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looked as majestically and triumphantly indignant, as Professor Milman's or Professor Wilson's Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize Apollo, when he has settled the hash of the Python. But these are harmless sports, compared with his Mercurial tricks in Ultra-Crepidarius. Fye, fye, Mr Hunt-kiss and tell?

"I wonder,' said Mercury, putting his head

One rosy-faced morning from Venus's bed

But now let us rush into the heart of the satire; for this is a satire, however unlike one it appears. There is no trusting to appearances in this wicked world; so our readers may depend upon it, that this is a satire, and that Mercury is no other heathen than that most powerful satyr, Leigh Hunt.

"But now the God, anger'd, shot into that leather

A terrible sense of who stood there together,

And while it slunk, shaking, half into itself,

Denounced it in words, that shall die on no shelf:"

Look at these four lines. THE GOD! why we only called him a king. The deification of the Colonel of the Hampstead Heavy Dragoons! Leigh Hunt DIVUS ! "A terrible sense of who stood there together!"-a Cockney and a Quean-a Radical and a Red-rag-a Scribbler and a Scold-two people, who, instead of looking as if they had descended from heaven, were evidently trampers, who had got a lift on the top of a strongly garrisoned Cheapand-Nasty, and who, on being forced to dismount for smutty jokes, too unequivocal for such refined society, vented their abuse, their obscenity, and their blackguardism, on the first welldressed and respectable person whom they chanced to meet sauntering from his native village.

Leigh Hunt, the god, encouraged by the drab whom he "keeps company with," the Venus whom, in words wholly unintelligible to us, he calls "the kind goddess, one of whose charmingest qualities, Is at a small thing to wonder how small it is!" This affords us a specimen of "celestial colloquy divine."

VOL. XV.

As soon as I finish my words, thou shalt be,

Not a man, for thou canst not, but human to see:

Thy appearance at least shall be taken for human,

However perplexing to painter or wo

man.

And again,

"All things, in short, petty and fit, say, and do,

Becoming a man with the soul of a shoe." And again,

"Be these the Court-critics, and vamp a Review;

And by a poor figure, and therefore a true, For it suits with thy nature, both shoelike and slaughterly,

Be it's hue leathern, and title the Quarterly."

And again,

"Like a rogue from a regiment bedrummer'd and fifer'd,

It slunk out of doors, and men call'd the thing GIFFORD.”

"Here Venus entreated, and fain would have gone,

But the god only clasp'd her the more, and went on."

Now, Master Mercury and Mistress Venus, are you not a pretty pair of vagabonds, and have you no fear of the tread-mill? Will the parish officers suffer such doings, that will be bringing a burden upon the poor'srates? To be sure, you have no settlement, but there is expense in passing paupers. So, mark down, relieved at the Vagrant Office," 44, and on your peril shew your mugs again at Ashburton.

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We have written so much for this Number (that Article on Ireland cost us two days' hard driving, and is itself a work) that our fingers are weary; so we conclude with one single observation, which we hope will be taken in good part-You, Leigh Hunt, are, without exception, the weakest and wishy-washiest satirist whose pen ever dribbled. You are like a jack-ass that comes braying out of a pound in which he has been enclosed from Monday till Saturday, precisely the same in sorrow as in anger-sulkily disposed to kick -but oh! weak, weak in the hams is the poor Vicar of Bray! Why, you poor devil, you talk of kicking! you

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cannot kick, neither can you strike. You quote from the Liberal two verses, alluding to your intended exposure of yourself, which say,

"Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick,

Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick?"

and you add in prose, (for you call that verse,)" the following jeu-d'esprit is the stick which is mentioned in the

third Number of the Liberal, as having been cut for Mr Gifford's special use.' Instead of a stick, why, it is only a strip of peeled willow-bark, held in a palsied hand. A tailor might as well threaten to murder a man with a yard

of remnant.

If, instead of good-humoured jocularity, we were to treat our satirist "with a fine serious air," we should present him with a parallel between himself and Mr Gifford, after the manner of Plutarch. We should draw the

character of Mr Gifford as an honest man, an accomplished scholar, a sound writer; often the eloquent, always the judicious, defender of religion, morality, and social order; a man with an English heart We should

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but

Cockney, "Well! soul of a shoe-vy vont you speak,'

"But despair of those nobler ascents, which thou'lt see

Stretching far overhead with the Delphian tree,

Holy ground, to climb up to whose least laurell'd shelf

Thou wouldst have to change natures, and put off thyself.

Stop, and strain at the base; yet, to ease thy despair,

Do thy best to obstruct all the feet that

come there,

Especially younger ones, winged like mine, Till bright, up above thee, they soar and they shine.***

and straddling up the sky, like DaThere he goes soaring, and swaling, niel O'Rourke on goose-back! Hold fast, Leigh, by the gabbler's gullet, or you will fall into the Bay of Genoa, or the New River. Toes in if you please. The goose is galloping-why don't you stand in the stirrups? There that's riding. Why, you are another Buckle. Don't poke your nose so over your horse's ears-I beg pardon, the goose. Mercy on us! he rides that furious animal in a snaffle. Alas! Pegasus smells his native marshes; instead of making for Olympus, he is off in a wallop to the fens of Lincolnshire.

draw Leigh Hunt as a we tremble to think of it: perhaps he Bellerophon has lost his seat-now he

will

"Denounce us in words that shall die on

no shelf."

So let us part good friends after all; and that you may hop off with flying colours from this "flyting," here, you god you, with the organ of self-esteem as large as a haddock, swallow your own description of yourself, and then, pulling up your yellow breeches, grin in Mr Gifford's face, and cry out, in choicest

clings desperately by the tail-a single feather holds him from eternity. Although strong as the quills one sees in public offices, it gives way from the socket; too late he finds that it is all a mistake about his having winged feet; and poor Leigh is picked up, sitting on his rump, in a green field, dead as the Liberal, and consequently speechless as a Scotch member in the Lower House of Parliament.

* See the articles in the Quarterly on Mr Keats, Mr Shelley, and others.

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in that situation. Croker has also slain Savary in the fashion of a true man : La Balafré himself never hewed down a vagabond more completely.

Give me, therefore, rest for one month. I will not write an article on the Metropolitan Review; I wish it every success, and hail its great and continually increasing circulation, as a proof that the country is in a healthy state. I am told it sells about 12,500, while Jeffrey's stuff certainly cannot pollute the nation to a greater extent than 5000, if so much. We remember, Kit, when affairs were differently arranged in the monde literaire, and I flatter myself, that you, and others, whose names need not to be mentioned, are to be not a little thanked for the amelioration. But though I do not wish to make my usual appearance in Maga this month, I have yet a subject to write to you about, which I am ashamed that you or some other person on our side of the question, more competent or more influential than I am, has not taken up already. I mean the case of Mr Theodore Hook, who, I perceive by the papers, has been arrested for his deficiency at the Mauritius. His case never has fairly been exhibited to the public, for reasons which I shall probably explain as I go on.

Let me make a few prefatory remarks on the conduct of the press. You know everybody knows-the intensity of my contempt for the people connected with the London newspapers: I make this assertion, of course, with due exceptions. But really I was not prepared for the bloodhound exultation which some of them expressed on this occasion. The same papers which, with blockhead sympathy, lamented over the firm mind, the vigorous determination, the &c. &c. of Jack Thurtell the murderer, a fellow who was no more to be respected on account of any mental accomplishment than the ordinary run of gentlemen of the press, chuckled with joy at the arrest of Mr Hook, who, by the way, never had done anything to avoid that result. Paragraph after paragraph poured from the filthy prints, lie after lie was studiously repeated, and I am informed, that it was even placarded, with every circumstance of insult that could enter the numscull jobbernouls of their conductors. And why was this done? Had Mr Hook's offence

such damning marks of guilt about it as to call for any particular demonstration of pleasure at its punishment? Not it. For even supposing him to be guilty of what these ruffians charge him with, it would be at most a mere sin of office, and certainly, taken at its worst, not pointed out by anything peculiar from the common herd of such affairs. Many a good Whig fortune is ultimately derivable from peculation, but that is never flung into the face of my Lord Holland, or any other of the worthies. But nobody who knows the man or the transaction suspects him of guilt. There must then be something personal in the rancour against Hook: and that is neither more nor less than that he is supposed to be a chief writer in John Bull. This is the real reason why he is persecuted by people in office, and abused by scoundrels out of it.

Whether Hook is John Bull or not, I cannot say. He denies it; but in this unbelieving age denials of such things go for nothing. John Wilson Croker was suspected; he too denied it; so did Luttrel; so did Horace Twiss; and perhaps we shall by and by have a flat negative from Joseph Grimaldi, or Joseph Hume. But, admitting the fact, what is the particular sin in conducting the Bull? It abuses its political opponents right and left, but I submit that is no more than what is done by every clever newspaper on every side of the question: I never heard of a Tory who would feel any satisfaction on learning that any unpolitical calamity had befallen James Perry, or William Cobbett. The darling fellows who bawl against it, talk with faces of brass of the peculiar cruelty of its observations defamatory to female reputation. Gentle and chivalrous souls! Is it not enough to make a man's gorge rise to hear such undefecated humbug? Female reputation indeed! John Bull had the courage to oppose the rabid faction which advocated the unfortunate Queen, and to display her, and those who were linked with her, in true colours, to the indignation of the chaste and virtuons. You might as well reprobate the Roman historians for painting Messalina, as the John Bull for exposing Caroline. And who are they who make the charge? The Whigs-the men whose poetical organ is Tom Moore, the author of the

Twopenny Postbag, (whose public defalcation, by the way, they never allude to)-and whose most favourite laureate was Wolcot, the author of the Lousiad. From these clever lampooners, for clever they are, in spite of their filth and venom, we could extract hundreds of passages hurtful to female character, slanderous to female reputation, and irritating to female feelings. I pass by the scores of inferior libellers in Whig pay. They indeed to talk of slander! No, no; the real reason of the hatred against Bull is not such nonsense as this. Its true crime is its wit, its keen satire, by which it has prostrated the blackguards of the Whig press, demolished the projected Queen's Court, covered the party everywhere with ridicule, and put an end to those bloody farces, "public meetings for constitutional purposes." For this, Hook is hated by the gang, and out of the blessed principle of Conciliation, which is doing such sad mischief in matters of infinitely higher moment, sacrificed by those whose most vital interests the publication supposed to be his has served in the highest.

Such has been the extent of misrepresentation on the subject, that I venture to say, not one in a thousand who speak about it, knows exactly how the thing is. The common impression fostered by the pot-house paper is, that Hook robbed the treasury committed to his care of £12,000; that, in fact, he thrust his hand into the chest, abstracted that sum, and put it coolly into his pocket. Nothing can be more directly contrary to the fact. In a few words I shall give you Hook's real case, and then trouble you with some remarks on the business. Here are the facts.

Mr Hook's chief confidential clerk, whose duty it was to make up the Treasury accounts of the Mauritius, made up those of November 1816 with an error of £9000 in them; notwithstanding which, they were audited, and had been passed correct for two years. In the meantime he delivered over the Treasury to a new governor, and received a certificate, which is published in the parliamentary papers on the subject, from five principal officers of government, attesting its correctness, and giving him, under their hands, a discharge for the entire balance. Three months after this, the chief clerk who,

two years before, had made the error, reported it himself to governmentthe error having given, of course, opportunity in the interim, to anybody who was aware of it, to have abstracted the amount in money, at the time of the transfer. An investigation of the affair was ordered; on the second day of which, that confidential clerk destroyed himself, without giving any clue as to the fate of the money. He could not, in fact, stand the investigation. For this, Mr Hook is now in prison.

Nay more, so far is his case from being fairly understood, that almost everybody who thinks of it, supposes that the sum for which he has been arrested, is the amount of the deficiency in his chest-and yet it is no such thing. The sum for which he is a defendant at the suit of the crown, is made up, besides the amount of the deficiency, of charges under different acts of Parliament, on the ground that he did not make the best bargains for Government in sales of bills, and that he was not sufficiently careful in the issue of specie, which he made against paper, or local arrangements,-and other details which would not be interesting to you, or your readers, and with which I suppose we shall be regaled in due time from his own pen. I allude to them, merely to shew that he has been most studiously misrepresented, and most determinately misunderstood.

Why, it may be asked, do I, living here, in this auld-warld neuk, give myself the trouble of defending a man whom I never saw, and whom, in all probability, I never shall see? or what is there in his arrest, which ought to call forth our attention? I shall just tell you. I do not care a fig's end for Hook-but I do care for the intense plucklessness of our party. It makes me perfectly indignant, at times, when I think of the courage with which the Whigs have at all times patronized their men, and the cowardice generally displayed by our Tory chieftains. I shall not go back to Sir R. Walpole, for the management of his Whiggish sovereignty would be too gross and palpable for our times. But look at what they did, when they had last a glimpse of authority. They gave a place to Moore, their lampoon-manto Hallam, their great Balaamite-they posted Sidney Smith, their jack-pud

ding parson-in fact, everybody who could write libel for them, or who had ever wielded a pen in their cause, no mattter how obtuse and nebless the tool might have been, was rewarded. On the contrary, it appears to be almost a fixed principle with us, that whenever a man does anything for the cause of Toryism, he is to be immediately given up-he is looked upon as a sort of thing of course, and left to battle with his adversaries, not only without the countenance of the great Tory leaders, but under a studious withdrawing of their support. I must say, that they order these things bet ter among the Whigs.*

Let me not be so misunderstood for a moment as to be thought to be pray ing for patronage. I despise such a thought from the bottom of my soul. We know, North, how little of that kind of thing we, for instance, either looked for or received. Thank Heaven, the general strength of Toryism just now is so great, that we are independent of the smiles or the frowns of any knot of ministerial people, whom we puff or abuse as we please. But I must say, that it is not fair, that because a man has been active, or has been suspected of being active in their behalf, he should be conciliated away —that he should suffer harder treatment than anybody else, out of mere candour and official deference to opponents. Now here is a case, in which a gentleman, whom nobody at all accuses of dishonourable proceedings,whose affairs admit of equitable arrangement, who is labouring under difficulties brought on by the negligence of people under him and over him, is treated with a degree of rigour never exerted against one but the most marked criminal. Extents have been issued against his property, which has been twice seized and sold, and against his person, which has been thirteen or fourteen months in confinement in one prison or other. All the little malice of an underling board has been exerted against him, instigated by political enemies, who hate him for his suspect ed support of ministers; while people

in authority calmly look on, and content themselves with saying, " A very hard case this of Hook's. We wish him out of it; but, you know, it would not look well for us to interfere.”Why? The answer is at hand. "Because we should be afraid that, if we did, it would be said, we did so on account of his supposed connection with John Bull;"-and there is the plucklessness of which I complain, and which is the reason of my writing you this letter.

This sneaking cowardice our ministerial men carry into a thousand departments. As I have often said, it is a sin not visible among the Whigs. Had they a John Bull among them, they would boldly stand by him for his writings in their behalf,-not affect to cut him in his difficulties. I wish we could borrow this leaf out of their book; not that I wish for any undue support for our literary people, but that the mere fact of their being for us should not deprive them of common justice. I hope Hook's business will make its appearance before Parliament this approaching session, and, when there, that it will be fairly met by ministers. Among them, there is at least one man who ought to take the courage of speaking up,-I mean George Canning. The editor of the Antijacobin ought not to look on it as a crime unpardonable to be accused (for it comes to that) of writing the John Bull.

Loves, compliments, &c. in all quarters where they are due. Yours, T. TICKLER.

P. S.-I hope you are above the silliness of declining to print my letter. There will be, of course, the usual trashery of a fellow-feeling for John Bull, or, it may be said, that I have written this to oblige Hook,—or, in fact, what the jack-asses about you are always braying about. But never mind that. You know why I have written it; and you know that is what I have been in the habit of saying for a very long time. T. T.

There was a fine story lately in the Morning Chronicle, given on occasion of Lord Erskine's death.-It represented him as leaving the woolsack when Chancel lor of England!!! and walking to the bar of the House of Lords!!! on purpose to tell Jemmy Pirie that he (the Chancellor) had that morning given a living in the Church of England!!! to one of his (Jemmy's) worn-out hacks of reporters!!! This anecdote should never be forgotten.

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