Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/259

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the "Quarterly Review" in one pocket, and "Wat Tyler" in the other; and that you deliberately stood up for the purpose of reviling an individual who was not present to vindicate himself, and in a place which afforded you protection." p. 2.

So that for Mr. William Smith in a debate on a bill for the suppression of all political opinions (as we are told by Mr. Alderman Smith, a very different person, to be sure, and according to Mr. Southey, no doubt, a highly respectable character, and a true lover of liberty and the constitution) for Mr. William Smith on such an occasion to introduce the sentiments of a well-known writer in a public journal, that writer being a whiffling tool of the court, and that journal the avowed organ of the government-party, in confirmation of his apprehensions of the objects and probable results of the bill then pending, was quite irrelevant and unparliamentary; nor had Mr. William Smith any right to set an additional stigma on the unprincipled and barefaced lengths which this writer now goes in servility and intolerance, by shewing the equal lengths to which he went formerly in popular fanaticism and licentiousness. Yet neither Mr. Southey nor his friend Mr. Wynne complained of Mr. Canning's want of regularity, or disrespect of the House, in lugging out of his pocket The Spencean Plan as an argument against Reform, and as decisive of the views of the Friends of Reform in parliament. Nay, Mr. Southey requoted Mr. Canning's quotation, for the purpose of reviling all Reform and all Reformers, in the "Quarterly Review;"—a place in which any one so reviled can no more defend himself than Mr. Southey can defend himself in parliament; and which it seems affords equal "protection" to those who avail themselves of it; for a Quarterly Reviewer, according to Mr. Southey, being anonymous, is not at all accountable for what he writes. He says,—

"As to the "Quarterly Review," you can have no other authority for ascribing any particular paper in that journal to one person or to another, than common report. The "Quarterly Review" stands upon its own merits." [Yet it was for what Mr. Southey wrote in that Review, that The Courier told us at the time that