Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/395

EDWARD MOXON. 355 charge of blasphemy. Mr. Serjeant Talfourd was engaged for the defence. " I am called," he com- menced, " from the bar in which I usually practise, to defend from the odious charge of blasphemy one with whom I have been acquainted for many years one whom I have always believed incapable of wilful offence towards God or towards man one who was introduced to me in early days, by the dearest of my friends who has gone before by Charles Lamb to whom the wife of the defendant was an adopted daughter." After a magnificent oration in which he asked, with a fitting indignation, "if the publisher of any penny blasphemy is to have the right of pre- scribing to us legally that such and such pages are to be torn from the treasured volumes of our choicest literature," he left in the hands of the jury "the cause of genius the cause of learning the cause of history the cause of thought," and concluded by a tribute to Moxon's character " beginning his career under the auspices of Rogers, the eldest of a great age of poets, and blessed with the continued support of that excellent person, who never broke by one un- worthy line the charm of moral grace which pervades his works, he has been associated with Lamb, whose kindness ennobled all sects, all parties, all classes, and whose genius shed new and pleasant lights on daily life ; with Southey, the pure and childlike in heart ; with Coleridge, in the light of whose Christian philosophy the indicted poems would assume their true character, as mournful, yet salutary, specimens of powers developed imperfectly in this world ; and with Wordsworth, whose works, so long neglected and scorned, but so long silently nurturing tastes for the lofty and the pure, it has been Mr. Moxon's privilege