1830.] Affairs in General. 457 



beef-steak regimen we cordially approve, and fully agree in the wisdom 

 of living as long as we can, and growing fat to keep ourselves warm in 

 the frosts of age ! 



A paragraph in a Scotch newspaper, in some fierce controversy about 

 roasting coffee, gives a capital conception for the improvement of news- 

 papers. 



" Let a boiler be well filled with a due proportion of high pressure 

 puffs, poems, paragraphs, parliamentary speeches, politics, intrigues, 

 despatches, deaths, births, marriages, disasters at sea, &c. &c. ; these 

 being well stirred together, after the manner of the Witches in Macbeth, 

 as soon as the steam is up, a cran is turned with much dexterity and 

 ingenuity on a pipe like the water-conductor of a fire-engine, when, 

 squirt, out flies high-pressure type by the thousand yards, which, being 

 skilfully directed first against one sheet, then against another, a whole 

 publication comes spouting to light in no time." 



There might be some difficulty in managing the " political arti- 

 cles," those ponderous affairs called the leaders, which require such 

 perpetual shifting of opinion, which make the newspaper of to-day 

 a satire on the newspaper from the same press and pen of a week 

 before. But, on all other points, the mechanical system is admirable. 

 For jnstance, it might be applied to all county meetings for fifty years 

 to come, without the change of a letter ; to the oratory of the Miltons, 

 the Bells, and Beaumonts of the north, the Lethbridges, and other 

 trimmers and blockheads of the south, and the Wilsons, Whitbreads, 

 Byngs, and Lord John Russels of the Middlesex and Southwark portion 

 of the national eloquence. The speeches of every one of those orators 

 might have been stereotyped for the last twenty years. We have the 

 same pompous pretences to national feeling, the same abject evasions, the 

 same rapturous delight at the view of their constituents eating, drinking, 

 voting, and rioting, and the same solemn pledges to " Liberty all over 

 the World!" 



The same note of scorn might be added to every one of their 

 harangues ; and the same indignation at the perpetual contrast between 

 bloated promise and empty performance. The minister's expose, called 

 the King's Speech, might be trusted with equal security to the machine ; 

 for in our memory it has never altered, above half-a-dozen phrases ; 

 and their substitutes were as closely as possible identified with the old. 

 In those matters the finances are always in a prosperous state, the country 

 quiet, the foreign powers loading us with assurances of perpetual peace ; 

 commerce flourishing beyond all example ; reduction the order of 

 the day ; and economy, rigid economy, the principle of his Majesty's 

 ministers. Their mode of fulfilling those fine promises, might very 

 safely be stereotyped too, with only the additions of a dozen or two of 

 sinecures, for the public comfort, a couple of millions down in the 

 customs, and another 500,000 for painting and papering, for bandy- 

 legged statues and architectural blunders, in the new palace. 

 . All the minor matters of speeches of the common-council Ciceros, 

 the presentations of snuff-boxes to the Peels, " rats and mice, and such 

 small deer " the harangues of barristers at election- dinners, the Afri- 

 can, Anti-African, the Camberwell Society for Washing Blackamoors 

 White, the Wilberforcian, Muggletonian, Owenian, Cosmopolitan 

 meetings in chapels, floor-cloth manufactories, dock-yards, and taverns, 



M. M. New Series. VOL. X. No. 58. 3 M 



