580 Notes of the Month on [Nov. 



London on the accession of a Noble composer, and the people on (we 

 hope) the cessation of his salary of 4,000 a year. 



What would the laughing world do without Ireland ? We are not now 

 alluding to its stock-absurdities, the barbarous blue-stockingism of that 

 exquisite old woman, that companion of princesses, lecturer of potentates, 

 and chief political adviser of Monsieur Lafayette, Miladi Morgan ! nor 

 to the other meteors, " prominent, publishing, and patriotic," of the Isle 

 of pikes, emeralds, and popish parliaments. Our allusion is to that gene- 

 ral and happy faculty which seems to live in the air, and which is as 

 cutaneous as the visitation of a Scotchman the propensity to say the 

 direct contrary of the thing, yet not in the Philpotts' style, but with the 

 most eager wish to make out its meaning in some way or other. Thus 

 the English secretaries and lord lieutenants always exhibit the national 

 lapsus linguae within the first twelve hours of their treading the 

 soil, and go on blundering in all varieties of style, until their five years 

 are out, and they have nothing to do but to blunder home. We now have 

 this announcement under the authority of the head of the Percies : 

 f( The Lord Lieutenant has offered a reward of 200/. for the assassin who 

 fired at William Purefoy, Esq., a magistrate, near Tipperary, with in- 

 tent to kill that gentleman. There is also a reward of 100/. offered by 

 his Excellency for the murderer of William Dwyer, near Cappawhite, in 

 the county of Tipperary." 



We have no doubt that the money will be most thankfully received 

 by the parties in question. If the appropriation of such sums should sur- 

 prise John Bull, he must remember that at Rome one must do as they do 

 at Rome ; that popularity is of importance to a lord lieutenant ; and that 

 the most popular thing possible is to encourage the only manufacture of 

 the country. 



George Colman has failed so egregiously in writing his own life, that 

 it would be one of the first charities of generous authorship to fabricate 

 a new life for him, write him over again, expunge forty of his sixty 

 years, and turn him upon the world, in all the " purple light" of his 

 original virtue. What he has been doing in the forty, we cannot 

 presume to conjecture, but we never suspected him of being too much 

 inclined to Methodism in the worst of times ! But what he is about to 

 do now, baffles us more. That he was always one of the most decorous 

 individuals possible, we never doubted, though others had their opinions 

 on that subject too. But, that since he has become licenser he is the 

 beau ideal of propriety, who can deny ? Yet the newspapers will be 

 stubborn; and they revenge themselves on the saint, with even more 

 wrath than they ever did on the sinner : for example 



(< Elderly Purity. George Colman, the licenser, it seems, is going it 

 again. Some curious anecdotes relative to the excisions the dramatic licenser 

 directed to be made in Mr. Wade's tragedy, are told the result, as it 

 should seem, of a new code of theology having enlightened the mind of 

 that egregious ' gentleman pensioner/ What will the clergy say, 

 when they hear that Mr. Colman rigorously forbids all mention, not 

 merely of ' hell,' but heaven, ' to ears polite ?' And that, so far from 

 permitting summary condemnation to be called for on stage villains, he 

 will not even allow a blessing to be begged upon their opposites. The 



