Such a process of selection would be exceedingly hard on any paper or book handling very advanced ideas, and very backward ones, in a spirit of great freedom.

Nay, it would prove a severe trial to most works of real value, whose scope extended beyond the respectabilities.

Not to mention Byron's caustic remarks on the peculiar expurgation of Martial in Don Juan's edition, it is obvious that the Bible and Shakespeare could both be proved obscene by this process; and setting aside ancient literature altogether, half our own classics, before the age of Wordsworth and Scott, would come under the same condemnation.

I know I am intruding among my betters; but I do not claim equality with them; I merely ask the same liberal judgment.

A man is no more to be judged by a few casual sentences from his pen, without any reference to all the rest, than he is to be judged by a few casual expressions he may let fall in a year's conversation.
Curiously, in all those twenty-eight folios of blasphemy, only three sentences were from my own pen, and two of them were extracted from long articles.