We regret to notice the death of Mr. Albany Fonblanque,
Editor of the Examiner from 1822 for a quarter of a century, and one of the most brilliant journalists this country has ever pro- duced. A thorough Radical of the old kind, in days when to be a Radical was to be a Pariah, he possessed a weapon which specially exasperated his Tory adversaries,—that wit which, though born of course of humour, is polished by scholarship and edged by the keenest common-sense. To the courtiers to be reviled was nothing, but to be turned into ridi- cule by Latin quotations and exposed in sentences as happy as Pope's best rhymes was unendurable. Here was a Radical who proved both his breeding and his scholarship in a way they could understand. Mr. Fonblanque lived down very bitter antipathies, was admired through life by all who had brains in England, and only when tired of work and usefulness descended to a Revenue Commissionership. His writings are as worthy to live as Sydney Smith's, but their form is already becoming a little antiquated to a generation which would not in public perpetrate a Latin pun for the world, and could not if it would.
