Obituary Notices. 
v 
ance from which I am about to quote. Thus sings the classic hard 
of our first beginnings in the Classical : — 
“ ’Twere vain to take the task from history’s page, 
And tell our progress on from youth to age ; 
But oft by future poets shall be sung 
The time when e’en the Classical was young ; 
When closely ranged on dusky benches sate 
The beardless arbiters of Britain’s fate, 
And, as to mock the dying light of day, 
One tallow candle shed a flickering ray 
From off the desk whence not an hour before 
Carson had poured the tide of classic lore. 
That tallow candle was an emblem fit 
Of those who used beneath its glow to sit, — 
Poor, slow, uncertain, solitary, dim, 
As were the nascent energies of him 
Who, all untaught to plead a party’s cause, 
Glanced at the Chair, and thought he saw the tawse ; 
Then trembling rose, and from his lips just sent 
The old exordium, ‘ Mr President’ — 
Looked at his notes, cough’d, hemmed with thoughtful frown, 
Looked at his notes again, — and then sat down !” 
These lines are contained in an address written for a supper of 
the Classical Society several years afterwards. The volume from 
which I quote contains many similar performances. These were 
the days of the first Reform Bill. Swinton was always a Tory of 
the bluest dye ; but he was the most liberal Tory I ever knew. He 
has some lines of kindly greeting to his classical opponents among 
the passages to which I have referred, and some very kindly lines 
addressed to myself. He hated “the bill, the whole bill, and 
nothing but the bill,” which was the Liberal cry in 1831, and he 
pleads that very laudable feeling in a letter which I had from him 
at the time, in which he justified himself for having blown to atoms 
the only woodcock which he had seen in a day’s grouse shooting. 
He said he had the bill and the whole bill, but then he had nothing 
but the bill, the merit of which he did not see. 
There are in this volume some very spirited lines in allusion to 
the French Revolution and the “tricolor,” the last stanza of which 
is the following : — 
“For the red is the rebel’s appropriate hue, 
The blue, livid envy’s foul stain, 
And the white is pale terror that trembles to do 
The deeds the base heart can contain; 
