It has been alleged that Mr. Colman was unnecessarily rigid in his exclusion of oaths and profane sayings from the dramatic works submitted to his inspection; and the gist of the arguments against him touching this rigour went to show that he ought not to expunge such expressions as examiner, because he had used such expressions himself as an author. This reasoning is absurd, the conclusion inconsequential. When Mr. Colman wrote plays, he was not bound by oath to regulate their language by any fixed standard; and, as all other dramatists of the day had done, in a dialogue or depicting a character he used in some--perhaps all his dramas--occasional expletives. But Mr. Colman's plays then had to be submitted to an examiner, who, conscientiously, did his duty; and, from the high moral character of the late licenser, there can be little lesson for doubting that _he_, like his successor, drew his pen across any expression which he might have considered objectionable; but no one ever complained of this, because Mr. Larpent had never written a play, or used an oath in its dialogues. When Mr. Colman assumed the legal and necessary power of correction, he had but one course to pursue: he was sworn to perform a certain duty assigned to him to the best of his judgment, and to correct any expressions which he might consider injurious to the state or to morality. What had _he_ to do, as licenser, with what he had himself done as author? The _tu quoque_ principle in this use is even more than usually absurd; it is as if a schoolmaster were to be prevented from flogging a boy for breaking windows, because, when he was a boy, he had broken windows himself. As we have already stated that it is not our intention to make these few pages a piece of biography, we shall leave to some better qualified person to give the more minute details of Mr. Colman's life. The following lines, written by himself, now many years since, and when he himself was under fifty, give as good an epitome of his career up to that period as fifty pages of matter-of-fact; and from that time until the occurrence of the sad event to which the last stanza, so pathetically--as it _now_ reads--refers, he lived on in happiness and comfort. A RECKONING WITH TIME. I. Come on, old Time!--Nay, that is stuff; Gaffer! thou comest fast enough; Wing'd foe to feather'd Cupid!-- But tell me, Sand-man, ere thy grains Have multiplied upon my brains, So thick to make me stupid;-- II. Tell me, Death's journeyman!--But no! Hear thou my speech: I will not grow Irreverent while I try it; For, though I mock thy flight, 'tis said The forelock fills me with such dread, I never take thee by it.