10 Specmens of Cant. QJuly^ 



They can have no excuse now^ for they can send it by you, and you must come 

 in as my sister. I hope you will do your best endeavours for me ; the smallest 

 trille in'my present situation would be of service, now that I am lagged. I 

 hope 1 shall have one drunk in Newgate before I go ; I should like a pipe of 

 baccy, a pot of beer, and one quartern of gin, but I can't get it. — So no more 

 at present from your's truly, " Mary Harbour, a lag." 



We like sincerity even in a quaker, a lord, or a whig ; but for our 

 souls we cannot comprehend the sorrows of men, of whatever softness, 

 in having obtained the situations for which they have been struggling 

 for weeks, months, or years. Here is Lord IVIilton, certainly a good- 

 humoured kind of personage as ever failed in York, and as certainly, 

 a thorough electioneerer as ever worked himself in for any place else, 

 deploring, in " good round sentences," his misfortune in having gained 

 the veiy thing he sought, and which (his antagonist says) he gained by 

 no means in the most courteous mode to that antagonist. Yet, after 

 standing the burden and heat of the daj^ spending, we may presume, more 

 money than it has cost his noble and very inhospitable mansion in dinners 

 since the hour of his birth, and making speeches with his prohibited 

 surtout off in all weathers ; we have him lamenting the result in lan- 

 guage worth}-- of Charlotte and Werter. One of our contemporaries, 

 who actually believes him in earnest, such is the innocence of man in 

 this nineteenth age, weeps with the weeper. " The address," says he, 

 " of Lord IMilton to the freeholders of Northamptonshire is, in some of 

 its allusions to the personal circumstances of the writer, a very affecting 

 production. His lordship, saj-s one, ' whose bosom is a stranger to joy,' 

 has been dragged from that retirement which lie had devoted to the 

 indulgence of melancholy feelings, or to the charge of domestic and 

 pious duties, and is clothed with a most conspicuous public trust, at a 

 time of fierce and political struggle, into the midst of which he will be 

 forced to plunge by the necessary effect of the obligations thus suddenly 

 cast upon him." Would it be indecorous to ask his lordship, who drag- 

 ged him into this " conspicuous public ti-u'st ?" and what but his own 

 cravings laid those responsibilities on him. It will be a long time 

 before the public wiU receive an answer. 



The Kirk is up in arms against Irving ; and, at a meeting the other 

 day, to scourge the heresies of this very well-whiskered divine, the 

 Scots anathematized the poor heretic in a style of that various eloquence, 

 which the orator himself has compared to the braying of dogs round a 

 lion of the Avilderness. In this parson-hunt, the only doubtful point 

 was as to the intensity with which our unfortunate tall preacher, unde- 

 niably the tallest since St. Christopher of ocean-wading memory, was to 

 be run down. Dr. Forbes moved a resolution, the substance of which 

 was, to tie up Presbyteries from allowing Mr. Irving to exercise his 

 privilege of a Licentiati or ^Minister in any Church of Scotland till he 

 avowed or denied these doctrines. Dr. j\lac Farlane opposed the motion, 

 on the ground that the Assembly ought not ^o pass sentence against 

 that which was more like the raving of a maniac than a man of sound 

 sense. ]\Ir. Geddes, of Paisley, regretted that they should ever have 

 ordained a man to insult and blaspheme the Saviour. The Dean of 

 Faculty opposed the motion, as calculated only to advertise such non- 

 sense into notice, which, if left to itself, would sink into insignificance 

 and contempt. The motion, however, was eventually carried by a 

 majority of 147 to 40. 



