CITY NORTH ELECTION

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 1011, 13 December 1881, Page 3

CITY NORTH ELECTION

In writing on the relative merits of the candidates for City North, the Evening Star says of Mr. Rees that he is frothy, redundant of promises, reckless of assertion, with a marvellous facility for abusing all who come in conflict with him, and wonderfully thin epidermis when attacked. If performance kept pace with the promises of Mr. W. L. Rees, there would be an amazingly fine harvest in store for everybody. If his practice kept pace with his profession, virtue would at last find its human personification. But it is here that the weak points of his character becomes manifest. He makes so many promises, and protests so much about them ; he is so earnest in his desire to begin all at once, that he flounders over the very initial stage, and then flies to something else, leaving his tootrustful admirer singing “ The Last Rose of Summer” to his last falling leaf of his disappointed hopes. Yet one really does believe in Mr Rees’s visions at first. Who has not? We confess to have listened with sweet and rapturous simplicity to those glorious flights of his in which all things delightful are promised to the faithful and all the terrors of the Inferno loom ominously over the heads of the recalcitrant unbeliever ; but like others we have grown wiser. At the close of Mr Rees’s rhapsodical sentences we seem to see a sort of mystical winking of the left eye, w’hile a ghostly exclamation of “moonshine” floats back as a sad echo from the shades of a disappointed past.