most magnificent prize essay that the English Universities have
produced for many years. The passage in which he describes the
talents, the researches, and learning of Sir William Jones, is
worthy of the imagination of Burke; and yet, with all this oriental
splendour of fancy, he has the reputation of being a patient and
methodical man of business. He looks, however, much more like a
poet or a student, than an orator and a statesman; and were
statesmen the sort of personages which the spirit of the age
attempts to represent them, I, for one, should lament that a young
man, possessed of so many amiable qualities, all so tinted with the
bright lights of a fine enthusiasm, should ever have been removed
from the moon-lighted groves and peaceful cloisters of Magdalen
College, to the lamp-smelling passages and factious debates of St.
Stephen's Chapel. Mr. G- certainly belongs to that high class of
gifted men who, to the honour of the age, have redeemed the literary
character from the charge of unfitness for the concerns of public
business; and he has shown that talents for affairs of state,
connected with literary predilections, are not limited to mere
reviewers, as some of your old class-fellows would have the world to
believe. When I contrast the quiet unobtrusive development of Mr.
G-'s character with that bustling and obstreperous elbowing into
notice of some of those to whom the Edinburgh Review owes half its
fame, and compare the pure and steady lustre of his elevation, to
the rocket-like aberrations and perturbed blaze of their still
uncertain course, I cannot but think that we have overrated, if not
their ability, at least their wisdom in the management of public
affairs.

The third of the party was a little Yorkshire baronet. He was
formerly in Parliament, but left it, as he says, on account of its