ward (only to denounce him) a local disturber; and you prohibited it. Why, George? If those acts and that incendiary were shewn in an approved light, then indeed must you have been warranted by the duties of your office, by your sense of religion, and by your common sense (if any is left), in suppressing the play; but when it is on all hands admitted that the thing is all the other way, by what kind of ratiocination have you acted as if it were not?
But no "political allusions" of any kind will you allow. No! Not even such as must promote the King's peace and serve to discountenance those who break it? And if not, George, why' not? Answer us, my friend. Is it treason or disaffection to write a play against the Government, and in favour of its enemies, and is it also treason or disaffection to write one in favour of it, and against its enemies?—Ridicule must overtake the wight that reasons with you; but would you conceive yourself behaving like a man of the humblest good-sense in prohibiting, this moment, a play of which the object should be to laud the principles that called the house of Brunswick to the throne, and to brand, at the same time, the adverse principles?—Or, coming closer on the point—suppose a little drama was sent in to you with a little Radical for its hero, and the plot built on Radical nonsense, but serving, every line, temperately to denounce it and him—how would you decide? Suppress it, as you have suppressed your old friend's drama, which, from your admissions, is so precisely a case in point? Would you, George?
As, "in one fell swoop," you have excluded from the stage the totality of the piece here spoken of, I cannot, in illustration of your loyalty, quote a whole play against you; but through another, which you have partially damned, I find abundance of passages that serve this purpose. To begin. An Irish reaper enters, singing four lines of an old song that has been sung a hundred times before, indeed as often thrummed as Mrs. Carey, or Paddy Carey, which you ought to know something about;—Scene, a street—in London; mark, in London;
"'Twas there I met wid Bonyparte, who tuck me by de hand,
An', says he, how's poor ould Ireland, an’' how does she stand?
Och! a poor distressed nation, as never yet war seen,
Where dey 're hangin' men an' women for de wearin' o' de green."—
And here I have preserved your cuts; and this is a sample of your sense of disloyalty. In the mouth of such a character, in such a situation, and at such a time as the present, the Irish reaper's mention of "Bonyparte," and the playful and, on the face of it, ridiculous allusion—to events now nearly thirty years gone by—this is disloyalty, and something too violent to be hummed in a song; you smell a rat, here; and with an intense grayity, that none but Dogberry and yourself were ever able to assume, you "cry stand in the Prince's name."—Talking of princes, do you remember the burlesque farce of which the name smelt odious in your nostrils, the other day at Drury Lane? and what was that name?— "The Prince of—Pimlico!"—yes, George; "Disloyalty, again," said you; "this name must be changed."—Well; returning to H.'s pieces, just another instance from them. The same Irishman comes before a magistrate, (not as an offender,) and the magistrate, in calling on him for an account of himself, jocosely observes, "Deserted from Captain Rock, I presume?"—to which Pat anxiously answers,—"No, in truth, then; I'll never deny there was
