears of his serpent of Old Nile. We can
picture him at Actium, sending his last words
before the fight to her, and we can see the
false-hearted creature, with treachery which
even vice abhors, play traitor to him in
the end. Fisk was vulgar Marc Antony;
yet the same sensual madness which
first led him from the path of conjugal
fidelity hurled him in insane infatuation at the
feet of the bad, aud, what is ever worse,
traitorous woman, who led him on only to cast
him of for another. The end of Antony was
tragic. He died by his own hand. The end
Of Fisk was tragic, too; the end was the
same, but 1t was a rival who killed him.
Nearer to our own day this cac0ethes
scri6endi has exhibited itself in the fall of
another great adventurer-the ex-Emperor
of the French. 1t need only be named to be
down his ornamental sword, and when
Rochefort and his sans culones burst into the
Tuileries, how they found among his papers
slowed away in secret drawers the notes and
endearments that told the tale of his haison
with the famous Marguerite Bellanger.
| Those who look over these letters of the
murdered Prince of Erie will find nothing in
them of the pure love immortalized in the
sonnets of Petrarch to his Laura or the ideal
| tenderness of Dante for his Beatrice. It is
Catullus as stock jobber, Swineburne as an
opera 6outs director. From the fatal day
when the meretricious beauty of Miss
| Mansfield burst upon him we have
q whole year with string of
silly letters, neither polished in style, perfect
| in grammar nor brilliant in wit. We come to
February, 1870, where it seems that frost
Of jealousy is nipping the garish flower of his
passion. He appeals to her "out of memory