the offer, and in this struggle of feeling she exclaims-"Give my little sister shelter, and you will be rewarded--our family--God will reward you!"--and here you zealously strike out the word, thereby effectually blunting, in delivery, the point and force of the passage, and so far injuring the author; and for what reason? Is the name here used irreverently, or lightly? Is it an imprecation or a wantonness? George, is this twaddle, or is it not? Again; the name may be harmlessly used; as, for example, in Shakspeare, too; during the pathetic description of Richard the Second's entry into York, it is said "None cried, God bless him!" This union of the word to other words, merely for the purpose of preserving the simple yet forcible phrase, is assuredly innocent; yet, in the same drama by H., where the persecuted Irishman, before spoken of, comes up to two strangers, in the street, with his " God save yez, kindly"-out goes the word again. Why, man, after this, "God save-the King," is either an immorality or a treason, or both. But if your Licenser's bill gives you power (denied) to blot that name "wherever" you find it, whence do you derive your warrant for striking out words and phrases, absolutely substituted to avoid the too frequent occurrence of the very name? You dash your pen over "Power omnipotent!" &c. in H.'s pieces; and where find you an act of parliament for that? And do you remember expressions you have since allowed to take place of those? Do you remember them?-One is" oh heaven!"-and in another place, where a man in a passion swears "by Him that is to judge between us!" you reject "Him," and afterwards permit "by heaven!" Pray, Georgy, if the first was immorality, is the second moral ? What do you mean, or what do you flatter yourself you mean, by this-consistency? But, abandoning many other illustrations of this particular feature of your morality, let me follow you into more open ground, where (a fico for the act!) you are moral by wholesale. Listen. A silly, superstitious valet, conceiving that his master is a wizard, or some such thing, says of him, in soliloquy-"He shall repeat a prayer with me, tonight, which no devil dares, or I'll meet my death for not knowing my catechism." And this blasphemous sentence you dash out. A few scenes on, the servant is found on his knees by his master, who remarks "I did not think you so godly,"-to which is answered-" A sinner, but I believe and fear;"-and all this, blasphemy again, you again dash out and in the progress of the play, where the same servant, carrying into effect his first determination with the same master, says to him" I did not say my prayers last night, master ;"-the master replying" What then, idiot?"-and the other rejoining-"I would say them now, therefore; aloud; and if you love me, join;"-every word of the shocking impiety here quoted, you also, in a fine, religious frenzy, exterminate. To continue a little. A ruffianly soldier who has inflicted wrong upon two defenceless girls, feels a twitch of conscience, and says, in the idiom of character and of nature-"'Tis a damned unhandsome trick I have played those girls ;" and away goes, as a piece of horrid profligacy-" damned:"-his comrade says, in a different scene--" damn coachee," and away with the word here, too. But 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 you 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 fel low!" 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 a man 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 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. an 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. C. P. THE BENDED BOW. It is supposed that War was anciently proclaimed in Britain, by sending messengers in different directions through the land, each bearing a bent bow, and that Peace was in like manner announced by a bow unstrung, and therefore straight. See Cambrian Antiquities. THERE was heard the sound of a coming foe, "Heard ye not the battle-horn? And the reaper arm'd, like a freeman's son, "Hunter! leave the mountain-chase, Let the wolf go free to-day, Leave him for a nobler prey ! Let the deer ungall'd sweep by Arm thee! Britain's foes are nigh!" And the hunter arm'd ere his chase was done, "Chieftain! quit the joyous feast! And the chieftain arm'd, and the horn was blown, "Prince! thy father's deeds are told, In the bower and in the hold! Give our bards a tale of thee!" And the prince came arm'd, like a leader's son, "Mother! stay thou not thy boy! Britain calls the strong in heart!" And the bended bow and the voice pass'd on, F. H. (562 -dal og „bend £, Ing" GRIMM'S GHOST hoogator gji THIS Society held its first anniversary dinner at the Albion tavern in Aldersgate-street, on Wednesday last. It is the laudable object of this Institution to rescue from vulgarity the inhabitants of the eastern parts of the metropolis: and when we consider the thousands of living beings who haunt the Royal Exchange, and who in their eagerness to turn a penny, are too apt to drill holes in their manners, the utility of an Establishment like the present must be obvious to the eyes of blindness itself. The gallery was filled with elegantly dressed ladies, and the waiters spoke French. The dinner consisted of every delicacy in and out of season, and would have been unexceptionable if it had not been for the appearance of some roast-beef and plum-pudding at the lower end of one of the tables. Several stock-brokers, who sat near those obnoxious articles, were seized with a faintness, which was only removed by the prompt substitution of a dish of cotellettes aux concombres and an omelette soufflée. One gentleman drank hock out of a white glass, and claret out of a green one, and was consequently desired to leave the room. An undertaker from Budge-row, during the singing of "Non nobis Domine," ejaculated "sed tuo," half a note too sharp; and an executor from Watling-street dropped his mourning-ring in his finger-glass. With the exception of the above accidents the dinner passed off with the most edifying decorum. The following toasts were then drunk. "The King, and may he never forget his German tailor in Cork street, Burlington-gardens !" "The Duke of York, and the last new hussar uniform!" The Duke of Clarence, and success to the new ambassador's yacht!" The noble chairman now rose, and begged the attention of the gentlemen present while he explained the meaning of the latter part of the last-delivered toast. It might not have occurred to every gentleman who heard him to do what he had himself recently done, namely, to visit in person the new ambassador's yacht then lying off Woolwich. Such a vessel, he was proud to say, was not to be matched in gentility by any vessel in his Majesty's navy, Cleopatra sailed not down the Cydnus in half so elegant a bark (applause). Cut-glass decanters, Sèvres china, Turkey carpets, or-molu inkstands, chintz hangings, graced every part of this truly genteel establishment. The rude rope that communicates between the tiller and the rudder was cased in a mahogany coating, and he had actually seen Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful" in a port-hole. The sailors, a race of men who called in a peculiar manner for the fostering aid of this establishment, were, on board the new ambassador's yacht, what sailors should be, perfect gentlemen. In such a vessel so manned and so decorated, if any thing unpleasant should happen in the Atlantic, an ambassador would have the satisfacof going to the bottom like a gentleman. One little anecdote he could not but communicate. It has hitherto been the heathen custom with sailors, when they want the aid of any of their brethren, to exclaim, tion 1 |