The spiral grooves in smooth meanders flow,
Drags the long chain, the polished axles glow,
While slowly circumvolves the piece of beef below.”
Canning took the pen, and added:
“The conscious fire with bickering radiance burns,
Eyes the rich joint, and roasts it as it turns.”
These two lines are now blended with the original text, and constitute, it is said, the only flaw in Frere’s title to the sole authorship of the first part of the poem, from which I have been quoting: the second and third parts were both by Canning.
In prose I cite the report of a peroration by Mr. Erskine, whose egotism could hardly be caricatured, at a meeting of the Friends of Freedom.
“Mr. Erskine concluded by recapitulating, in a strain of agonizing and impressive eloquence, the several more prominent heads of his speech: He had been a soldier, and a sailor, and had a son at Winchester School; he had been called by special retainers, during the summer, into many different and distant parts of the country, travelling chiefly in post-chaises; he felt himself called upon to declare that his poor faculties were at the service of his country—of the free and enlightened part of it, at least. He stood here as a man; he stood in the eye, indeed in the hand, of God—to whom (in the presence of the company, and waiters) he solemnly appealed; he was of noble, perhaps royal blood; he had a house at Hampstead; was convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform; his pamphlet had gone through thirty editions, skipping alternately the odd and even numbers; he loved the Constitution, to which he would cling and grapple; and he was clothed with the infirmities of man’s nature; he would apply to the present French rulers (particularly Barras and Reubel) the words of the poet:
“‘Be to their faults a little blind;