. The parodies by Addison and Luther were contributed by
a Tory lawyer, who was afterwards a judge.

Hone had published, in 1817, tracts of purely political ridicule: _Official
Account of the Noble Lord's Bite,_[415] _Trial of the Dog for Biting the
Noble Lord_, etc. These were not touched. After the trials, it is manifest
that Hone was {186} to be unassailed, do what he might. _The Political
House that Jack built_, in 1819; _The Man in the Moon_, 1820; _The Queen's
Matrimonial Ladder_, _Non mi ricordo_, _The R--l Fowls_, 1820; _The
Political Showman at Home_, with plates by G. Cruickshank,[416] 1821 [he
did all the plates]; _The Spirit of Despotism_, 1821--would have been
legitimate marks for prosecution in previous years. The biting caricature
of several of these works are remembered to this day. _The Spirit of
Despotism_ was a tract of 1795, of which a few copies had been privately
circulated with great secrecy. Hone reprinted it, and prefixed the
following address to "Robert Stewart, _alias_ Lord Castlereagh"[417]: "It
appears to me that if, unhappily, your counsels are allowed much longer to
prevail in the Brunswick Cabinet, they will bring on a crisis, in which the
king may be dethroned or the people enslaved. Experience has shown that the
people will not be enslaved--the alternative is the affair of your
employers." Hone might say this without notice.

In 1819 Mr. Murray[418] published Lord Byron's _Don Juan_,[419] and Hone
followed it with _Don John, or Don Juan Unmasked_, a little account of what
the publisher to the Admiralty was allowed to issue without prosecution.
The parody on the Commandments was a case very much in point: and Hone
makes a stinging allusion to the use of the "_unutterable Name_, with a
profane levity unsurpassed by {187} any other two lines in the English
language." The lines are

"'Tis strange--the Hebrew noun which means 'I am,'
The English always use to govern d----n."

Hone ends with: "Lord Byron's dedication of 'Don Juan' to Lord Castlereagh
was suppressed by Mr. Murray from delicacy to Ministers. Q. Why did not Mr.
Murray suppress Lord Byron's _parody_ on the Ten Commandments? _A._ Because
it contains nothing in ridicule of Ministers, and therefore nothing that
_they_ could suppose would lead to the displeasure of Almighty God."

The little matters on which I have dwelt will never appear in history from
their political importance, except in a few words of result. As a mode of