"CONSCIENCE" GREEN, M.H.R.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3562, 8 December 1882, Page 4

"CONSCIENCE" GREEN, M.H.R.

Our Christchurch namesake alludes to the speaking abilities of the now famous "M.HR. with a conscience " as follows :—No one who has ever heard Mr M. W. Green, member of the Hou3e of Representatives for East Dunedin, deliver a political oration, would dream of attributing to him the faintest pai- ,- ticle of humor. His style is, honestly speaking, the dismallest of the dismal. Linked dulness, long drawn out, is the beginning and the middle and the end of his address. Of all the bores whom a keenly discriminating body of electors contrived to return out of tho three hundred candidates who offered themselves at last general election, Mr M. W. Green is by far the most stupendous. It is recorded that on one occasion when he rose to speak in a full House last session, certain members of a statistical turn of mind went to the pains of counting the number who left the Chamber while he was speaking. They were forty-two, and of the remainder fully one half were in an attitude of profound rppose before the discourse had got beyond ' fifthly'—and it went to ninthly or tenthly at least. Mr Green certainly cannot, by the wildest stretch of imagination, be called" a son of Momus. ' Poppies is nothing to him,' as fam "Weller was prone to observe. Yet notwithstanding his natural defects as n comedian, Mr Green has a simplicity of soul which stands him sometimes in the stead of wit. -By a patient and energetic friction of what he is pleased to call his brain, he sometimes produces, quite unconsciously, fitful flashes of a weird, intangible sort of humor, just as the untutored children of the wilderness get fire, after a laborious fashion, by rubbing a stick against a log of dry wood.