PROPHECY OF THE LIVING "SAMUEL?
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR.
Everyone knows that Samuel Rogers is a poet; many think that lie is also a wit: but who ever said or thought that he was a prophet? Yet so it is: he looked into his futurity-glass seven years ago, and said—" I see a clever public speaker, allied with men who have the signs and sounds of Liberal principles ever upon and about them, occupied in destroying their claim to the possession of any such principles. I see him making a spiteful attack upon a political adversary, beset with difficulties in his attempt to effect what the orator himself deems a good measure." Once upon a time we read this prophecy, or its equivalent; and now we recognize the appari- tion which prompted our aged soothsayer and bard to utter it, to have been that of a gentleman accounted one of the most brilliant members of the Whig eleven. Here it is, for the gratification of your readers; in a note on the poem of Italy.
" Candour, generosity, how rare are they in the world; and how much is to be deplored the want of them I When a Minister in our Parliament consents at last to a measure which, for many reasons perhaps existing no longer, he had before refused to adopt, there should be no exultation as over the fallen, no taunt, no jeer. How often may the resistance be continued lest an enemy should triumph and the result of conviction be received as a symptom of fear? CoUld words foretell the event better than these virtuous lines, penned as it were in anticipation of what befell in the late debate on Maynooth?
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