e coming hour,
And reinvest us with the robe of power;
Rule while we live, let future days transmute
To every merit all we've charged on Bute.
Let late posterity receive his name,
And swell its sails with every breath of fame--
Downwards as far as Time shall roll his tide,
With ev'ry pendant flying, let it glide."

The rest is equally intolerable.

But Bentley was lucky in his patrons, if not in his poetry; as, in
addition to a Commissionership of Lotteries, he received a pension for
the lives of himself and his wife of L500 a-year! Though thus
undeservedly successful in attracting the notice of the government,
his more honest efforts failed with the public. He wrote two plays,
both of which failed. Walpole next describes Robertson the historian
in these high-coloured terms, "as sagacious and penetrating as
Tacitus, with a perspicuity of Livy:" qualities which every one else
knows to be directly the reverse of those which characterize
Robertson. That very impudent woman, Catharine Macaulay, seems also to
have been one of the objects of his literary admiration. He describes
her, as being as partial in the cause of liberty as bigots to the
church and royalists to tyranny, and as exerting manly strength with
the gravity of a philosopher.

But Walpole is aways amusing when he gives anecdotes of passing
things. The famous Brentford election finds in him its most graphic
historian. The most singular carelessness was exhibited by the
government on this most perilous occasion--a carelessness obviously
arising from that contempt which the higher ranks of the nobility in
those days were weak enough to feel for the opinion of those below
them. On the very verge of an election, within five miles of London,
and which must bring to a point all the exasperation of years; Camden,
the chancellor, went down to Bath, and the Duke of Grafton, the prime
minister, who was a great horse-racer, drove off to Newmarket.
Mansfield, whom Walpole seems to have hated, and whom he represents as
at "once resentful, timorous, and subtle," the three worst qualities
of the heart, the nerves, and the understanding, pretended that it was
the office of the chancellor to bring the outlaw (Wilkes) to justice,
and did nothing. The consequence was, that the multitude were left
masters of the field.

On the morning of the election; while the irresolution of the court,
and the negligence of the prime minister, caused a neglect o