your Copyright Bill) forbid all Thomas Teggs and other extraneous persons, entirely unconcerned in this adventure of his, to steal from him his small winnings, for a space of sixty years at shortest. After sixty years, unless your Honourable House provide otherwise, they may begin to steal.

And your petitioner will ever pray.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

ON THE SINKING OF THE VENGEUR1

[1839]

TO OLIVER YORKE, ESQ.

DEAR YORKE, Shall we now overhaul that story of the Sinking of the Vengeur a little; and let a discerning public judge of the same? I will endeavour to begin at the beginning, and not to end till I have got to some conclusion. As many readers are probably in the dark, and young persons may not have so much as heard of the Vengeur, we had perhaps better take-up the matter ab ovo, and study to carry uninstructed mankind comfortably along with us ad mala.

I find, therefore, worthy Yorke, in searching through old files of newspapers, and other musty articles, as I have been obliged to do, that on the evening of the 10th of June 1794, a brilliant audience was, as often happens, assembled at the Opera House here in London. Radiance of various kinds, and melody of fiddlestrings and windpipes, cartilaginous or metallic, was filling all the place, when an unknown individual entered with a wet Newspaper in his pocket, and tidings that Lord Howe and the English fleet had come-up with Villaret-Joyeuse and the French, off the coast of Brest, and gained a signal victory over him.2 The agitation spread from bench to bench, from box to box; so that the wet Newspaper had finally to be read from the stage, and all the musical instruments, human and other, had to strike-up Rule Britannia, the brilliant audience all standing, and such of them as had talent joining in chorus,- before the usual