wholesale. Sometimes, indeed, we knock off a leading barrister or so,
and express the anguish of the junior counsel at a loss so destructive to
their interests. But that is only a stray hit, and the slain barrister
often 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