of those very sinners whom the Barrister’s fancy thus convokes.  O shallow man! not to see that here lies the main strength of the cause he is attacking; that, to repeat my former illustration, he draws the attention to patients in that worst state of disease which perhaps alone requires and justifies the use of the white pill, as a mode of exposing the frantic quack who vends it promiscuously!  He fixes on the empiric’s cures to prove his murders!—­not to forget what ought to conclude every paragraph in answer to the Barrister’s Hints; “and were the case as alleged, what does this prove against the present Methodists as Methodists?” Is not the tenet of imputed righteousness the faith of all the Scotch Clergy, who are not false to their declarations at their public assumption of the ministry?  Till within the last sixty or seventy years, was not the tenet preached Sunday after Sunday in every nook of Scotland; and has the Barrister heard that the morals of the Scotch peasants and artizans have been improved within the last thirty or forty years, since the exceptions have become more and more common?—­Was it by want of strict morals that the Puritans were distinguished to their disadvantage from the rest of Englishmen during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I. Charles I. and II.?  And that very period, which the Barrister affirms to have been distinguished by the moral vigor of the great mass of Britons,—­was it not likewise the period when this very doctrine was preached by the Clergy fifty times for once that it is heard from the same pulpits in the present and preceding generation?  Never, never can the Methodists be successfully assailed, if not honestly, and never honestly or with any chance of success, except as Methodists;—­for their practices, their alarming theocracy, their stupid, mad, and mad-driving superstitions.  These are their property ‘in peculio’; their doctrines are those of the Church of England, with no other difference than that in the Church Liturgy, and Articles, and Homilies, Calvinism and Lutheranism are joined like the two hands of the Union Fire Office:-the Methodists have unclasped them, and one is Whitfield and the other Wesley.

Ib. p. 75.

“For the same reason that a book written in bad language should never be put into the hands of a child that speaks correctly, a book exhibiting instances of vice should never be given to a child that thinks and acts properly.” (Practical Education.  By Maria and R.L.  Edgeworth.)

How mortifying that one is never lucky enough to meet with any of these ‘virtuosissimos’, fifteen or twenty years of age.  But perhaps they are such rare jewels, that they are always kept in cotton!  The Kilcrops!  I would not exchange the heart, which I myself had when a boy, while reading the life of Colonel Jack, or the Newgate Calendar, for a waggon-load of these brilliants.

Ib. p. 78.