86 Notes of the Month on QJuly, 



we hope improved his lordship's happiness, and which, we solemnly 

 believe, was of some service to his understanding ; for, from that 

 auspicious hour, he published no more verses ; or, as William Spenser 

 says, in his di-awing-room style, 



" The happiest man of men become, 

 The Muses' worshipper was dumb. 

 Voted his pen and ink a bore. 

 And wooed the Nine Old Maids no more." 



But by what moral right were those ten thousand pounds a-year 

 heaped upon a man who never was presumed to have done ten-pence 

 worth of service of any kind for this enormous sum of public money ? 

 He was the nephew of the Lord Chancellor Thurlow ! This was all his 

 claim. Heaven defend the country against having many such chancel- 

 lors, with any such recipients of sinecures. We plainly pronounce this 

 disposal of the public property iniquitous in Jhi'o conscientics. Old Lord 

 Thurlow might have had the legal power to alienate the sum to his 

 nephew ; but this was a right wliich no man should have. If old Lord 

 Thurlow lived to no better purpose than to give away sinecures — and of 

 none better in his brawling career do we know — or if young Lord 

 Thurlow lived to none better than to feed upon them, what possible 

 "feeling can the nation have in the fate of either, than gratification at 

 being relieved from the power of both to prey upon the public, and the 

 hope of a speedy and total extinction of the whole sinecure system ? 



In the mean time, as the sinecures are at the disposal of the 

 chancellor for the time being, it might be a species of satisfaction to 

 ascertain in what way the 10,000/. a-year is destined to go. To poor 

 Lord Thurlow, of verse- writing memory, there could have been no 

 objection but the mere fact of his putting the money in his pocket ; but 

 there are others whom the public hate strenuously, and from their souls ; 

 the demand is to know whether those incomes are to be among the 

 rewards of these men .? 



Of Mr. Nash, the favourite architect, we know nothing but as an 

 architect ; in which character we certainly owe him a grudge for every 

 building that we have seen proceeding from his portfolio. Not that we 

 think him much worse than the crowd of architects who defonn our city 

 witli incumbrances, the most costly, unsightly, and unstable of any city 

 of Europe. Compare our new public buildings with tlie new ones of 

 any metropolis on the Continent, of St. Petersburg]!, of Munich, of 

 Stuttgard, of any city of any size where building has been lately going 

 on, and we instantly sink a hundred degrees below Zero. Regent Street 

 alone remains to sustain our boast to the foreigner. But the merit of 

 Regent Street lies between the flagging on its sides ; its breadth is its 

 single merit: for since wigwams were first formed, there never was such 

 a combination of architectural monsters, as startle the eye in Regent 

 Street. But of this more anon. 



Of Colonel Davies we know nothing, but as an imitator of Mr. Hume*; 

 which we conceive to give, in general terms, as disadvimtageous an idea of 

 a man's taste and understanding, as could be expressed in all the eloquence 

 of language. But on the present occasion, we feel strongly disposed to 

 think that the Colonel is perfectly in the right, that he has been doing a 

 public duty, and that his services will operate as a valuable hint to a great 

 many gentlemen, to the full as young and thoughtless as Mr. Nash. As 



