As it is now the universally-admitted, and indeed
pretty-generally-suspected aim of Mr. Whitbread and the infamous,
bloodthirsty, and, in fact, illiberal faction to which he belongs, to
burn to the ground this free and happy Protestant city, and establish
himself in St. James's Palace, his fellow committee-men have thought
it their duty to watch the principles of a theatre built under his
auspices. The information they have received from undoubted authority,
particularly from an old fruit-woman who had turned king's evidence, and
whose name for obvious reasons we forbear to mention, though we have had
it some weeks in our possession, has induced them to introduce various
reforms: not such reforms as the vile faction clamour for, meaning
thereby revolution, but such reforms as are necessary to preserve the
glorious constitution of the only free, happy, and prosperous country
now left upon the face of the earth. From the valuable and authentic
source above alluded to, we have learnt that a sanguinary plot has
been formed by some united Irishmen, combined with a gang of Luddites,
and a special committee sent over by the Pope at the instigation of
the beastly Corsican fiend, for destroying all the loyal part of
the audience on the anniversary of that deeply-to-be-abhorred and
highly-to-be-blamed stratagem, the gunpowder plot, which falls this year
on Thursday, the 5th of November. The whole is under the direction of
a delegated committee of O.P.'s, whose treasonable exploits at Covent
Garden you all recollect, and all of whom would have been hung from the
chandeliers at that time but for the mistaken lenity of government.
At a given signal a well-known O.P. was to cry out from the gallery,
"Nosey! Music!" whereupon all the O.P.'s were to produce from their
inside pockets a long pair of shears, edged with felt to prevent their
making any noise, manufactured expressly by a wretch at Birmingham,
one of Mr. Brougham's evidences, and now in custody. With these they
were to cut off the heads of all the loyal N.P.'s in the house, without
distinction of sex or age. At the signal, similarly given, of "Throw
him over," which it now appears always alluded to the overthrow of our
never-sufficiently-enough-to-be-deeply-and-universally-to-be-venerated
constitution, all the heads of the N.P.'s were to be thrown at the
fiddlers, to prevent their appearing in evidence, or perhaps as a false
and illiberal insinuation that they have no heads of their own. All that
we know of the further designs of these incendiaries is, that they are
by-a-great-deal-too-much too-horrible-to-be-mentioned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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