1829.] Affairs in General. 181 
things may be known to the Noble and Learned Lord, but I do not see what 
we can do but believe what we hear; and he cannot, therefore, be surprised 
that we, who feel strongly on this subject, should wish to feel secure as to the 
safety of the Church and State before we venture to proceed on such an 
experiment as this. My Lords, 1 am very much afraid that the Roman 
Catholic religion, in its natural state, is not very favourable to civil government in 
any part of Europe; and I must beg your Lordships to observe, that in ail 
the countries of Europe, the Sovereigns have, at different periods, found it 
necessary, as has been stated by my Noble and Learned Friend (Lord 
Colchester) on the cross bench to-night, to cAnL upon THE PopE TO ASSIST 
THEM IN THE GOVERNMENT OF THEIR PEOPLE.” 
The first art in the art of writing is to know how to choose a subject. 
There are men, and clever ones too, who, with the tide of pence and 
publication before them, have suffered their voyage to run into flats and 
shallows, till they were stranded in that Godwin Sands of genius, the 
King’s Bench, through the simple want of knowing how to catch a taking 
topic. Memoirs on the longitude; histories of the Royal Society ; 
treatises on moral philosophy ; annals of the Revolution of 1688, and 
of all other revolutions ; mathematical memoranda ; lives of philosophers, 
patriots, and heroes ; voyages round the world ; and discoveries from 
pole to pole—are fatal. They die of the yearly distemper that loads the 
Paternoster Row cemetery with such mortality of quarto. No man reads 
their epitaph ; and their authors, growling at the degeneracy of the age, 
sink into the tomb with their own labours, calling all the surviving 
world, to their last breath, Goths and Vandals. 
Yet, from time to time, the misery of an injudicious choice may be 
palliated by the address of the chooser. We haye known a mathema- 
tical folio come to some favour, notwithstanding its horrid perversion of 
the arts of printing and engraving, by containing a “ demonstration of 
squaring the circle,” by giving, in perches, the height of a mountain in 
the moon, or by the infallible proof that the sun was only a gazometer on 
a considerable scale. Memoirs of great men may be made popular by 
memoirs of the great men’s wives, and of the little men that licked the 
dust off the great men’s shoes ; voyages to the pole may find a charm in 
the loves of those bear-skin and blubber beauties, the Esquimaux ; and 
histories of the French war, or even of that most horribly hackneyed 
portion of it, the peninsular campaigns, may be made swallowable by a 
little radicalism, and a sly hit now and then, tending to prove that the 
Duke, on certain occasions, did not know his right hand from his left, 
and, at the best of times, saw no farther than his own Roman nose. 
The only unequivocally and irrecoverably destined to extinction are 
all treatises on modern divinity, proceeding from either of the uni- 
versities, and there, xar sfoxn, if proceeding from the divinity pro- 
fessors. The letters S. T. P. are never failing on the occasion of obli- 
vion ; they are the brand on the offender’s forehead, which saves all the 
trouble of the judge on any future appearance in the dock. A man 
would as soon buy a gown and cassock from Gibraltar as clothe his 
literary loins in this article stamped, with death in every plait. Such 
is the inevitable law of lecturing on a port and pudding regimen, with 
“ prodigious prospects” in reversion! We say no more—the tale is 
melancholy, moving, and true; and let the race of “ compilers,” how- 
ever buzz-wigged and bulky— the gatherers of other men’s stuff,’ with 
the addition of all the stuff that they can fabricate of their own—look to 
the solution of the problem. 
