-1829.] . Affairs in Generals ($25 
the example of Oxford will stimulate its priesthood. But still the service 
that we hada right to expect from our seats of learning has miserably 
failed. The curse of dulness is upon the generation; and we shall see 
before long, the weapons which indolence would not, stupidity could 
not, and corruption dared not, wield, wrested ay, contemptuously and 
irretrievably wrested from their hands. The atheist college is now 
.to be laughed at no longer. It is thriving and spreading, and it is 
absorbing the whole sap of the infidei community. It will not stop.; and 
the times are coming when it will show, in open day, what sudden mag- 
nitude may be given by the “ spirit of revenge, immortal hate,” to the 
shape that our folly despised. The toad will start up, like Milton’s evil 
principle—« A giant armed.” 
LA CABINETTE DE ARTHURE; 07, THE FRIENDES AND FINALE OF 
GREATNESSE. 
(From MSS. in the State-Paper Office.) , 
Crutched Friars, April 1, 1829. 
Srr :—As I, with equal sincerity and justice, scorn all contemporary 
literature, and have satisfied myself that since the period when I ceased 
to write verses—about sixty years ago, come Michaelmas—not a syllable 
worth reading has been written, I have occupied myself chiefly in 
looking over the invaluable labours of the past generations, collected 
as they are in the official dust under the care of my excellent friend 
Mr. Lemon. It must be unnecessary to state to a gentleman of your 
exquisite taste, universal knowledge, matchless learning, and remark- 
able courtesy (I scorn to flatter), the nature and extent of the discoveries 
to which Mr. Lemon’s very late awakened vigour has led the world of 
literature. To him we are indebted for that infinitely curious autograph 
of the original writer of Tom Thumb, which has furnished the last 
months’ readings to the learned Society of Antiquaries. In fact, the 
long disputed authorship of that truly original work, seems now to be 
finally settled, unless, which Heaven avert, some members of the sacred 
bench should take it in hand, and of course puzzle it into new per- 
plexity for three generations to come. To him are we indebted for the 
first copy of Mother Goose, which had been so long lost to the eyes of 
the intelligent, and which is the only book that his Royal Highness of 
Sussex declared ever completely suited his taste: and to him we owe 
the endless gratitude due to the man who recovered so fine a subject of 
controversy, as the Milton MSS., which will, I trust and hope, defy all 
certainty to the end of time, whether it was written by the great poet, 
or by the great poet’s valet de chambre ; whether it was meant as a 
defence of Christianity, or an attack ; whether it was republican and 
infidel, or royalist and religious. 
Emulating the extraordinary discoveries of this English Angelo Mai, 
I have laboured for twelve. hours.a day in erudite dust, enough to have 
choaked a coal-heaver, and dug wp from the depth of miasmatic cellars 
and darkness undisturbed for a hundred years, MSS. of the most 
precious kind, which I shall probably submit to you in succession. 
The long lost Treatise, by Machiavelli, “ How to carry on a Govern- 
ment by bribing one half the people, robbing the other, and cheating 
all,” is among my treasures. I have, also, a Treatise by Cardinal Pole, 
on the “ Art of Reconciling a Protestant Bishop to Idolatry,” with an 
