before this publication, fully aware of the men-was about the reading of a line in success with which he had cultivated in Horace. Walpole had concluded a his youth, and has improved in his age, brave vindication of himself and his an exquisite taste in classical and Eng- quarter-of-a-century of administration by lish versification, and how high it might professing,-have been his lot -inter amabiles Vatum ponere se choros'- if he had not been called to the graver duties of the Senate and the Cabinet 'Lost, lost too soon, in yonder House or Hall-- There Talbot sank, and was a wit no more! Nil conscire sibi, nulli pallescere culpæ :' 'Nullâ pallescere culpâ,' interrupted Pulteney; and while the House was dividing on the fate of the minister, a bet of a guinea was to decide the grammatical controversy. Hardinge, the clerk of the House-a superior man of business, though a scholar--decided for Pulteney, who, when Walpole good-humouredly threw him the guinea, held it up, and exclaimed that it was the first public money he had touched for a long time,* and should be the last.' been We hear and read every day grievous lamentations of the utter inadequacyparticularly for the business of the worldof the system of education pursued in the all-accomplished Chesterfield, who deWe need hardly remind our readers of our great schools; much virtuous indignation against longs and shorts; and a as Bolingbroke himself, and who in after serves that designation at least as well deal of nonsense prose against the futility life ridiculed his own early pedantry, as of nonsense verses. We are not now going he called it, without considering how to enter into the details of that question; but much he might have owed to it. Their the occasion obliges us to say that, if the bold and able contemporary, Lord Grantree is to be judged by its fruits-a ville, was a first-rate classical scholar-a test which is peculiarly applicable to schools-Eton, Westminster, Winches- patron of learning—who, if he had not ter, and Harrow-with all their enormi- be patronised. The great Lord Chata patron, would have deserved to ties of hexameters and pentameters, chori ham has left us specimens of Latin and ambics, and hypercatalectics-have turned English verse; Lord North was an eleout such men-in all the walks of life-gant scholar; Lord Grenville a profound as no strictly utilitarian seminary has one. Mr. Fox was a contributor to the ever equalled, or we believe ever will. Musa Etonenses, and understood DemosLet us take, for instance, that class of thenes even better than he imitated him, men to which Lord Wellesley belongs. What affairs of life can have less relation to dactyls and spondees than the duties of a practical statesman and the complex arts of governing mankind?-yet our greatest political leaders have ranked and in his retirement beat Gilbert Wakefield at his own weapons, in criticism and philology. Mr. Pitt was, in the opinion of an eminent Greek scholar, 'the best Greek scholar that he had ever conversed with;' and we suspect that Mr. amongst our best scholars. To go no Fox would have found him as powerful farther back than Mr. Pulteney-who is suggested to us by Pope's testimony- an antagonist on a text of the Philipwe know that he and his great antago know not that any of his juvenile exerpics, as on the Regency question. We nist, Sir Robert Walpole, two as practicises have been preserved; but he concal men of the world as the world ever produced, were both scholars-Sir Robert a distinguished Etonian--Pulteney a Westminster-and so eminent that, on his removal to Christ Church, he was selected to pronounce the oration to Queen Anne on her visit to the university. At the close of twenty years of political struggle, in which they exhibited such an admirable variety and extent of practical knowledge, the last personal contest between the two great rivals-in the very crisis of their fate as public *The great-grandfather of Sir Henry Hardinge. *He had been in office in the reign of George I. # Swift records with his peculiar humour, the scholarship of Lord Granville-"His Excellency, the present Lord Lieutenant, was educated in the University of Oxford, [Christ Church College, to which he removed from Westminster,] from whence, with a singularity scarce to be justified, he carried away more Greck, Latin, and philoso. phy, than properly became a man of his rank; indeed, much more of each than most of those who are forced to live by their learning, will be at the unnecessary pains to load their heads with."-Vin. dic. of Lord Cartaret, Swift's Works, vii. 476. tributed, we have reason to believe, some [tion may contribute to the result we have of the cleverest papers, both prose and indicated, is a matter of curious speculaverse, serious and comic, in the Anti- tion. Does it operate at all? May not jacobin.' One unpublished specimen of the simple fact be that clever men, who his poetical taste we can vouch for. Strolling one day with a friend in the walks of Holwood, his companion happened to quote that noble stanza of one of the noblest odes of Horace (II. ii.) : ་ 'Virtus recludens immeritis mori Cœlum, negatà tentat iter viâ, Cætusque vulgares et udam Spernit humum fugiente penna :' of which Mr. Pitt immediately extemporised this spirited paraphrase: 'On wing sublime, through trackless paths she soars; And spurning vulgar haunts and earthly shores, do every thing well, will also make the best verses? That is the easiest solution, and true no doubt to a great degree; but not, we think, altogether. The nicer and more critical study of the ancient languages must at least produce the good effect of familiarising the young mind with examples of the purest taste -the most generous sentiments-the noblest achievements. It may also act beneficially by exercising the memory and ingenuity in matters, minute yet not trivial-just weighty enough to steady without overloading the youthful intellect and may there not be something in the habit of judicious selection, nice adaptation, and careful construction esNeed we mention Windham, Canningsential to classical versification, which Peel, Lord Grey, Lord Holland, Lord operates, as the rudiments of the exact Stanley, Lord Wellesley himself, and in sciences are admitted to do (and we short almost every man-dead or living might almost call prosody an exact -who for the last century has taken a science), by accustoming the mind to predistinguished and predominant part in cision, discrimination, accuracy, and the great business of the nation? There order? But however all this may be, have been no doubt some, and not inconsiderable exceptions. Yet all are not exceptions that at first sight may appear so—Mr. Burke, for instance-who though a sound scholar and rich in all the varieties of erudition, was, more patrio, but an indifferent prosodian. One remarkable example of this deficiency, and the readiness with which it was repaired and turned to account, though well known, is worth repeating. Mr. Burke, while impressing economy on the government, From these preliminary observationsquoted a dictum of Cicero, which he much too cursory for a subject of so mispronounced-Magnum est vectigal much interest and importance, but which parsimonia-ti-gal-Burke,' suggested are at least appropriate to our present Lord North audibly across the House. task-we proceed to give our readers 'I thank the noble Lord,' resumed Mr. some specimens of the compositions of Burke, for his correction-which ena- Lord Wellesley. bles me to repeat with still more force Where all are elegant, there is no diffi. and propriety that admirable maxim-culty but in selection; and as the general Magnum est vectigal parsimonia.' With- defect of modern Latin verses is that they out giving too much importance to a are rather reminiscences than effusions, false quantity, may we not speculate whether the utility and fame of Mr. Burke and other men of the same class, might not have been extended and heightened, if, instead of the somewhat irregular culture of Dublin or Edinburgh, their perhaps too luxuriant talents had received the more exact training of our The following ode, written at Eton English schools and Universities? in Lord Wellesley's seventeenth year, Whether, or how far, or by what though liable to the objection, if indeed means, the practice of classical composi- it be one, of personifying in Pudor' we can only say that whenever Hackney and Gower street shall produce anything superior to the scholar-statesmen we have enumerated, or fifty others that might be named, we shall have less confidence in the beneficial tendency of the Sapphic and Alcaic processes of Eton and Harrow. But that desirable period is, we fancy-notwithstanding the rapid march of modern intellect-still far distant. and conversant rather with ideal than real existence, we shall, in the few extracts which our limited space allows, make choice of not perhaps the best examples of classical beauty, but-those which seem best to express the feelings of the individual. The four last strophes are admirable. Such verses prove satisfactorily that Eton knew how to combine literature and religion; and the graces of the mind with the higher duties and loftier aspirations of a Christian spirit; and it is remarkable and gratifying, that these feelings, which dawn so brightly in Lord Wellesley's earliest productions, shine, with increased brilliancy in those of his middle age, and with confirmed splendour in his last. Twenty years later-just before his embarkation for India-he thus expresses his horror of the excesses of the French revolutionists : 'At qua Pestis atrox rapido se turbine vertit, Cernis ibi, prisca moruin compage soluta; Procubuisse solo civilis fœdera vitæ, Et quodcunque Fides, quodcunque habet alma verendi Religio, Pietasque et Legum fræna sacrarum.'Reliquiæ, p. 1. and builds his hope for England on the solid basis of order and religion: Una etenim in mediis Gens intemerata ruinis Libertate proba, et justo libramine rerum, And more than thirty years later still, he amplifies and illustrates the same principles in the longest, and, in our humble judgment, decidedly the best of all those compositions-of which neither our clas sical nor our Christian readers would for. give us if we suppressed a line. The oc. casion was not, as is too often the case in modern Latinity, supposed for the sake of the verses-these verses were prompted by the happy occasion. It appears that Lord Wellesley, last summer, hired a villa near Windsor; and this residence led him to his earliest haunts in the beloved neighbourhood of Eton. There, a weeping willow on the banks of the Thames suggested the following lines: 'SALIX BABYLONICA. " THE WEEPING WILLOW. The first of this race of willow was introduced into England in the last century: it was brought Passis mœsta comis, formosa doloris imago, Dicitur Hebræas sustinuisse lyras; Nunc pede barbarico, et manibus temerata profanis, Umbra Tua, et viridi ripa beata toro, Sit mihi, primitiasque meas, tenuesque triumphos, Quæ tuleras animo lumina fausta meo; Stet quoque prisca Domus; (neque enim manus impia tangat ;) Floreat in mediis intemerata minis; Det Patribus Patres, Populoque det inclyta Cives, Eloquiumque Foro, Judiciisque decus, Conciliisque animos, magnæque det ordine Genti Immortalem alta cum pietate Fidem. Floreat, intacta per postera secula famâ, Cura diù Patriæ, Cura paterna Dei.'-Reliquiæ, Pp. 11-13. Fern Hill, Windsor, August 22, 1839. Of this admirable and interesting poem, Lord Wellesley has given a translation by his own hand, which though, perhaps, not of equal merit-at least of equal terseness-with the original, is so good, that both as a specimen of his English versification, and for the sake of our fair readers, but few of whom can have appre. ciated our former extracts, we venture to give it at length: 'THE WEEPING WILLOW OF BABYLON. Dishevelled, mournful, beauteous type of Grief, Beheld upon Thy melancholy boughs The Harps unstrung of Israel's captive band, To move great Sion's festal lay sublime, Down by Euphrates' side They sat and wept, To Thee, beloved Sion! vain were given vain The glorious present Majesty of Heaven Irradiated Thy chosen holy Fane ! Fallen from Thy God, the heathen's barbarous hand Reft of Her Children mourns the Parent Land, Despoils thy Temple, and thine Altar stains; And in Her dwellings death-like silence reigns. Rise, sacred Tiee! a monument to tell How Vanity and Folly lead to Woe; Rise, sacred Tree! on Thames's gorgeous shore, Teach them, their pure religion to adore, And foreign Faiths, and Rites, and Pomps dis. own! Teach them, that their Forefathers' noble race, The Throne, and Altar's strength have inter- The lofty glories of the Land and Main, The Majesty of Empire to sustain, God's Blessing on sound Faith is Britain's force. Me, when Thy shade and Thames's meads and Invite to soothe the cares of waning age, Come, parent Eton! turn the stream of time Guided by Thee I raised my youthful sight To the steep solid heights of lasting fame, name. O Blest Instruction! friend to generous youth! And wake Her lyre to strains of Faith Divine. Firm, incorrupt, as in life's dawning morn, tions-who was the parliamentary companion of Mr. Pitt in his greatest strug And guide my steps through honour's paths to gles-who has been Governor-General of death. India (and such a Governor-General)— And Thou, Time-honoured Fabric, stand! A Tower be raised from the dead-Secretary of Above the Vain, and Ignorant, and Great! The Mighty Race with cultured minds adorn, State at home, and Lord-Lieutenant in ' still vexed' Ireland; and above all, that the piece is written in his eightieth_year -it appears to us not merely one of the best productions of the Musa Anglicana, but a literary curiosity almost without parallel. It fully proves, we think, the happy accomplishment of the wishes ex Valido mihi Lord Wellesley adds in a note, that a pressed in the votive and very appropriate reform of Eton College, on the principles motto, which Lord Wellesley has prefixof the new system of education, has been ed to his volume:menaced by high authority.'-If Eton has not very much degenerated, Lord Wellesley's beautiful deprecation of the me. naced reforms is a sufficient proof that they are supremely unnecessary. Our last extract shall be his lordship's last production-also in Latin and English-in which, however, contrary to the opinion expressed on the last specimen, we rather prefer the translation to the original, Latoë dones, et, precor, integrâ HOR. Ode xxxi, l, î. ART. VIII.-1. Iniquities of the Opium INSCRIPTION ON THE TOMB OF MISS BROUGHAM, THE 2. The Opium Crisis. A Letter addressed ONLY DAUGHTER OF LORD AND LADY BROUGHAM, to Charles Elliott, Esq., Chief Superintendent of the British Trade with China. By an American Merchant (King) resident at Canton. CONSTANT SOURCE OF CONSOLATION TO HERSELF, 3. The Rupture with China, and its Causes, AND TO HER AFFLICTED PARENTS AND FAMILY. • Blanda Anima e cunis heu! longo exercita morbo Inter Maternas heu ! lacrymasque Patris, Quas risu lenire Tuo jucunda solebas, Et levis, et proprii, vix memor Ipša mali; I pete cælestes ubi nulla est cura recessus ; Et Tibi sit nullo mista dolore quics! [Translated.] ⚫ Doomed to long suffering from your carliest years, in a Letter to Lord Viscount Palmerston. By a Resident in China. 4. The Opium Question. By Samuel Warren, Esq., F.R.S., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law. 5. Brief Observations respecting the pending Disputes with the Chinese, and a proposal for bringing them to a satisfactory Conciliation. 6. Some Pros and Cons of the Opium Question, with a few Suggestions regarding British Claims on China. 7. The Opium Question as between Nation These verses, like all that we have and Nation. By a Barrister-at-Law. quoted, and indeed all that we have not, 8. Is the War with China a just one? By are elegant and amiable-creditable to H. Hamilton Lindsay, late of the Hon. the scholar and the man; but of all, our East India Company's Service in China. 9. The Chinese Vindicated, in Reply to S. judgment assigns the palm to those on the Salix Babylonica, which would be reWarren, Esq. By Capt. T. H. Bullock, markable for their elegance and spirit, of H.H. the Nizam's Army. their force and feeling, if written in the 10. Correspondence relating to China. Prefull vigour of youth, by one who made. sented to both Houses of Parliament by poetry his chief pursuit ; but when it is command of Her Majesty. 1840. recollected that they are the production | 11. Additional Correspondence, do. do. do. of a statesman who has spent his life in THOUGH some of the publications, whose such very different and absorbing occupa- titles are here enumerated, may not be |