Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/176

 I heard one of the, a thinking and independent smuggler, euphonise the latter word with much significance, in a tirade against the planners of the late African expedition: 'As to Algiers, any man that has half an in his scull must know, that it has been long ago dey-monstered, I should say, dey-monstrified,' &c. But the phrase, which occasioned this note, brings to my mind the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who, returning highly gratified from a showman's caravan, which he had been tempted to enter by the words , gilt on the pannels, met another caravan of a similar shape, with the  on it, in letters of the same size and splendour. 'Why, dis is voonders above voonders,' exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as first comer, and soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and intensity of his expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnolence, from which he is roused by the supposed showman at Hounslow, with a '''In what name, Sir, was your place taken? are you booked all the way for Reading?''' Now a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third tier of 'Voonders above voonders.'"

A public that could read such stuff as this with any patience would indeed be so. We do not understand how, with this systematic antipathy to the Reading Public, it is consistent in Mr. Coleridge to declare of "Dr. Bell's original and unsophisticated plan," that he "himself regards it as an especial gift of Providence to the human race, as an incomparable machine, a vast moral steam-engine." Learning is an old University mistress, that he is not willing to part with, except for the use of the church of England; and he is sadly afraid she should be debauched by the "liberal ideas" of Joseph Lancaster! As to his aversion to the prostitution of the word Idea to common uses and in common minds, it is no wonder, from the very exalted idea which he has given us of this term.

"What other measures I had in contemplation it has been my endeavour to explain elsewhere... O what treasures of