EDITORIAL COLLOQUY. 521 



Statesmen, of all shades, characters, and capabilities, are pensioned ; 

 favourites, good, bad, or indifferent, are pensioned ; and if no merit, 

 or merit, whether warlike or civil, be paid by the public, how much 

 more worthy of liberal support is literary talent ! What an amount 

 of happiness is given by a successful writer! thousands upon thou- 

 sands derive benefit or amusement from his labours ; and yet, he 

 lives in obscurity, perhaps, and die* in poverty. Will any man for a 

 moment compare the claims of any class of men upon public sym- 

 pathy and support, with the right-minded author, who proceeds 

 through good report and bad report, to work out the noble purposes 

 to which he has devoted himself? I think not. A tithe of the 

 thousands wasted upon commissions and enquiries, often merely the 

 means of blinking important questions, would place in comparative 

 wealth many sons of genius, who now waste their lives and energies 

 for a paltry trade pittance. Had Sir Robert Peel no other claims to 

 our regard, his noble and generous conduct to Mrs. Hemans and 

 poor Banim should endear him to us. As to the notion that a pen- 

 sion is necessarily followed by subserviency, I do not envy that 

 man's head, who thinks so meanly of talent and acquirement." 



" I have lately been reading the second edition of Mr. Coombe's 

 able work on the Constitution of Man, and have been much struck 

 by some of his positions and trains of reasoning. Hitherto I have 

 been puzzled to make out why the London juveniles are so prone 

 to theft and rascality : example and temptation have been the only 

 causes I have been able to bring to bear on the question ; but even 

 these, powerful as they are, fail in many instances in explaining the 

 causation of apparently inherent villany. Mr. Coombe, however, 

 solves the question ; he has rolled back the mists of ignorance from 

 my sight, and made the mystery a thing of course." 



" Ay ! how is that, pray ? He is an able man, and his opinions 

 are worth attention. 1 am not a phrenologist, but that is no reason 

 why phrenologists may not be right." 



" I will give you his own language. He is speaking of punish- 

 ment as inflicted under the natural laws: 'Under the animal 

 system children produced of parents who have been recently en- 

 gaged in either suffering, inflicting, or witnessing punishment, will, 

 by the organic law, inherit large and active animal organs, oc- 

 casioned by the excitement of similar organs in the parents. Thus, 

 a public execution, from the violent stimulus which it produces in 



