'SIR,--The present age has been distinguished from every former period of English history by the number of those writers who have suffered the penalties of the law for the freedom and spirit with which they descanted on the morals of the age, and chastised the vices or ridiculed the follies of individuals of every rank of life, and among every description of society. In former periods of British civilization, as during the flourishing ages of Greece and Rome, the oratorical censor, and the satirical poet, were regarded as exercising only that just pre-eminence to which superior genius and an intimate knowledge of life and human nature were conceived to entitle them. The _MacFlecknoe_ of Dryden, the _Dunciad_ and the satirical imitations of Pope, remained secure from molestation by the Attorney-General; the literary castigators of a Bolingbroke and a Wharton enjoyed the triumph of truth and justice unawed by _ex-officios_; and Addison could describe a coward and a liar without being called to account for his inuendos by the interference of the judicial servants of the king. But times are altered, and a man may now be sent to prison for a couple of years, and ruined perhaps for life, because he calls a spade a spade, and tells a public individual the very truths that are obvious to the most partial of his friends.' So fine a judge of 'Shelleyan flavour' as Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy ought surely to have observed how greatly this piece of writing differs in style and quality from the prose of Shelley's novels, his Oxonian letters to Stockdale and Hogg, his Irish addresses, and all his prose writings of the same period. Instead of discovering the difference, however, our nice _connoisseur_ of 'Shelleyan flavour,' and the historic probabilities, exclaims in a rapturous note to the last sentence of the quotation:-- 'This passage proves almost conclusively that the person addressed as "Editor of the _Statesman_" must have been Mr. Finnerty. The public individual of whom he published those obvious truths that were pronounced a libel by Lord Ellenborough was Lord Castlereagh. The former editor of the _Statesman_, Mr. Lovell, was suffering imprisonment for a different offence.'