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Our readers may perhaps require a reason of us for noticing a work wliich , having originally appeared in the columns ot a Journal of unenviable notoriety , and being on some accounts not unworthy of its place there , may be thought little entitled to any further attention than that which it has already received .
We have a reason which shall be stated presently ; first premising , that we do not review " Runnymede" in the character which he assumes of the champion of Toryism . There is no intellectual identification between him and the party . No doubt the Tories think it a fine thing to have such a fine writer in their interest ; they take his magniloquence for magnificent eloquence ;
they wonder at his parade of history , and repeat his repetitions of their catch-words ; and they are in especial glee when he grows scandalous . But as to his reasonings , theories , and speculations , they accord with them in the same spirit , and with similar comprehension , as the Bristol trader who appropriated the splen-€€
did speech of his colleague on the hustings by merely adding , I say ditto to Mr Burke . " And they will say ditto to any speculations that tend to help their party to place , and its retainers to p ickings . This hope lights them on a little way into the book ; but it is a delusive meteor ; and were the truth told , they would confess that their intellects soon were sorely swamped in the marshes of Runnymede .
Nor do we notice this work on account of the truthfulness of the writer ' s spirit , or the goodness of his feelings : qualities which are sometimes conjoined with theories almost as wild , and arguments almost as fallacious , as his own , but which always command respect . For the very reverse of these qualities we need not look beyond the dedication to Sir Robert Peel . The writer
there asserts that , of the measures of reform projected by Ministers at the commencement of the session , " not one has been carried" A back date to the dedication will not help him out of this glaring falsehood . The connection fixes the meaning to an assertion that they were lost . Now , foremost amon g st these measures were the English Church Bill , the Dissenting Marriage
Bill , the Registration Bill , and the Tithe Commutation Bill . We speak not of the worth of all these measures ; the first seems . to us a very bad one ; but these are four of the promised reforms , and all of them are carried . With like contempt of truth he says , " the Dissenting organs denounce even the projected alleviation " of their grievances " as a miserable insult . " The Dissenters certainly are not satisfied that their other claims should
• 8 ro . Mkaone . 1836 .
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540 The Letters of Runnymede .
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THE LETTERS OF RUNNYMEDE . *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1836, page 540, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2661/page/16/
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