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TO THE SECOND VOLUME.

NEVER was a greater outcry raised among the hypocrites of all classes, than against this publication. What with the "great vulgar" protesting, the "small" abusing, lawyers denouncing, "divines" cursing, scandal-mongers bawling, dunces of all sorts shrieking all the sore places of the community seem to have been touched, and the "body politic" agitated accordingly.

"As when the long-ear'd, milky mothers wait
At some sick miser's triple-bolted gate,
For their defrauded, absent foals they make

A moan so loud, that all the Guild awake;
Sore sighs Sir Gilbert, starting at the bray,
From dreams of millions, and three groats to pay:
So swells each windpipe: ass intones to ass,
Harmonic twang! of leather, horn, and brass;
Such as from lab'ring lungs th' enthusiast blows,
High sounds, attempered to the vocal nose;

Or such as bellow from the deep divine:

There, Webster! peal'd thy voice; and, Whitfield! thine;
But far o'er all sonorous Blackmore's strain:

Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again.

In Tottenham fields the brethren with amaze,

Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze!

Long Chancery Lane, retentive, rolls the sound,

And courts to courts return it round and round."-Dunciad.

All these people deserve no better answer than a laughing quotation. But we will just admonish some well-meaning persons,

not over strong in their understandings, that with respect to the religious part of the business, they are most grossly and "irreligiously" taken in, if they suffer themselves to be persuaded, that it is we who would lessen the divinity of what is really divine. It is these pretended "divines" and their abettors, who lessen it; -those raisers-up of absurd and inhuman imaginations, which they first impudently confound with divine things, and then, because we shew the nonsense of the imaginations, as impudently call their exposers blasphemers. Were we inclined to retort their own terms upon them, we should say that there was nothing in the world more "blasphemous" than such charges of blasphemy. The whole secret is just what we have stated. They first assume unworthy notions of the Divine Spirit, and then because that very Spirit is in fact vindicated from their degradations by an exposure of the absurdity and impossibility of such notions, they assume a divine right to denounce the vindicators, and to rouse up all the fears, weakness, and ignorance of society, in defence of the degradation. Of this stuff have the "Scribes, Pharisees, and Hypocrites" in all ages been made, whenever established opinion was to be divested of any of its corruptions. "He blasphemeth!" quoth the modern tribunal. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" quoth the Quarterly. This is the point, which persons who undertake to be didactic in Reviews, should answer; and not a hundred things which we never said.

There is a more generous indignation which we allow might be felt by some persons upon another point, but still owing to real want of information on the subject. We allude to what has been said in the Liberal of the late King. The Vision of Judgment was written in a fit of indignation and disgust at Mr. Southey's nonsense; and we confess that had we seen a copy of it in Italy, before it went to press (for we had none by us) we should have taken more pains to explain one or two expressions with regard to that Prince. Had the Preface also, entrusted to Mr. Murray, been sent, as it ought to have been, to the new publisher, much of the unintended part of the effect produced upon weak minds

would have been explained away at once;-that effect, which the hypocritical enemies of the Liberal at once delighted to assist in producing, and most pretended to deprecate. But the virtues of the late King, though of a negative kind, were of a kind nevertheless exceedingly calculated to excite a great many feelings in favour of him in a society like that of England; while his vices (pardon us, dear self-love of our countrymen, for supposing that you have vices) were equally calculated to be overlooked in a certain general blindness prevailing on that subject. Yet to those vices, extreme self-will for instance, sullenness of purpose, a strong natural vindictiveness, &c. was owing the bloody protraction of the American War to those vices, as well as to Mr. Pitt's haughty sympathy with them, was mainly owing the general war against liberty which was roused among the despots of the continent and if certain staid and well-intentioned people suppose, that persons quite as moral and as pious as themselves, could not hold the late King in a light very different from their own, and much more revolting than even we hold it, they are most egregiously mistaken. What was thought of George the Third's natural character by a man of the highest respectability, who knew him intimately at court,-to wit, his own Governor when Prince of Wales,-may be seen by those who wish to do us justice, in the Memoirs of James, Earl of Waldegrave, published by the aforesaid Mr. Murray. See also Dr. Franklin's Life, Junius, and the opinion of Mr. Southey's friend, the author, of Gebir. What the Earl of Waldegrave prophecied of that character, may be seen also in Mr. Murray's publication. We think that prophecy came to pass. The most pious and virtuous person we ever knew, even in the ordinary sense of those terms (and she might have stood by the side of the most virtuous, in the most extraordinary) thought so too, and taught some of us to think so in our childhood. The ruin of her family and prospects was brought upon her, to her knowledge, by that Prince's temper and obstinacy; and though the strict religious way in which she was brought up might have induced her to carry too far her opinion

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