Where sit the gowned clerks, by ancient rule,
This on a chair, and that upon a stool;
Where stands the well-pil’d table, cloth’d in green;
There on the left the TREASURY-BENCH is seen.
No sattin covering decks the’ unsightly boards;
No velvet cushion holds the youthful lords:
And claim illustrious Tails such small regard?
Ah! Tails too tender for a seat so hard.
This passage touches on a subject of much offence to the young friends of the minister; we mean the barbarous and Gothic appearance of the benches in the House of Commons. The Treasury-bench itself looks no better than a first form in one of our public schools:
No sattin covering decks the’ unsightly boards,
No velvet cushion holds the youthful Lords.
The above couplet states with much elegance the matter of complaint, and glances with equal dexterity at the proper remedy. The composition is then judiciously varied. The whole art of the poet is employed to interest our passions in favour of the necessary reform, by expostulatory interrogations and interjections the most affectingly pathetic. And who can read the former, without feeling his sense of national honour most deeply injured by the supposed indignity; or who can read the latter, without melting into the most unfeigned commiseration for the actual sufferings to which the youthful lords are at present exposed? It must, doubtless, be a seasonable relief to the minds of our readers, to be informed, that Mr. PITT (as it has been said in some of the daily papers) means to propose, for one article of his Parliamentary Reform, to cover the seats in general with crimson sattin, and to decorate the Treasury-bench, in particular, with cushions of crimson velvet; one of [1] extraordinary dimensions being to be appropriated to Mr. W. GRENVILLE.
The epithet “tender” in the last line we were at first disposed to consider as merely synonymous with “youthful.” But a friend, to whom we repeated the passage, suspected that the word might bear some more emphatical sense; and this conjecture indeed seems to be established beyond doubt, by the original reading in the manuscript, which, as we before said, has been communicated to us,
“Alas! that flesh, so late by pedants scarr’d,
Sore from the rod, should suffer seats so hard,”
We give these verses, not as admitting any comparison with the text, as it now stands, but merely by way of commentary, to illustrate the poet’s meaning.
From the Treasury-bench, we ascend one step to the INDIA-BENCH.
“There too, in place advanc’d, as in command,
Above the beardless rulers of the land,
On a bare bench, alas! exalted sit,
The pillars of Prerogative and PITT;
Delights of Asia, ornaments of men,
Thy Sovereign’s Sovereigns, happy Hindostan.”
The movement of these lines is, as the subject required, more elevated than that of the preceding: yet the prevailing sentiment excited by the description of the Treasury-bench, is artfully touched by our author, as he passes, in the Hemistich,