lives to become Attorney-General, renounce Whig
principles, and prosecute the very Press that destroyed him. Bishops are
our proper food; we send them to heaven on a sort of flying griffin,
of which the back is an apoplexy, and the wings are puffs. The Bishop
of---, whom we despatched in this manner the other day, being rather
a facetious personage, wrote to remonstrate with us thereon, observing
that though heaven was a very good translation for a bishop, yet that in
such cases he preferred 'the original to the translation.' As we murder
bishop, so is there another class of persons whom we only afflict with
lethiferous diseases. This latter tribe consists of his Majesty and his
Majesty's ministers. Whenever we cannot abuse their measures, we always
fall foul on their health. Does the king pass any popular law, we
immediately insinuate that his constitution is on its last legs. Does
the minister act like a man of sense, we instantly observe, with great
regret, that his complexion is remarkably pale. There is one manifest
advantage in diseasinq people, instead of absolutely destroying them:
the public may flatly contradict us in one case, but it never can in the
other; it is easy to prove that a man is alive, but utterly impossible
to prove that he is in health. What if some opposing newspaper take up
the cudgels in his behalf, and assert that the victim of all Pandora's
complaints, whom we send tottering to the grave, passes one half the day
in knocking up a 'distinguished company' at a shooting-party, and the
other half in outdoing the same 'distinguished company' after dinner?
What if the afflicted individual himself write us word that he never
was better in his life? We have only mysteriously to shake our heads
and observe that to contradict is not to prove, that it is little likely
that our authority should have been mistaken, and (we are very fond
of an historical comparison), beg our readers to remember that when
Cardinal Richelieu was dying, nothing enraged him so much as hinting
that he was ill. In short, if Horace is right, we are the very princes
of poets; for I dare say, Mr. MacGrawler, that you--and you, too, my
little gentleman, perfectly remember the words of the wise old Roman,--

"'Ille per extentum funem mihi posse videtur
Ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit,
Irritat, mulcet, falsis terroribus implet.'"

["He appears to me to be, to the fullest extent, a poet who
airily