Note 46 — TABLE TALK; OR, ORIGINAL ESSAYS ON MEN AND MANNERS (continued 5)

To give the modern reader un petit aperçu of the tone of literary conversation about five or six and twenty years ago, I remember being present in a large party composed of men, women, and children, in which two persons of remarkable candour and ingenuity were labouring (as hard as if they had been paid for it) to prove that all prayer was a mode of dictating to the Almighty, and an arrogant assumption of superiority. A gentleman present said, with great simplicity and naïveté, that there was one prayer which did not strike him as coming exactly under this description, and being asked what that was, made answer, ‘The Samaritan’s—“Lord, be merciful to me a sinner!”’ This appeal by no means settled the sceptical dogmatism of the two disputants, and soon after the proposer of the objection went away; on which one of them observed with great marks of satisfaction and triumph.—‘I am afraid we have shocked that gentleman’s prejudices.’ This did not appear to me at that time quite the thing, and this happened in the year 1794. Twice has the iron entered my soul. Twice have the dastard, vaunting, venal crew gone over it; once as they went forth, conquering and to conquer, with reason by their side, glittering like a faulchion, trampling on prejudices and marching fearlessly on in the work of regeneration; once again, when they returned with retrograde steps, like Cacus’s oxen dragged backward by the heels, to the den of Legitimacy, ‘rout on rout, confusion worse confounded,’ with places and pensions and the Quarterly Review dangling from their pockets, and shouting ‘Deliverance for mankind,’ for ‘the worst, the second fall of man.’ Yet I have endured all this marching and countermarching of poets, philosophers, and politicians over my head as well as I could, like ‘the camomoil that thrives, the more ’tis trod upon.’ By Heavens, I think, I’ll endure it no longer!