It cannot be forgotten that when Lord Spoonbill paid his last recorded visit to his epicurean friend Erpingham, the interview between the two worthies was interrupted, or to all appearance shortened, by the intrusion of Zephaniah Pringle. Nor can it be forgotten that Zephaniah the critic was most grievously offended and mortified by the cavalier manner in which he was treated by Lord Spoonbill. It is a sad thing that lords will be so rude to critics; but they will, and there is no help for it; and even if a bill were brought into Parliament to correct the evil, we have our doubts whether it would pass the House of Lords, that hospital of incurables. Zephaniah, we have said, was very angry, and very justly was he so. Who would not be angry to be treated with disrespect by a lord? For, in proportion to the honor and praise and glory redounding from being able to quote and repeat a lord’s condescending sayings, must be the mortification to recollect that a lord has treated us with contempt. Now Zephaniah, after the insolence which he had experienced at the hands, or more properly speaking at the eyes, of Lord Spoonbill, for his lordship merely stared at him, went home in high dudgeon and took up his pen and wrote a most violent philippic against the Whigs, and especially against Whig lords; and he fully intended to print this paper in his own periodical, which we shall not name, seeing that we hold it to be a sin to advertise Tory books. And Zephaniah would certainly have printed his violent and eloquent philippic, had he not seen that those same animals were much more scandalously vituperated in another periodical from the north. Thus it came to pass that poor Zephaniah was doubly distressed. He was mortified that he had been cut by a lord, and he was more miserably mortified still to find that his venom and malignity were exceeded by what he had the impudence to call a rival publication; a rival, forsooth! One is no more a rival of the other than the d---- is a rival of one of his own imps. We cannot help observing by the way, as mere lovers of justice, how cruel it is to abuse and calumniate the Whigs. We simply ask, what have they done? If they had done any mischief, they might have been abused by the good; and if they had done any good, they might have been abused by the wicked. But what have they done? They have stood in the middle of the political see-saw; they have lightened the darkness and clouded the daylight. But we hate politics.