Page:The Poetical Works of William Motherwell, 1849.djvu/54

 of life, then he was blameable. I do not say that this was the case, because I do not think so; not that I would be understood as approving of all that he wrote in these times, but that, considering the circumstances in which he was placed, his abstinence from a certain measure of vehemence would have argued a neutrality of feeling on the great questions of the day which would have literally disqualified him for the office that he held. Let us be just to the dead, then, and grant that what was well was due to the man, and that what was amiss was chargeable upon the infirmity of our common nature.

In his editorial capacity Motherwell occasionally drew upon his poetical faculty and in general successfully, as the following jeu desprit will show. It appeared early in 1833, when the Reform Bill was supposed to be in danger, and when its friends in Glasgow exhibited an, unusual degree of anxiety respecting it. T—m A—k—n is the late Mr Thomas Aitkinson, bookseller, who was a very keen liberal politician. M'P—n was his neighbour Mr M'Phun, likewise a bookseller and agent for the Sun newspaper. Sir D. K. S—f—d is the late Sir D. K. Sandford, the accomplished Professor of Greek in the University of Glasgow, who was at that time an ardent reformer, and whose premature and much-lamented death was probably accelerated by the excitement of that miserable period. With these explanations this clever trifle will be intelligible:—