Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/387

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criticism as happy as it is just: but it will be evident to the readers of the Fudge Family, that the soul of "a certain little gentleman" is not attracted with the same lively or kindly symptoms to the Bourbons, or to their benefactors and restorers "under Providence!" The title of this delightful little collection of sweets and bitters, of honey and gall, is, we suppose, an allusion to the short ejaculation which honest Burchell, in the "Vicar of Wakefield," uttered at the end of every sentence, in the conversation of Miss Amelia Carolina Wilhelmina Skeggs and her friend, on the Court and Fashionables; and which word, "Fudge," our malicious Editor thinks equally applicable to the cant upon the same subjects at the present day,—to the fade politesse of the ancient regime,—to "the damnable face-making" of Holy Alliances, and "the flocci-nauci-pili-nihili-fication" of Legitimacy. He may be wrong in this; but if so, we are most assuredly in the wrong with him: and we confess, it gives us as much pleasure to agree with this writer, as it does to differ with some others that we could mention, but that they are not worth mentioning.—The Correspondents of the Fudge Family in Paris are much of the same stamp (with one exception) as the Correspondents of Dr. S———, in his work of that name, which was lately put a stop to by that sort of censorship of the press which is exercised by the reading public; only the Correspondents in the present volume have a very different Editor from him of "The Day and New Times," or, as it is at present called, The New Times alone, the Day having been left out as an anomaly, "ut lucus a non lucendo:" for the readers of that paper roll their eyes in vain, and "find no dawn; but, in its stead, total eclipse and ever-during dark surrounds them."—But to return from "the professional gentleman," as he calls himself, his scavenger's bell, his mud-cart of liberal phraseologies, and go-cart of slavery and superstition, to something as different as genius from dulness, as wit from malice, as sense from moon-struck madness, as independence from servility, as the belles-lettres from law-stationery, as Parnassus from Grub--