In a word, to conclude this part of the subject, the writer of _The Times_ is governed entirely by his will; and this faculty is strong, and bears sway in him, as all other principles are weak. He asserts a fact the louder, as he suspects it to be without proof: and defends a measure the more lustily, as he feels it to be mischievous. He listens only to his passions and his prejudices, not to truth or reason. Prove to him that any thing is the most idle fiction that ever was invented, and he will swear to it: prove to him that it is fraught with destruction to the liberties of mankind in all places and in all time to come, and he is your own for ever. _Sed hæc hactenus._ Goethe has given to one of his heroes this motto—‘Mad but wise.’ We would give the following to the hero of _The Times_—Mad but not wise. ILLUSTRATIONS OF ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS —— —— ——‘Facilis descensus Averni; Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis; Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, Hoc opus, hic labor est.’ _December 22, 1816._ The meaning of which passage is, that it is easier to sail with the stream, than to strive against it. Our classical reformers should have known this passage in Virgil. They should have known themselves too; but they did not. ‘Let no man go about to cozen honesty,’ or to be a knave by halves. The man, as well as the woman, who deliberates between his principle and the price of its sacrifice, is lost. The same rule holds with respect to literary as to any other kind of prostitution. It is the first false step that always costs the most; and which is, for that reason, always fatal. It requires an effort of resolution, or at least obstinate prejudice, for a man to maintain his opinions at the expense of his interest. But it requires a much greater effort of resolution for a man to give up his interest to recover his independence; because, with the consistency of his character, he has lost the habitual energy of his mind, and the indirect aid of prejudice and obstinacy, which are sometimes as useful to virtue as they are to vice. A man, in adhering to his principles in contradiction to the decisions of the world, has many disadvantages. He has nothing to support him but the supposed sense of right; and any defect in the justice of his cause, or the force of his conviction, must prey on his mind, in proportion to the delicacy and sensitiveness of its texture: he is left alone in his opinions; and, like _Sam Sharpset_, in Mr. Morton’s new comedy (when he gets into solitary confinement in the spunging-house,) grows nervous, melancholy, fantastical, and would be glad of _somebody_ or _anybody_ to sympathize with him; but when he has once gone over to the strong side of the question (perhaps from these very scruples of conscience, suggested by