that is not slandered, if it can answer the purposes of a party to do
so. The weight of power, of wealth, of rank is thrown into the scale,
gives its impulse to the machine; and the whole is under the guidance of
Mr. Gifford's instinctive genius--of the inborn hatred of servility for
independence, of dulness for talent, of cunning and impudence for truth
and honesty. It costs him no effort to execute his disreputable task--in
being the tool of a crooked policy, he but labours in his natural
vocation. He patches up a rotten system as he would supply the chasms in
a worm-eaten manuscript, from a grovelling incapacity to do any thing
better; thinks that if a single iota in the claims of prerogative and
power were lost, the whole fabric of society would fall upon his
head and crush him; and calculates that his best chance for literary
reputation is by _black-balling_ one half of the competitors as
Jacobins and levellers, and securing the suffrages of the other half in
his favour as a loyal subject and trusty partisan!

Mr. Gifford, as a satirist, is violent and abrupt. He takes obvious or
physical defects, and dwells upon them with much labour and harshness of
invective, but with very little wit or spirit. He expresses a great deal
of anger and contempt, but you cannot tell very well why--except that he
seems to be sore and out of humour. His satire is mere peevishness and
spleen, or something worse--personal antipathy and rancour. We are in
quite as much pain for the writer, as for the object of his resentment.
His address to Peter Pindar is laughable from its outrageousness. He
denounces him as a wretch hateful to God and man, for some of the most
harmless and amusing trifles that ever were written--and the very good-
humour and pleasantry of which, we suspect, constituted their offence in
the eyes of this Drawcansir.--His attacks on Mrs. Robinson were unmanly,
and even those on Mr. Merry and the Della-Cruscan School were much
more ferocious than the occasion warranted. A little affectation and
quaintness of style did not merit such severity of castigation.[C] As a
translator, Mr. Gifford's version of the Roman satirist is the baldest,
and, in parts, the most offensive of all others. We do not know why
he attempted it, unless he had got it in his head that he should thus
follow in the steps of Dryden, as he had already done in those of Pope
in the Baviad and Maeviad. As an editor of old authors, Mr. Gifford is
entitled to