tained in limited monarchies than republics, I am for English permanence in this respect, in preference to French mutability, and American electiveness; though, at the same time, I cannot but consider the two great nations of France and the United States as setting us enviable examples in regard to the more amiable sociality of the one and the special and constant consideration for women in the other. The Tory Government having failed in its two attacks on the Examiner, could not be content, for any length of time, till it had failed in a third. For such was the case. The new charge was again on the subject of the army-that of military flogging. An excellent article on the absurd and cruel nature of that punishment, from the pen of the late Mr. John Scott (who afterwards fell in a duel with one of the writers in Blackwood), had appeared in a country paper, the Stamford News, of which he was editor. The most striking passages of this article were copied into the Examiner, and it is a remarkable circumstance in the history of juries, that after the journal which copied it had been acquitted in London, the journal which originated the copied matter was found guilty in Stamford; and this, too, though the counsel was the same in both instances-the present Lord Brougham. The attorney-general at that time was Sir Vicary Gibbs; a name which it appears somewhat ludicrous to me to write at present, considering what a bugbear it was to politicians, and how insignificant it has since become. Sir Vicary was a little, irritable, sharp-featured, bilious-looking man (so at least he was described, for I never saw him); very worthy, I believe, in private; and said to be so fond of novels, that he would read them after the labours of the day, till the waxlights guttered without his knowing it. I had a secret regard for him on this account, and wished he would not haunt me in a spirit so unlike Tom Jones. I know not what sort of lawyer he was; probably none the worse for imbuing himself with the knowledge of Fielding and Smollett; but he was a bad reasoner, and made half-witted charges. He used those edge-tools of accusation which cut a man's own fingers. He assumed that we could have no motives for writing but mercenary ones; and he argued, that because Mr. Scott (who had no more regard for Bonaparte than we had) endeavoured to shame down the practice of military flogging by pointing to the disuse of it in the armies of France, he only wanted to subject his native country to invasion. He also had the simplicity to ask, why we did not " speak privately on the subject to some member of Parliament," and get him to notice it in a proper manner, instead of bringing it before the public in a newspaper? We laughed at him; and the event of his accusations enabled us to laugh more. The charge of being friends of Bonaparte against all who differed with Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Canning was a common, and, for too long a time, a successful trick, with such of the public as did not read the writings of the persons accused. I have often been surprised, much later in life, both in relation to this and to other charges, at the credulity into which many excellent persons had owned they had been thus beguiled, and at the surprise which they expressed in turn at finding the charges the reverse of true. To the readers of the Examiner they caused only indignation or merriment. The last and most formidable prosecution against us remains to be told; but some intermediate circumstances must be related first. CHAPTER XII. LITERARY WARFARE. THE Examiner had been established between two and three years, when [in 1810] my brother projected a quarterly magazine of literature and politics, entitled the Reflector, which I edited. Lamb, Dyer, Barnes, Mitchell, the Greek Professor Scholefield (all Christ-Hospital men), together with Dr. Aikin and his family, wrote in it; and it was rising in sale every quarter, when it stopped at the close of the fourth number for want of funds. Its termination was not owing to want of liberality in the payments. But the radical reformers in those days were not sufficiently rich or numerous to support such a publication. Some of the liveliest effusions of Lamb first appeared in this magazine; and in order that I might retain no influential class for my good wishers, after having angered the stage, dissatisfied the Church, offended the State, not very well pleased the Whigs, and exasperated the Tories, I must needs commence the maturer part of my verse-making with contributing to its pages the Feast of the Poets. The Feast of the Poets was (perhaps, I may say, is) a jeud'esprit suggested by the Session of the Poets of Sir John Suckling. Apollo gives the poets a dinner; and many versemakers, who have no claim to the title, present themselves, and are rejected. With this effusion, while thinking of nothing but showing my wit, and reposing under the shadow of my "laurels " (of which I expected a harvest as abundant as my self-esteem), I made almost every living poet and poetaster my enemy, and particularly exasperated those among the Tories. I speak of the shape in which it first appeared, before time and reflection had moderated its judgment. It drew upon my head all the personal hostility which had hitherto been held in a state of suspense by the vaguer daring of the Examiner, and I have reason to believe that its inconsiderate, and I am bound to confess, in some respects, unwarrantable levity, was the origin of the gravest, and far less warrantable attacks which I afterwards sustained from political antagonists, and which caused the most serious mischief to my fortunes. Let the young satirist take warning; and consider how much self-love he is going to wound, by the indulgence of his own. Not that I have to apologize to the memory of every one whom I attacked. I am sorry to have had occasion to differ with any of my fellow-creatures, knowing the mistakes to which we are all liable, and the circumstances that help to cause them. But I can only regret it, personally, in proportion to the worth or personal regret on the side of the enemy. The Quarterly Review, for instance, had lately been set up, and its editor was Gifford, the author of the Baviad and Mæviad. I had been invited, nay, pressed by the publisher, to write in the new review; which surprised me, considering its politics and the great difference of my own. I was not aware of the little faith that was held in the politics of any beginner of the world; and I have no doubt that the invita tion had been made at the instance of Gifford himself, of whom, as the dictum of a "man of vigorous learning," and the "first satirist of his time," I had quoted in the Critical Essays the gentle observation, that "all the fools in the kingdom seemed to have risen up with one accord, and exclaimed, let us write for the theatres !'" Strange must have been Gifford's feelings, when, in the Feast of the Poets, he found his eulogizer falling as trenchantly on the author of the Baviad and Mæviad as the Baviad and Mæviad had fallen on the dramatists. The Tory editor discerned plainly enough, that if a man's politics were of no consideration with the Quarterly Review, provided the politician was his critical admirer, they were very different things with the editor Radical. He found also, that the new satirist had ceased to regard the old one as a "critical authority ;" and he might not have unwarrantably concluded that I had conceived some personal disgust against him as a man; for such, indeed, was the secret of my attack. The reader is, perhaps, aware, that George the Fourth, when he was Prince of Wales, had a mistress of the name of Robinson. She was the wife of a man of no great character, had taken to the stage for a livelihood, was very handsome, wrote verses, and is said to have excited a tender emotion in the bosom of Charles Fox. The prince allured her from the stage, and lived with her for some years. After their separation, and during her decline, which took place before she was old, she became afflicted with rheumatism; and as she solaced her pains, and perhaps added to her subsistence, by writing verses, and as her verses turned upon her affections, and she could not discontinue her old vein of love and sentiment, she fell under the lash of this masculine and gallant gentleman, Mr. Gifford, who, in his Baviad and Mæviad, amused himself with tripping up her "crutches," particularly as he thought her on her way to her last home. This he considered the climax of the fun. "See," exclaimed he, after a hit or two at other women, like a boy throwing stones in the street "See Robinson forget her state, and move On crutches tow'rds the grave to 'Light o' Love."" This is the passage which put all the gall into anything which I said, then or afterwards, of Gifford, till he attacked myself and my friends. At least, it disposed me to think the worst of whatever he wrote; and as reflection did not improve nor suffering soften him, he is the only man I ever attacked, respecting whom I have felt no regret. It would be easy for me, at this distance of time, to own that Gifford possessed genius, had such been the case. It would have been easy for me at any time. But he had not a particle. The scourger of poetasters was himself a poetaster. When he had done with his whip, everybody had a right to take it up, and lay it over the scourger's shoulders; for though he had sense enough to discern glaring faults, he abounded in commonplaces. His satire itself, which at its best never went beyond smartness, was full of them. The reader shall have a specimen or two, in order that Mr. Gifford may speak for himself; for his book has long ceased to be read. He shall see with how little a stock of his own a man may set up for a judge of others. The Baviad and Maviad-so called from two bad poets mentioned by Virgil—was a satire, imitated from Persius, on a set of fantastic writers who had made their appearance under the title of Della Cruscans. The coterie originated in the meeting of some of them at Florence, the seat of the famous Della-Cruscan Academy. Mr. Merry, their leader, who was a member of that academy, and who wrote under its signature, gave occasion to the name. They first published a collection of poems, called the Florence Miscellany, and then sent verses to the London newspapers, which occasioned an overflow of contributions in the like taste. The taste was as bad as can be imagined; full of floweriness, conceits, and affectation; and, in attempting to escape from commonplace, it evaporated into nonsense : "Was it the shuttle of the morn That wove upon the cobwebb'd thorn "Hang o'er his eye the gossamery tear." "Gauzy zephyrs, fluttering o'er the plain, |