1.830.] The Prosecution of the Press. 71 



the generation of lyrists would cease to plunder Petrarch make love 

 by the twopenny post, and live. 



The news of fashion might rapidly form a most extensive, as it already 

 does a most interesting, portion of our daily knowledge. Every human 

 being must be the wiser and the better .for the assurance of the fact that 

 the Duke of Bedford has had the gout, but has, luckily, recovered ; or that 

 the Duke of Northumberland has been taken with the spleen in Ireland, 

 and is likely to retain his disorder until he can shift his position : that 

 Lady A. is gone to Bath, and Lady B. to Bristol : that Lord X. has 

 said his last good thing, and that Lord Y. has never said his first. The 

 value of the system, once tried, will be universally acknowledged ; and 

 the saving, soothing, and salutary nature of the change, will give a new 

 and justified consciousness of our superiority to those ancestors who 

 plagued their heads, and sometimes lost them too, in their search after a 

 constitution. 



Having laid down the system, who can be so blind as to doubt the 

 practice ? The English are, proverbially, a gloomy people. The pro- 

 vision of amusement will be thus a patriotic labour. The ministers of 

 England have considerable trouble in answering popular complaints, 

 and suppressing popular grumblings. This trouble will be utterly at an 

 end ; the mighty minds of those pre-eminent individuals will be left at 

 leisure to pursue their own illustrious conceptions for the safety of the 

 state. Where there is no complaint there may be presumed to be no 

 suffering; or, as half the evils of the world are embittered by im- 

 patience, the perfect silence of the public on public measures, taxes, 

 sinecures, new palaces, and new places, will be next to perfect acquies- 

 cence, and perfect acquiescence, to not feeling them at all. For the At- 

 torney General we do not feel ourselves competent to draw up a system ; 

 but we strenuously advise him to urge the principle of punishing to the 

 uttermost all tendency to bring His Majesty's ministers into contempt. 

 The advantages of the principle are matchless ; for there is not an act 

 of the individual, or the public, that it cannot be made to grasp. It 

 crushes the past and present delinquency of thinking one's self entitled to 

 inquire into what has been done in the high quarters of Whitehall : it 

 smites all resistance for the future. With the present ministry, of 

 course, we can never conceive any kind of evil to originate. They 

 are all honourable, and some of them right honourable men ; and all 

 right trusty and beloved councillors, and so forth. But as their immor- 

 tality of fame does not extend to their corporal existence, they may be 

 succeeded by individuals whose conduct is not quite so sure of universal 

 homage. If a tyrannous and odious ministry should, in the lapse of 

 time, arise in England, the " tendency to bring into contempt" would be 

 of prodigious value to the new possessors of the Treasury Bench. We 

 have had administrations in England, already, who found the matchless 

 value of the principle ; and, if Sir James Scarlet's memory will reach 

 back to the time of Charles II. and James, he will possibly recollect the 

 names of Arlington, Lauderdale, Clifford, and their fellows ; a tyran- 

 nous, apostate, and traitorous ministry, then insulted the land, and be- 

 trayed the king. The people, long patient, at length remonstrated. 

 Coercion followed, the law was busy, the dungeon was crowded, the 

 scaffold was red ; every man who loved his country was marked out for 

 a victim ; Russell and Sidney were dragged to an ignominious slaughter. 

 We all know the results to the ministry and their tools, to the unfortu- 

 nate king, and to the insulted people. 



