Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 011.djvu/572

 am astounded that, by calling back the days when the results, of which you now so bravely and preposterously deprive others, were to your proper flesh and blood desirable,—when you stood in the place of H. and aspirant for dramatic name, and nothing else—I am astounded, I say, that a chance-recollection of this kind does not help to make you more merciful.

Zounds, man! before you set up your little mud-coloured chaise (which, by the way, unless you take my last advice as to new-painting, &c. you had better chip up for winter-fuel), drawn by the two black animals that mutely proclaim their skill in trailing over the pavé, corpses, rather than living men, as if they had been purchased of an undertaker; ere this—and ere, along with your regular official salary, you had two hard guineas from the poor managers for every piece you damned; before all this happened, how would you like to have found in your present situation, and in the insane or inexplicable abuse of an unconstitutional power, some drivelling old fellow, ready to suppress or hash up your immortal pieces, just as you now suppress or hash up the pieces of a new generation? Does this natural question never occur to you?

I have called your place an unconstitutional one, and, in appeal to the whole and entire frame of the constitution, I hold fast by my word. There is no second to it throughout all the places and offices of the state; there is nothing to balance it, or agree with it. I say, George, in more distinct words, there is no other office or officer, that, without trial by jury, or some such resource, presumes to sit in individual judgment upon the political or moral sentiments of any man, no matter how expressed, and by a single, private word, to censure him, hold him up as a person to be avoided by those who are disposed to serve him, take character from his claims, and the very money out of his pocket. In England in the public criminal tribunals men have their fair trials before God and their country; but Shee and H. were tried, sentenced, executed, and cut up by your tremendous self, alone. Your place, then, and the act which creates it, are a solitary excrescence on the otherwise healthy and beautiful frame of the constitution; as richly deserving to be lopped off, as, in all conscience, the edict for burning old women, which was repealed only so late as 1822. And should not this view of the matter, in which I know you agree, exact, even from your policy (if you are not altogether infatuated), an additional reason for pursuing a more quiet course? In the name of the loaves and fishes, why should you wantonly compel to a close and philosophical analysis of the nature of your office, the eyes of a great and enlightened country and administration, whose ancestors have toiled hard, and bled profusely, to give them a charter undisfigured with any such blemish? Depend upon it, George, the time is not far off when that blemish will be removed. I sincerely hope you and I may not live to see it; it will gladden my heart to behold your rubicund countenance and little globular person bask, to the hour of your death, in the sunny light of office and pay; but the people, the senate, the cabinet, and the monarch who live in, legislate for, and govern a free state, cannot much longer consent to an enslaved drama; free representation in Parliament, take my word for it, George, is friendly to free representation on the stage; and those who have allowed to poor debtors the benefit of their one act, will not refuse to poor authors the benefit of their five acts, also.