1829-3 Police, Pre.is, Pupcri/, and Foreign Relations. 367 



Our clever contemporary is in the right. There is not a jury of 

 " twelve honest men in a box," in any corner of the realm, who would 

 not scoff it out of court. Where can have been the brains of even 

 those wretched persons, who, to the utter disgrace of the bar, are 

 employed to pore over the newspapers for libels ? With the brains of 

 those exalted vindicators of the singed moustachios of military supremacy, 

 the grand jury, who found this on their oaths to be " libel," we have 

 nothing to do. We leave them to constitute tlie eternal problem of some 

 new Gall or Spurzheim. But our anticipation of the mode in which 

 any chamber of men of sense must have received it, would have been 

 a leaf out of Tristram Shandy : — " The Duke flew up to the Court of 

 Chancery with the newspaper; even Scarlet blushed as he gave it in ; 

 the recording clerk could not write the libel down for laughing ; and the 

 jury kicked libel, lawyer, and plaintiff out of court for ever." 



But, for the offence of those suspicions — the crime of conceiving it 

 possible that every public man is not an Aristides — the guilty surmise 

 that the liberties of England are not to be put in trust into the hands of 

 the writer of the far-famed notes to Curtis knd the Duke of Leinster, the 

 friend of Copley and Peel, that avov/ed breaker-down of the Constitution 

 of 1688 ; — that the civil rights of a free and religious empire are not to be 

 smiled away with the confiding fondness of a school-girl, and dropped 

 into the " grasp" of the first gentleman in a red coat who may desire the 

 possession ; the whole country is to be thrown into a state of alarm ; and 

 every man who retains the spirit of a Briton must speak with a recollec- 

 tion that the fetter may be his portion for an unmeasured syllable. Nay, 

 the liberty of verbal surmise is too broad — he must not even mentally 

 object. Some unlucky muscle will betray the evil conjecture — 

 some criminal change of colour, or traitorous obliquity of glance, will 

 let out the lurking principle of insubordination ; and we shall have his 

 thoughts perused by a professor of the new college of libel, the factious 

 disapproval dragged into day, and the culprit found guilty of a skin 

 deficient in the true camp-colour, and an indictable physiognomy. 



And for " suspecting" that a man who, in the presence of the empire, 

 disclaimed, with the strongest protestation, the idea of attempting the 

 power which he possesses at this instant, and which he was at that instant 

 exerting all the machinery of his soul to possess — the man who threw 

 off the charge of " grasping at the premiership," even less as an imputa- 

 tion on his principles than as a denial of his understanding ; the Duke of 

 Wellington, who solemnly declared that " he should be mad to think of 

 being a minister," and yet was a minister at the first moment that bad 

 eminence could be seized with however rude, insufficient, and " grasping" 

 a hand ; the suspector is to be thrown into the arena — the caverns of the 

 Old Bailey are to let loose their hungry tribes to worry and waste him ; — 

 the armed terrors of the law — the lavish purse of Government — the inve- 

 terate insolence of office — the outcry of the whole pack that dog the 

 heels of patronage, are to be summoned against the British citizen. If he 

 defeat the array of power, the price of his victory is a heavy purchase — • 

 to the opulent man a severe mulct ; to the poor man total ruin. But 

 if, by the weakness of his jury, he be defeated, well may he lament the 

 rash lionesty of standing up for the cause of what he believed to be the 

 truth. The dungeon — the decay of his livelihood — the tarnish of his 

 name — the fine at the mercy of men from whom he has found none — 

 perhaps eternal exile, if he does not escape it by a broken heart — such 

 are the sini|)le consequences. With what motives the lately converted 



