their ignorance, and
inculcating whatever is most pernicious in principle and most dangerous
to society. This is their golden age; for though such men would in any
age have taken to some villainy or other, never could they have found a
course at once so gainful and so safe. Long impunity has taught them to
despise the laws which they defy, and the institutions which they are
labouring to subvert; any further responsibility enters not into their
creed, if that may be called a creed, in which all the articles are
negative. I? we turn from politics to what should be humaner literature,
and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed the
press, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetent
assume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions;
for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, or
hypocritical, _quo quis impudentior eo doctior habetur_.

_Montesinos_.--The pleasure which men take in acting maliciously is
properly called by Barrow a _rascally_ delight. But this is no new form
of malice. "_Avant nous_," says the sagacious but iron-hearted
Montluc--"_avant nous ces envies ont regne_, _et regneront encore apres
nous_, _si Dieu ne nous voulait tous refondre_." Its worst effect is
that which Ben Jonson remarked: "The gentle reader," says he, "rests
happy to hear the worthiest works misrepresented, the clearest actions
obscured, the innocentest life traduced; and in such a licence of lying,
a field so fruitful of slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his
laughter? Hence comes the epidemical infection: for how can they escape
the contagion of the writings whom the virulency of the calumnies hath
not staved off from reading?"

There is another mischief, arising out of ephemeral literature, which was
noticed by the same great author. "Wheresoever manners and fashions are
corrupted," says he, "language is. It imitates the public riot. The
excess of feasts and apparel are the notes of a sick state; and the
wantonness of language of a sick mind." This was the observation of a
man well versed in the history of the ancients and in their literature.
The evil prevailed in his time to a considerable degree; but it was not
permanent, because it proceeded rather from the affectation of a few
individuals than from any general cause: the great poets were free from
it; and our prose writers then, and till the end of that century, were
preserve