Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 011.djvu/571

 of all, creatures that have come under your pen, the poor Irishman is, over and over, a branded disloyalist and, profligate. While. urging a suit to a superior, he exclaims, according to the patois of his country—"Do, my lard; an' may yow have a long life, a happy death, an' a favourable judgement;"—and the manifest wickedness of the last member of the sentence, feels your chastening hand. Afterwards, while expressing his abhorrence of any one who could commit a certain act of treachery, he says—"Musha, my curse, an' the curse o' Saint Patrick, an' their own mother's curse on their heads!"—and how, George, do you manage this sentence? how, in the glorious name of nonsense? You allow "the curse o' Saint Patrick" to stand; but the curse of the living Paddy himself, and of his venerable mother, you seriously and decidedly object to—out they go. Distinguish for us, will you? Explain; deliver; be particular, "Oh thou particular fellow!"

But if any thing be wanted to fill up the huge and yet overflowing measure of your inscrutable absurdity, it is two illustrations more, which I have gathered from other authors (not H.'s) who have also been lately before you. "I'm like a goblin damned!" says a merry fellow, in a light piece, quoting from the well-known passage in Hamlet; yet you—put—the—expression—out! and in another case where aman exclaims "Oh, holy virgin!"—out with it too! I can only repeat, in spite of you,—Oh, holy virgin!

And all this is morality. George! George!—it cannot be your doing. I'll never believe it. You submitted the MSS. at a love-feast of old women, male and female, and the erasures are theirs, not yours. Nothing else saves you from my direct laughter and scorn, or can save you from that of the world, if, unfortunately for you, these snuffling efforts, to keep your place and save your soul, ever meet the world's eye. An inordinate fear of the devil, working on a mind reduced to the last gasp of imbecility, could alone originate such a ludicrous, yet injurious abuse of paltry power; if, indeed, the still meaner vanity of feeling one's self unexpectedly in a situation to do harm, has not, still working on the same kind of mind, assisted the process.

Again and again, I cry out, what do you mean? With the sentiments I know you have, and with those you ought to have, answer me! I do not want to build on your past literary life any thing against your present niceties (though, if worth the while, what a silencing battery might on that ground be raised!); it is reasonable for you to argue that we must not hinder from at last making all others moral, the man who, even till "his hair was silvered," did his little best the other way; I shall not open your plays, and array against you endless instances of the very freedoms—if freedoms they be—which, before you grew an Examiner, you took with the stage, and now, open-mouthed, prohibit; much less am I inclined to quote from your other literary works, passages that would soil my paper, and that no gentleman could read to sister, wife, or daughter; I always admired your being anointed licenser; indeed, under favour of the old proverb—"Set a thief to catch a thief," have we not both fattened on our laugh at the conceit?—so, let all that pass:—but I wonder, and in my wonder will I die, how, with your candid opinions of your own past courses, you cannot afford to be a little more charitable to those who sin not within a thousand degrees of your sin, if, as I before premised, they sin at all; and next I