Whenever we cannot abuse their measures, we always fall foul on their health.

Does the king pass any popular law, we immediately insinuate that his constitution is on its last legs.

Does the minister act like a man of sense, we instantly observe, with great regret, that his complexion is remarkably pale.

There is one manifest advantage in diseasinq people, instead of absolutely destroying them: the public may flatly contradict us in one case, but it never can in the other; it is easy to prove that a man is alive, but utterly impossible to prove that he is in health.

What if some opposing newspaper take up the cudgels in his behalf, and assert that the victim of all Pandora's complaints, whom we send tottering to the grave, passes one half the day in knocking up a 'distinguished company' at a shooting-party, and the other half in outdoing the same 'distinguished company' after dinner?
What if the afflicted individual himself write us word that he never was better in his life?
We have only mysteriously to shake our heads and observe that to contradict is not to prove, that it is little likely that our authority should have been mistaken, and (we are very fond of an historical comparison), beg our readers to remember that when Cardinal Richelieu was dying, nothing enraged him so much as hinting that he was ill.