to the hammer of the carpenter, little is thought by the public, and
little need be said by the committee. Truth, however, is not to be
sacrificed for the accommodation of either; and he who should
pronounce that our edifice has received its final embellishment would
be disseminating falsehood without incurring favour, and risking the
disgrace of detection without participating the advantage of success.

Professions lavishly effused and parsimoniously verified are alike
inconsistent with the precepts of innate rectitude and the practice
of external policy: let it not then be conjectured that because we
are unassuming, we are imbecile; that forbearance is any indication
of despondency, or humility of demerit. He that is the most assured
of success will make the fewest appeals to favour, and where nothing
is claimed that is undue, nothing that is due will be withheld. A
swelling opening is too often succeeded by an insignificant
conclusion. Parturient mountains have now produced muscipular
abortions; and the auditor who compares incipient grandeur with final
vulgarity is reminded of the pious hawkers of Constantinople, who
solemnly perambulate her streets, exclaiming, "In the name of the
Prophet--figs!"

Of many who think themselves wise, and of some who are thought wise
by others, the exertions are directed to the revival of mouldering
and obscure dramas; to endeavours to exalt that which is now rare
only because it was always worthless, and whose deterioration, while
it condemned it to living obscurity, by a strange obliquity of moral
perception constitutes its title to posthumous renown. To embody the
flying colours of folly, to arrest evanescence, to give to bubbles
the globular consistency as well as form, to exhibit on the stage the
piebald denizen of the stable, and the half-reasoning parent of