1829-3 Affairs in General. 85 



a sum than fifty-two pounds and several farthings, from a loan of a 

 million, in which the patriot had embarked with kindred patriots, for 

 the " salvation of Greece," was too brilliant not to have had its 

 " reaction :" for in this world we cannot have even fifty pounds for 

 nothing ; and its price was the whole and sole fame that ]\Ir. Hume had 

 been toiling day and night, week and month, for three long years, to 

 raise. Since that accession to his wealth, the great revisor of every 

 other man's gains, the detector of every other man's meanness, and the 

 teller of every other man's exchequer, has been as mute as if he had 

 been choked with the largest rouleau of the mint, as idle as my Lord 

 Ellenborough, and as useless as that sublime genius, my Lord Breck- 

 nock, or his successor, that sagacious mariner and veteran tactician, the 

 new admiralty commissioner, my Lord Castlereagh. Yet, if nobody else 

 can be found to take up the Sinecures, we should suffer even INIr. Hume 

 to try the subject. The abuse is so glaring, that an attempt at its 

 reform might revive even his name — nay, wipe aAvay the remembrance 

 of the Greek Loan, Lord Palmerston's pliilippic, and the dinner at 

 Brookes's ; and before he goes where his masters, John Wilkes and 

 Home Tooke, have gone before him, enable a conscientious man to 

 say, without direct perjury, that his life was of some use to man- 

 kind. Let him first try, what JekyU calls the most trying of profes- 

 sions, the law. There he may find a rich harvest of sinecurism, and not 

 an atom of public sympathy for the sinecurists ; there he may revel in 

 the leviathan extortions of prothonotaries, chief clerks, registrars, and so 

 forth, with a two-handed sword in his grasp, strip up the nepotism of 

 old fat chief justices, and pursy, hypocritic chancellors, loading their 

 relatives with the public property, and making even the imbecility of 

 those relatives a ground for increasing the load. He might ask, how 

 much money the present Lord Ellenborough obtains from his sinecure 

 in the Court of King's Bench .^ How much my Lord Hardwicke 

 receives from the Irish courts ? How much my Lord Maryborough, and 

 fifty other lords ? But, of the showy style in which a lord chancellor 

 can accumulate income on a nephew, let us take the following 

 example : — 



" "The late Lord Thurlow held the offices of clerk of the Hanaper, 

 patentee for making out commissions of bankruptcies, and clerk of the 

 custodies of lunatics and idiots, — the whole yielding an aggregate of we 

 believe nearly ten thousand pounds per annum, besides very extensive 

 patronage. These are all offices in the gift of the lord chancellor ; and, 

 in the present crisis, it is an object of great curiosity to ascertain how 

 they are to be disposed of. Will they be regulated according to the 

 arrangement recommended by several successive finance conuuittees ? 

 that is to say, by carrying all the fees to the consolidated fund, merely 

 reserving their present salaries to the deputies who discharge the duties 

 of the respective offices?" 



Of the late lord, who has died within a short period, we know nothing 

 more than that he made a profusion of poetry ; and, certainly, the worst 

 poctnj that ever issued even from a lord ; — for we by no means allow Lord 

 Nugent's Portugal, and things of that calibre, to be poetry at all. As to 

 his merits as a man and a citizen, let those describe them who ever 

 heard of them. And the most careful investigation that we can institute 

 on the subject, is, that his lordship's chief or single title to fame, was his 

 marrying a very pretty little actress some ten years since — a deed which 



