Montesinos.—­Ephemeral it truly may be called; it is now looked for by the public as regularly as their food; and, like food, it affects the recipient surely and permanently, even when its effect is slow, according as it is wholesome or noxious.  But how great is the difference between the current literature of this and of any former time!

Sir Thomas More.—­From that complacent tone it may be presumed that you see in it proof both of moral and intellectual improvement.  Montesinos, I must disturb that comfortable opinion, and call upon you to examine how much of this refinement which passes for improvement is superficial.  True it is that controversy is carried on with more decency than it was by Martin Lutherand a certain Lord Chancellor, to whom you just now alluded; but if more courtesy is to be found in polemical writers, who are less sincere than either the one or the other, there is as much acerbity of feeling and as much bitterness of heart.  You have a class of miscreants which had no existence in those days—­the panders of the press, who live by administering to the vilest passions of the people, and encouraging their most dangerous errors, practising upon their ignorance, and inculcating whatever is most pernicious in principle and most dangerous to society.  This is their golden age; for though such men would in any age have taken to some villainy or other, never could they have found a course at once so gainful and so safe.  Long impunity has taught them to despise the laws which they defy, and the institutions which they are labouring to subvert; any further responsibility enters not into their creed, if that may be called a creed, in which all the articles are negative.  I? we turn from politics to what should be humaner literature, and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed the press, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetent assume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions; for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, or hypocritical, quo quis impudentior eo doctior habetur.

Montesinos.—­The pleasure which men take in acting maliciously is properly called by Barrow a rascally delight.  But this is no new form of malice.  “Avant nous,” says the sagacious but iron-hearted Montluc—­“avant nous ces envies ont regne, et regneront encore apres nous, si Dieu ne nous voulait tous refondre.”  Its worst effect is that which Ben Jonson remarked:  “The gentle reader,” says he, “rests happy to hear the worthiest works misrepresented, the clearest actions obscured, the innocentest life traduced; and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of slanders, how can there be matter wanting to his laughter?  Hence comes the epidemical infection:  for how can they escape the contagion of the writings whom the virulency of the calumnies hath not staved off from reading?”