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Untitled Article
so on through the whole variety of trades . All these are wearying and disgusting enough , but give me each and all of them , day after day , rather than condemn me to be talked to by a litterateur , all whose faculties are so taken up by books , that he has neither time nor inclination for ideas . If he be in addition a professional writer for a
fashionable publication , eschew him as you would the plague . He is infallibly one of the people described by Goethe , * whom you can teach nothing to , and whom you can learn nothing from . In the coming age , such people will be prohibited from marrying , in order that the world may cease to be deluged with a nuisance , a professional critic 1 Bound to read all the books that come out ! His brain , if brain he
have , must be a mere word-basket , and he must keep his opinions ready within to be taken out of a sack like lottery tickets , whence it follows that so many misfits take place between books and opinions . There were plagues in Egypt , but verily the poor people might contrive to exist , for in those days the plague of literary critics existed not . Father ! what is that flight of steps with a column on the top ?
That , boy , is an entrance into the park . The fourth Guelph was so intolerably selfish , that he refused the people a right of way through the site of what formerly was Carlton Palace . The fifth Guelph , wishing to * do popularity , granted leave , but needlessly piled up a mass of granite , to oblige people to go up and down stairs , as if a hill road were better than a level . But the column , father . It looks as if it were intended to put something on the top of it ?
That column , boy , was built by subscription , by the officers of the army , in sycophantic adulation of another Guelph who ruled the army , and paid his harlot the wages of her iniquity , by giving her the patronage and sale of commissions . He was not even a soldier . He commanded British bull-dogs , and so paralyzing was the influence of his imbecile mind , that even Dutchmen beat them away from the land they had a footing in . He was once nearly taken prisoner , and an
adverse general remarked that it was a fortunate thing he escaped , for he was as good as an army of reserve to them . There is a huge block of granite somewhere , carved into his semblance , which it was intended to place o « the top of the column . And why have they not so placed it ? Because in these latter days there is a thing come forth of new and boundless power , called public opinion . This power proclaimed that the departed Guelph was no honour to the community to which he had belonged , that he was a gambler and a sensualist , who , after disappointing a host of creditors , and bringing many of them to ruin , left the world with their curses on his head . Public opinion has decreed that it would be held an insult to decency to erect the stone
effigy of such a man , and the subscribers have wisely abstained . It would only have given trouble to a future popular government to overthrow it , as will eventually be done by that of the charlatan Canning . Public morality imperiously demands that the statues of wicked men should not be set up in high places . Would not the populace throw them down ? It is not desirable , boy . It would be a breach of the law . Ib is a
Untitled Article
689 Juvenile Lessons .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 682, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/22/
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