een confided, that the having borne its colours
only for a month would be sufficient to exclude any man, whatever his
talents, his learning, or his courage may be, from the slightest chance
of being permitted to serve his country either for fee or without. A
fellow who unites in himself the bankrupt trader, the broken author, or
rather book-maker, and the laughed-down single speech spouter of the
House of Commons, may look forward, always supposing that at one time he
has been a foaming radical, to the government of an important colony. Ay,
an ancient fox who has lost his tail may, provided he has a score of
radical friends, who will swear that he can bark Chinese, though Chinese
is not barked but sung, be forced upon a Chinese colony, though it is
well known that to have lost one's tail is considered by the Chinese in
general as an irreparable infamy, whilst to have been once connected with
a certain society, to which, to its honour be it said, all the radical
party are vehemently hostile, would be quite sufficient to keep any one
not only from a government, but something much less, even though he could
translate the rhymed "Sessions of Hariri," and were versed, still
retaining his tail, in the two languages in which Kien-Loung wrote his
Eulogium on Moukden, that piece which, translated by Amyot, the learned
Jesuit, won the applause of the celebrated Voltaire.

No! were the author influenced by hopes of fee or reward, he would,
instead of writing against Popery, write for it; all the trumpery
titled--he will not call them great again--would then be for him, and
their masters the radicals, with their hosts of newspapers, would be for
him, more especially if he would commence maligning the society whose
colours he had once on his hat--a society which, as the priest says in
the text, is one of the very few Protestant institutions for which the
Popish Church entertains any fear, and consequently respect, as it
respects nothing which it does not fear. The writer said that certain
"rulers" would never forgive him for having been connected with that
society; he went perhaps too far in saying "never." It is probable that
they would take him into favour on one condition, which is, that he
should turn his pen and his voice against that society; such a mark "of a
better way of thinking" would perhaps induce them to give him a
government, nearly as good as that which they gave to a certain ancient
radical fox at the intercessio