hermit of the wilderness, he accords it to
them all.

There is a considerable body of men in
this country who have no veneration for the
old landmarks of public safety and
governmental checks. They cannot see the
importance of the duty exercised by any officer
appointed to watch over the tone and purity
of any portion of the public press. They
consider that the stream of literature is best
left to flow on unguided, wherever it listeth;
as, the more it flows, the more it contributes
towards its own purification. Some even go
so far in their logical demonstrations as to
declaim against the folly of setting up an
arbitrary standard of morality before the
general morality of the country evolves and
creates that standard. Societies for the
suppression of vice are looked upon as mistaken,
but well-intentioned, organisations; fighting
with shadows; occasionally contributing to a
great injustice by aiding in the punishment
of an individual for the sins of the mass;
removing a moral sore from a notorious part
of the metropolis to another part that has
not yet grown quite so notorious.

To persons holding these opinions, who
butt at shams as a mad Spanish bull rushes at
a picador, and who hate expediencies and
compromises as a Puritan does the Evil One, the
office of examiner of plays must appear to be
one of the most feeble, the most ineffectual, the
most unnecessary, and the most ridiculous of
all the many absurd offices that custom and
an indolent country have placed at the
disposal of a British minister. Such men are
accustomed to laugh unmercifully at the
possible channels of evasion and freedom that
exist to render the position of licenser of
plays as empty and powerless for all practical
general good as the fluttering rags on a pole in
the midst of a field of corn. The examiner
of the light and varied productions of
dramatic genius, the preserver of public
morality, is a scarecrow. He is the phantom,
the vestige of a shadow of ancient, bygone
authority. He is like an old watchman of
the last century, who looked a substantial
representative of order and power at a
moderate distance; but who it was found,
upon closer inspection, could be tripped up
by a child. He is like a mastiff chained
firmly to a stake, who makes a hostile noise,
and might do some little damage to those
who ventured within the circle of his
influence, but who is powerless for harm
beyond those narrow limits. He is like an
imposing beadle who presents an opposition
to the entrance of a dirty urchin into the
sacred temple, while the dirty urchin darts
in between his legs. If his personal judgment
or his sense of official duty lead him to
prohibit the theatrical representation of a
particular piece, he knows that it can be
printed and circulated as a literary work,
and afterwards read in public by the author
or any other lecturer, without his having the
slightest influence over its destiny in these
two latter forms. When he has exercised
the pruning-knife with more than his usual
energy and care, he feels that the sentiments
and opinions he has thereby expunged may
be thundered from the orators' platform, or
printed in hundreds of thousands of copies in
any form of daily, weekly, hourly, monthly,
quarterly, morning, or evening magazine, or
newspaper that the printing-presses of the
country are eternally pouring over the land.
He has no control over the improvised
outpourings (vulgarly called gagging) of the
inspired comic actor. The very criticisms
upon the amended play will supply to millions
of readers the rejected passages, flavouring
them with free and disrespectful comments
upon the judgment and utility of the moral
dramatic sentinel of the state. To interpose
the voice of authority in such a tempest of
literary wrath is like holding up the frailest
parasol to protect the head from a shower of
red-hot lava and cinders dropping from a
fiery volcano. It is useless; and the contest
is one where the most honour and profit is
got by retreat and resignation.

For these reasons, disliking fictions of power
—authority which is no authority—and
generally shams of all kinds; knowing also, in the
present state of popular feeling and popular
liberty, that there is no chance in this world
of the licenser of plays ever being made a
more solid, beneficial reality than he now is,
or of his being aided and abetted in his
functions and duties by a censorship of public
printing, and of public speaking; having
also an inhuman taste for striking weak
and tottering officials over the head, and
burying such dead nonentities quickly out
of the public sight; I would gladly and
willingly, as I have said before, accept the
appointment of examiner of plays, from the
Prime Minister's hands, that I might lock
up the department, and put the key in my
pocket, writing outside the door those familiar
words, "Gone away: return uncertain."

MR. CHARLES DICKENS
WILL READ AT ST. MARTIN'S HALL:
On THURSDAY EVENING, JULY 22nd, at Eight (the
last reading in London), The STORY OF LITTLE DOMBEY.
The Reading will last two hours.
Stalls (numbered and reserved), Five Shillings; Area
and Galleries, Half-a-crown; Unreserved Seats, One
Shilling. Tickets to be had at Messrs. Chapman and
Hall's, Publishers, 193, Piccadilly; and at St. Martin's
Hall, Long Acre.
MR. DICKENS will also read at CLIFTON, on the 2nd of
August; at EXETER on the 3rd; at PLYMOUTH on the 4th
and 5th; at CLIFTON on the 6th; at WORCESTER on the
10th; at WOLVERHAMPTON on the 11th; at SHREWSBURY
on the 12th; and at CHESTER on the 13th of August.