The Press. — London, England, 1853-05-07 00:00:00

Vito 1:) rtgg+ LONDON, SATURDAY, MAY 7, 1853. LATEST INTELLIGENOL SkiI:I:DAY EVENING. BRUSSELS, Friday, May fi. (From our own Correspondent.) The journey of King Leopold and his elder son, the Prince Royal, to Germany, is a political event which occupies diplomacy a great deal, and is yet enhanced by the reception the Belgian Monarch en counters. Our papers are filled with details brought mostly by telegraph from Berlin, where the august travellers arrived on Wednesday afternoon, after having slept the night before at the ducal palace at Brunswick. At Potsdam the King of Prussia stepped into the royal carriage, and accompanied to Berlin his guests, who, having declined the apartments pre pared for them at the palace, took up their abode at the hotel of the Belgian minister, Baron Nothomb. Immediately after their arrival they received another visit from the King, accompanied by all the Prussian princes at present in Berlin. King Leopold assisted at Potsdam at a grand dinner, and a great review was to take place the next day in honour of his Majesty, who will also be present at the ceremony of the delivering, by the King of Prussia as elder member, to his brother the Prince of Prussia, the order of the Spanish Golden Fleece. The decoration is that worn by the late G neral Castanos, Duke of Baylen. The King of the Belgians and the Duke of Brabant will spend some days at Berlin, and then leave for Vienna, where they are expected on the 11th. It seems now positively decided that the King of Prussia will not start for his announced visit to the Emperor Franz Josef before the 18th, so all rumours about a con gress of sovereigns fall to the ground. A telegraphic despatch announced that the King of the Greeks was to leave Athens for Vienna and Germany on May 4. BERLIN, Ftitlay Morning. (By Telegraph.) Yesterday, after the return from the Opera, the King of the Belgians received Lord Bloomfield, the British minister, with whom he remained closetted until midnight, and to whom his Mtkjesty delivered a letter li►r Queen Victoria. This morning the King and the Duke of Brabant were present at a grand review of the Gna►tis. and returned to Berlin at half-past eleven, when the King received Baron Budberg, Russian minister. At one the King of Prussia called on his august guests, whoa► he accompanied in a visit to the ►oyal museums. The Prussian Gazette states that three Prussian police officers have been sent to England, alien., through the gond offices of the English police authorities, t h ey a.wer leaned that salt of the war munitions thseo‘ urea at 110- t herliit he had been onlered by revt diet it 'tiler% pntties,and were paid for by ready money sent from Berlin end IZosti They ',naught home several specimens, a n d the original corre spondence of the parties, which throws a Vaalitli w light en the proceedings. A new arrest took place at Rostock on May Ist, when the advocate Wiggero was taken in enstody, and immediately sent to the fortress of linstow. For the first time since the last attempt on his life. the Emperor of Austria held on m —ay 'dud a grand reliew at Vienna. The Prince Daniel() of Montene!tro was at his side. The latter is to leave shortly. to return to his estates, hearing with him, it is thought, the acknowledgment of his independence by Austria. It is mated that the new Austrian law on marriage is ready, and was sent from Vienna to Rome to lee submitted to the , approval of the Pope for th e part %hid! touches th e twt» laws. The enneordat will be eonelittled before the end of the year. r A despatch felon 31 date states that the rigour of the state of siege has been ' htvl ; the assiteiations are again nutlet wised to ml4l, and the town gates are to remain open from four o'clock in the illionling UIl ten at night. SPAIN. A telegraphic despatch, flitted Aladrid, \lay a, brings decision 1111 a .ll- I .IIMINIVI'IIed Illit'Stll , ll. The ItOpil 011111 ell IlliM 'Wen entrusted with the cmitoillation lil ' all railway schemes whose execution has tag t . l The same despatch states that the vonversion of liefecretla into ConsolidatAll Debt has been rotspentled. Funds.—Three per Olds., .11! ; Certificates, I. 4'orit•r of general (officers, composed of Tun! Cathcart. Sir P. lititland. and Sir G. Berkeley, lout just terminated the inquiry into the charges preferred, at the intaance of the. C'ottimander-iti-Chief, agaitist ILrjor•(ienensl the Hon. le. H. F. Compton Cavendish. 'rhot ottieer was itemised of having written a series of pseinlosil mons lettem to the bite Duke of Wellington, with the object of destroying the character of Colonel Hall. M.P., who at the last lore% et sue eeeded General Cavemlisli iu the rommatiol of the Ist Life Guards. From these charges the result of the in quiry has cleared lieneral Cavendish, the court tinding that he was not the writer uor privy to the writing of the letters iu question. THE PRESS. PROFESSOR ATTOL7N'S LECTURES ON POETRY. Yesterday W. G. Aytoun, Esq., Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres iu the University of Edinburgh, delivered the first of a series of lectures on poetry and dramatic literature, at Willis's Rooms. The lecture was attended by a fashionable and brilliant audience, among whom we noticed the Duke and Duchess of Argil, Loid John Manners, Mr. Thackeray, &c. The lecturer commenced by an allusion to an olden legend of a monk, who, entranced by the melody of a bird, followed it far into the woods, and when he returned, fancying that he had been absent for a night, he found his convent a ruin, his garden a wilderness. He had been absent a hundred years. Such, said the professor, is poetry. While listening to its melody no note is taken of time, and its lays, once uttered, endure for ever. The poetry of the old world has lost nothing what. ever of its freshness ; it comes upon the hearts of men as vividly now as if it had been uttered yesterday. The reason of this was that the poet dealt with the emotions of and sensations of mankind. Poetry, strictly speaking, was a sentiment, not a substance, as its elements were common to mankind. Much, however, of what was now held up to admiration as poetry was in reality verse, which was a very different thing, and differed from poetry as much as a wax figure differed from the living malt. Verse was not even a necessary vehicle for poetry, as the books of Isaiah, Job, awl Ecclesiastes, abondantly proved, to say nothing of such authors as Jeremy Taller, Sir Thomas Browne, and Bishop Hall, of Norwich. 'Sir 11 - alter Scott was not the less a poet when he abandoned metrical form for his prose novels. Still verse had this advantage over prose for the enunciation of poetical emotions, that it compelled concentration of thought and greater care• fatness in the composition. In prose one remenv tiered the sense but not the language; in poetry the ideacould not be dissociated from the words. Besides, the metrical form was in itself musical, and music, it was well known, even when dissociated front words, was capable of convey ing the emotions of the heart. It was remarkable enough that in every nation verse was older than prose. Herod°. tits was :separated by at gap of flair hundred years from Homer; and Homer, as was clear from his own works, arras not the first bard of his country. Among the Ro mans, the Celts, the Scandinavians—in fact, in every na. that with which we were acquainted—the order of prece dence was the same. The reason of this the lecturer traced to the necessity which was early felt of preserving the won's of the elan or the nation, at a time before the art of writing was known, and when everything must therefore have depended upon oral tradition ; and a severe memory, in the fanciful mythology of the Limits, was called the mother of the Muses. Thus origin ated the institution of the bardic or minstrel order, whose province it was to become the depositaries of tradition. Ceasar vouched for the existence of such en institution among the ancient Britons, and that the store of warlike cheats and revelations was so great that it took a young had twenty years to kern them. In the highlands of Scotland the order of Sennachies, or family lairds, did not fall into abeyance till the system of clanship was put down, alter the rebellion of MO. Of the sane order were the Scalds of of Norway, the Minnesingers and Tmnneres of Southern Europe. He purposely omitted the Troubadours, because they did not profess to be the depositaries of tradi tion. The bards were in fact only human books,_ produced at certain times to communicate information to the people. Citing the example of Homer in ancient and Shakspere in modern days, to prove the axiom that a true poet should always write as if, like the bards of old, he were addressing an audience, Professor Aytoun explained upon this princi ple the very different fate that had overtaken the fame of two recent poets. Scott was generally supposed to be an inferior poet to Wordsworth. but he was sure that there were few boys at our public schools who had not got by heart copious extracts from " Munition " or " The Lay of the Last Minstrel." while he never knew one who could declaim twelve consecutive lines of " The Excursion." ( Laughter. ) Professor Aytistat afterwards discussed the question whe ther poetry could be written or poets be aided in writing by rules and theories. a Mob he decided in the negative, and supported his deeision lly copious illustrations, and by a sternly eritieal examination of Pope's school of poetry and his scholaN. The leeture concluded with a spirited and stifling recitation of the old Norse "!tenth Song . of Roper Lialbrity, as translated by Samuel For tson. the mallow of the admirable poem entitled "Forging of the Atieltor... THE WAGES MOVEMENT continues at Liverpool, ge nerally to the advantage of the men. The painters, according to the Lirerpool Standard, have succeeded. almost if not altogether; the shoemakers have gained their point ; the cabinetmakers have got all they asked fir; the plasterers' labourers have made an appeal to the public, their masters still holding out. The tailors, after succeeding in their own agitation, hold weekly delegate meetings in order to legislate for their brethren, and berm a tribunal before which complaints and grievances can be heard. NI 1.1.11 iENCE lms ►eached hallo]. by electric telegraph, that Lady I►alhousie died on board the Monarch, when► oft Land's-end, on the :Ind instant. Her ladyship was return ing from hullo, having left Calcutta on the 2nd of Jan uary. Ml march expetieneed very tine weather on her passage until Sunday last, when a very strong southerly gale came on, which produced iu Lady I►alhousie such extreme debility from sea sickness that her frame sank under its died*. The body will be 41:n11110y conveyed to London. SATURDAY, flitratare. The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell's Administration. By Lord Grey. Vol. 1. London : Bentley. LORD GREY'S book belongs to a class of which the specimens, rare in the literature of any country, are especially so in that of England. It is in some sense a political autobiography rather than a history, for the writer records lu own acts, and is himself the hero of the nai rative ; yet an autobiography limited to the events of a few years, dealing exclusively with the business of an official department, and founded. as we are told more than once, on no private or exclusive sources of informa tion. These peculiarities, but especially the last, distinguish it from every other composi tion of a similar nature with which we are acquainted. It is not a work of memoirs ; for it contains, from commencement to close, no one fact which was not already in some shape before the world. For a history it is at once too limited in scope, too controversial in tone, and too early published. We can describe it no otherwise than as a voluminous pamphlet, or rather series of pamphlets, in which the sub stance of Lord Grey's speeches on colonial policy is gathered up, condensed, separated from trivial and uninteresting matter, and thrown into the form most likely to secure for it general and permanent attention. This practice of self vindication by a minis ter, of which Lord Grey has set the example, is not one generally recommendable to public men. Calumnies are more easily lived down than written down ; eulogy more readily ac corded where it is not claimed ; and a retired minister in the enjoyment of full health and mental vigour will, in most eases, find his time more profitably employed, both as regards his own interests and those of the state, in framing and supporting new measures, than in defend ing those which, whether for good or evil, are already part of the land's law. It is only to old age, exile, or incapacity of farther exertion, that the pleasures of political retrospect should be allowed. Till the life's work is done, and the statesman's rest fairly earned, it is better for him to go on as he has begun, careless of contemporary obloquy, trusting in the ephc moral nature of falsehood and the triumph of truth, and bent only on effacing the memory of his early services by exertions yet more sus• tained and exploits even more eminent. So at least we think : but it is only fair to add that Lord Grey has given reasons for this publication which exempt him from the general censure implied in our words. His volumes, egotistic in design, are not so in reality : their object is, as the author explains, less to vindi cate his own character from the aspersions of political opponents, than to lay fully before the country the principles—modified as these necessarily were in their application to indivi dual eases, and by such modification oftentimes concealed from careless observers—on which his colonial administration was based. This task he has accomplished with success ; and, without reference to the merits of the system here set forth, it is undeniable that we have from him an exposition at once clear, detailed, and comprehensive of the policy actually pur sued in regard to the colonies during an event ful period of five years. Lord Grey's mission on accepting office, as understood by himself, may most fitly be de scribed in his own words Before I premed to give an account of what has been done in particular colonies, it will be convenient that I should state, somewhat folic, the general principles which have in all cases been the guide of our policy, and that I should call your attention to the manner in which the peculiar circumstances of the times have affected the administration of colonial affairs. To begin with the last, 1 hare to remark that in these affairs much of the opposition we have met with, and the principal difficulties we have encountered, have arisen, directly or indirectly, fnom our having thought it our duty to maintain the policy of free tnule, and to extend its application to the produce of the colonies. That these difficulties must be expected from this policy I was quite aware when your Government was formed; but the greatest service that I believed we were called upon as a Government to render to the country was that of completing the work, which had been happily begun, of removing restrictions from in - dustry. and securely establishing a system of free man throughout the empire. So far back a* when I first en I II I 14