a double crime, and excites a double portion of spleen in the Editor, when female writers are not advocates of passive obedience and non-resistance.  This Journal, then, is a depository for every species of political sophistry and personal calumny.  There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication.  There we meet the slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power.  Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is pursued are odious.  The intention is to poison the sources of public opinion and of individual fame—­to pervert literature, from being the natural ally of freedom and humanity, into an engine of priestcraft and despotism, and to undermine the spirit of the English Constitution and the independence of the English character.  The Editor and his friends systematically explode every principle of liberty, laugh patriotism and public spirit to scorn, resent every pretence to integrity as a piece of singularity or insolence, and strike at the root of all free inquiry or discussion, by running down every writer as a vile scribbler and a bad member of society, who is not a hireling and a slave.  No means are stuck at in accomplishing this laudable end.  Strong in patronage, they trample on truth, justice, and decency.  They claim the privilege of court-favourites.  They keep as little faith with the public, as with their opponents.  No statement in the Quarterly Review is to be trusted:  there is no fact that is not misrepresented in it, no quotation that is not garbled, no character that is not slandered, if it can answer the purposes of a party to do so.  The weight of power, of wealth, of rank is thrown into the scale, gives its impulse to the machine; and the whole is under the guidance of Mr. Gifford’s instinctive genius—­of the inborn hatred of servility for independence, of dulness for talent, of cunning and impudence for truth and honesty.  It costs him no effort to execute his disreputable task—­in being the tool of a crooked policy, he but labours in his natural vocation.  He patches up a rotten system as he would supply the chasms in a worm-eaten manuscript, from a grovelling incapacity to do any thing better; thinks that if a single iota in the claims of prerogative and power were lost, the whole fabric of society would fall upon his head and crush him; and calculates that his best chance for literary reputation is by black-balling one half of the competitors as Jacobins and levellers, and securing the suffrages of the other half in his favour as a loyal subject and trusty partisan!