gians, who supplied him when he was in want, followed by his vote in favor of starving the whole nation by blockade; his moving the address to the Prince Regent, in which he told him, that commerce, manufactures, and the revenue were flourishing, just at the moment when they were declining; his slurring over the twenty-seven petitions against the propertytax, and his own phocionic vote in favor of that tax; as well as numerous other fine actions, are adequately celebrated. We have, besides, the pleasure to find here the whole of Sir Thomas' speech on the leathertax, made after the gallery was cleared: the poet's eulogy, of which we shall afterwards extract parts, ends as follows:

O form'd to join with coalescing soul,

The double part of Wilberforce and Rolle !

Some malicious critic proposes to read "the double heart of Wilberforce;" but this we utterly reject.

Our author now, in a Pindarie rapture, sees the worthy candidates already in the House of Commons. In the following passage he has evidently Virgil in

his eye, 66 cum stabulis armenta ruunt ;" but the com

parison leaves his original far behind.

As when a torrent rolls with mighty force,
Flocks with their stables follow in its course;
Thus, when Cas. pours the bubble of his throat,
The headlong members with their places vote.

He then, with prudence, considers the possibility of his favourite being defeated, in which case he immediately creates a peerage, into which his hero retires. This is evidently a more noble resource than that of the cloud, into which Virgil puts Eneas when he is defeated in Troy. The title of the peerage too is highly appropriate; it is that of Baron Poll or Polle. He then cries,

Who shall e'er equal the illustrious Rolle,
Except the scarcely less illustrious Polle?

Again

And he who hates not thee, majestic Rolle.
Shall love the sinuosities of Polle.

Sinuosities-some persons take this word in a moral sense, but we believe, indeed we have been assured by the author, that it only alludes to the gesticulations of the worthy candidate on the hustings.. He ends this vision with a panorama view of the Castle Yard, and the inhabitants of Great Torring ton* coming up to vote.

These rolling poll, and those from polling roll

Oh polling Rolle! Oh rolling Polle! Oh Rolle! Oh Polle!" This is beyond all comment. We leave it to the admiration of our readers.

Having got into the Torrington booth, our poet does not leave it without describing a great man: whom he finds there.

There Rufus combats, with his head of oak,
In accents such as erst our ploughmen spoke
With terms unknown to rustic vomits flaws,
And by perverting law upholds the laws.
The mild-subsheriff fears to give offence,
And takes his nonsense for the county's sense.

Each of these lines contains a beauty. The head of oak is undoubtedly an improvement on Sir Thomas's heart of oak, and at the same time characteristic. "As erst our ploughman spoke," is just and discriminating; for no ploughman now-a-days t speaks with so low-bred an accent as the learned gentleman. Readers of taste will perceive the beauty of the other lines. Every one who is a friend to church and state must own, that it is only by per-verting and suspending the laws in detail that they e can be preserved in the gross

* Great Torrington has been mentioned above,

No. III.

With the account of the feats of Tommy Try-me, as he is called in Devon, in the House of Commons our author has interspersed some masterly sketches, of the present leading characters in parliament. Of our wonderful Foreign Secretary, he says,

Great Castlereagh! had I an iron tongue,
The pewter voice should be more fitly sung.
There is a curve, of which our Newton's treat,
Which ever nears a straight line-ne'er will meet:
Thus Cas.'s eloquence more wise than Pitt's,
But skirts a meaning which it never hits,

Vast, pow'rs of diction! which, more bright than Pitt's,
Pulls up a long oration with an "its."
Of such orations some faint trace is giv'n
To him who o'er a sandy road has driv'n.
As that is heavy, tiresome, long, and slow,
So long, so tiresome, Cas.'s periods flow:
So the material alike in each,

Light, loose, and barren, both of road and speech.
Shall I withhold a my praises? forbid it pelf;
I then should turn my back upon myself.

With what art does our author allude to the speeches of the Noble Lord himself-his secunda Philippica, which ended with the respectable word its; and his oration pro domo sua, in which he conjured the country gentlemen not 'to turn their backs upon themselves. But the best couplets of the whole are the first and last. The "iron tongue" is borrowed, from Virgil, ferrea vva: but the pewter voice," neither wholly lead, nor wholly tin, is original, and admiraly express the Noble Lord's elocution, composed of a draw!, a lisp, and a nasal twang. In the last couplet, forbill it pelf" is a most forcible expres sion. Another writer would have said, 'forbid it honor, or forbid it justice, but our author, with more truth, says, "forbid it pelf," alias pension, the legitimate object of all poetry.

3

We are happy to see that our poet does not agree with Lucretius, who describes an orator a la Castle reagh, as

Clarus ob obscuram linguam magis inter inanes
Quamde graves inter Graiós qui vera requirunt :
..... nam stolidi magis admirantur amantque
Inversis quae sub verbis latitantia cernant.

But Lucretius is indeed inferior to our author in every respect.

Rise then, my muse, and, mounting like a lark,
Say on what feature shall I first embark:
Stand off ye vulgar! let the drivelling nation-
Shew no impatience of a relaxation.

Of the slight pressure of a light taxation.

He goes on with his parliamentary portrait in due prcedency, and next describes Mr. Vansittart. Some of Mr. Canning's young friends are said to have remonstrated on the unfairness of this arrangement, seeing the great talents of their master; but our poet justified it by the example of the great Cas. himself, who always leaves Mr. Vansittart with the lead in the House of Commons when he is absent. He thus describes him in two lines, both physically and morally :

Pale without grief, and smiling without joy,

In jobbing old, simplicity a boy.

The last verse is copied from one of Pope, but much improved.

A learned friend, however, is not satisfied with it as it stands, and proposes to read the verse thus

In wit a child, but in finance a boy;

alluding to the famous American boy, whose skill in arithmetic exceeds even that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The following verses recal to the reader's recollection Mr. Vansittart's speeches on finance, at the beginning of the year 1816, when he was ingenious enough to prove, that taxation, which,

the ignorant supposed to be the cause of the distress then prevailing, was in fact the only remedy for it. For, said he, if every man was to find a guinea in his pocket, the country would not be at all the richer for it; but if a great sum was collected, i. e. a property-tax raised, and afterwards lent out to the landholders, agriculture would revive directly. To accomplish an object so desirable for the nation, he did not hesitate to break his faith..

So skilful hidden meanings to explore,

That his no longer means for two years more.

He, when sad Britain's cheeks were moist with grief,
Would if he could administer relief..

He thought a fortune lost were soon regain'd

By giving all the little that remain'd;

And prov'd, with arithmetic skill, that riches

Would grow the more that they were cut like ditches.

There are many other portraits in this work extremely flattering to the subjects of them, but we have no room for inserting them. One of Mr. Wy P -e, however, is so short, that we set

it down.

Three brothers in a western island sprung,
Have tun'd to praise each European tongue:
In council luminous the first surpass;
The next in action: but in nought the last
The power of nature could no farther go;
She robbed the third t' enrich the other two.

The portrait of Mr. Canning is the longest and most laboured of the whole. We find here set forth and justified by the whole of Mr. Canning's political life; how he began his career by writing a jacobin epigram; how he was advised to join Mr. Pitt and write the Anti-Jacobin, including the defence of his blasphemous parodies to run down the Whigs and uphold church and state; how he wrote satires on Lord Hawkesbury, Mr. Addington, and Mr. Pereeval, which now go for nothing, as the two former