On that occasion a letter was addressed to a gentleman of the town, in return for a present of some delicacies, so
full of wit and humour that the Editor, having been favoured with a copy, is induced to insert it.
“Your very obliging present made its appearance this day, together with your note of the 2d. instant; pray, accept my best thanks for the same, the quality of which will, I have no doubt, on trial fully justify the favourable impression already made by their fragrance.
“Under the melancholy circumstances of affliction in which your town must be plunged by the announcement of the intended spoliation of a moiety of its electoral privileges, it is most pleasing to recognise a disposition in the leading citizens to impart of their good things to others; and although I should at all times have been much delighted by any mark of your friendly remembrance, yet it is doubly gratifying at a period like the present, when public embarrassments might naturally be supposed to absorb every other feeling, and to leave little room for indulging a spirit of individual philanthropy.
“Allow me, however, to express the hope, that as, when Hercules broke off the horn of the river god Achelous, it became the medium through which the golden gifts of the Genius of Plenty were showered down, so the ancient and patriotic borough of Helston, although shorn of a part of its long-enjoyed honours, and mutilated as to one of its protectors, may still flourish with a cornucopia of abundance and of prosperity.
2671. (φυε, φυε, οττοτοι, παπαι, αι, αι) 2671.
“quoth the Population Return for 1821.
“For which slight numerical deficiency, and for no earthly offence imputable to the inhabitants, save that of a practical application of the principle ‘non numero, sed honore valemus,’ the long-standing privileges of loyal men are scandalously invaded, and a body of independent electors declared incapable of exercising more than one half of their prescriptive rights.
“I seem to hear an indignant voter of Helston exclaim, ‘Why this measure of penal severity, accompanied at the same time with an apparent mitigation and leniency?’ Political annihilation had been a milder doom; extermination from the lists of suspected corruption had been far better than thus to suffer mutilation from the pruning knife of reform, beneath the wound inflicted by which the gangrene of dissatisfaction will still lurk and fester for ever.
——Mene Iliacis occumbere campis