Page:Fugitive Poetry 1600-1878.djvu/575

This poem on the day of the funeral of the late Duke of Wellington in 1852, was published anonymously. It was dated from "Oriel College, Oxford."

"The Duke of Wellington left to his countrymen a great legacy—greater even than his glory. He left them the contemplation of his character. I will not say his conduct revived the sense of duty in England. I will not say that of our country. But that his conduct inspired public life with a purer and more masculine tone I cannot doubt. His career rebukes restless vanity, and reprimands the irregular ebullitions of a morbid egotism. I doubt not that among all orders of Englishmen—from those with the highest responsibilities of our society to those who perform the humblest duties—I daresay there is not a man who in his toil and his perplexity has not sometimes thought of the Duke, and found in his example support and solace. Though he lived so much in the hearts and minds of his countrymen—though he occupied such eminent posts and fulfilled such august duties—it was not till he died that we felt what a place he filled in the feelings and thoughts of the people of England. Never was the influence of real greatness more completely asserted than on his decease. In an age whose boast of intellectual equality flatters all our self-complacencies, the world suddenly acknowledged that it had lost the greatest of men; in an age of utility, the most industrious and common-sense people in the world could find no vent for their woe and no representative for their sorrow but the solemnity of a pageant; and we—we who have met here for such different purposes—to investigate the sources of