The Press. — London, England, 1854-02-11 00:00:00

138 pen had publicly assailed her in such blasting lines as Lord Byron in '• English Bards ad dressed to Lady Holland. But where are the illusions of Holland-house now? Gone —utterly gone beyond redemp tion by all the powers of rhetoric : They are gone with the miserable revelations of its utter mediocrity in these "memoirs of the /Whigs," and offensive " anecdotes of foreign Courts," published by Lord Holland. Where is the wit, or the genius, or the style, or the scholarship (of which we were so often told), or the philosophy, in any of their pages ? Lord Holland had full leisure ; he had ample opportunities for observation ; and, after the most laborious efforts, he can leave behind him nothing but twaddling anecdotes, told iu slipshod language. Writing of a national hero like Lord Nelson, he says, " His greatness " was a strong instance of the superiority of " the heart over the head, and a strong proof " that a warm imagination is a more necessary " ingredient in the composition of a hero than " a sound understanding."—p. 20. Lord Nelson had an intellect which would have raised him to the first rank in any profession. He was completely master of every branch of naval science, and the annals of war do not record a more remarkable case of prescient sagacity than Nelson's divination of the escape of the French fleet to the West Indies in 1800, and again discovering that they had returned. Not satisfied with impeaching his intellect, Lord Holland devotes half of the space allot ted to Nelson to the consideration of Lady Hamilton's " scandal." He does more justice to Mr. Pitt : if he tried to diminish the great ness of Mr. Pitt's genius, Lord Holland felt that he would have been injuring the fame of "my uncle, Mr. Fox." But mark how he denies any merit to the pecuniary disinterest edness of Pitt: — I have not spoken of his disinterestedness about money It was, however, acknowledged by his enemies, and would in a man of inferior capacity have deserved to be recorded as a virtue. But it is a negative virt le at best ; and in a statesman of great ability who is contending for " crowns and kingdoms," and has neither children nor family to pro vide for, it seems of no difficult attainment. He must be a fool indeed who woulu barter the mighty space of such large honours for so much trash as may be grasped at. We feel no pleasure in calling attention to the fact of a public subscription having been made for Mr. Fox, to the amount of thirty-six thousand pounds, when he had squandered the enormous sums of money given to him by his father, to whose fortune the maxim of " ill got, ill gone," is painfully applicable. The fact of the " rate in aid " having been levied. from Whig pockets for the sustenance of Mr Pox has been the precedent for the eleemo synary assistance given to stipendiary patriots like Mr. O'Connell and Mr. Cobden. The largesse given to Charles Fox ought to have been recollected when Lord Holland vilified the acts of Sheridan. Even so truly eminent a member of the Whig party as the late Earl Grey does not escape from his aspersion. He commemorates the altercations between Lord Grey and his brother-in-law, Mr. Whitbread. He even insinuates that the conduct of Lord Grey had the effect of shortening his relative's life. Here are Lord Holland's words : Mr. Whitbread was always surrounded by flatterers; some, from mere servility of disposition and submissive admiration of all he said or did ; others, with baser desiEns of interest or revenge, instilled suspicions and inflamed his animosity against his brother-in-law. Lord Grey, on the other hand, frank, artless, and impetuous, and conscious .of the sincerity as well as purity of his affections, never measured his words nor restrained his warmth in his in tercourse with a man with whom he had been so long and so intimately connected. The uneasy footing nn which they lived was a source of vexation to both. Perhaps it was ultimately fatal to the peace, the fortune, and even the life of Mr. Whitbread. Who but Lord Holland would have insinu ated that quarrels with Lord Grey had short ened the days of Whitbread? We have always thought that Whitbread, like Lord Castlereagh, lost his reason from having been vastly overworked. The management of his extensive brewery in Chiswell street and of his large lauded property, along with his in cessant exertions as an active member of Parliament, were enough to overtask any man ; i and, n addition to these toils, he tried to arrange the chaotic concerns of Drury-lane Theatre. The charge against Lord Grey of' " not measuring his words " comes with sin- THE PRESS. gular grace from the pen of a nobleman whose posthumous memoirs incriminate friends and foes. Mr. Whitbread was rather intractable in his party, and Lord Byron happily called him " the Demosthenes of bad taste; " and Lord Grey would not allow himself to be brow beat by any man. But when the illustrious name of Grey, which stands so high for per sonal honour and consistency, is thus assailed by the censorious pen of Lord Holland, we need not expect that any reputation can es cape from the "safe malignity" of his acri monious style. Lord Holland delights in accusing his contemporaries of being sur rounded by " flatterers "—a charge which might have been retaliated on this dinner giving peer. Mr. Macaulay has drawn the character of Windham—" the finest gentleman " of the age ; his form developed by . every i " manly exercise ; his face beam in g with n " telligence and spirit ; the ingenious, the " chivalrous, the high-souled Windham."* Of this brilliant man we are told by Lord Holland, " He loved flattery, and his palate loved it in a "gross form ,and served up in the meanest p latter : ' ' The insinuation is both false and foul. Sooner than truckle to some of the public journals, Windham endured being unreported in the debates, and he tauntingly called the press that fourth estate." We lose all patience when we are told " that the most fulsome " adulation from an inferior blinded his dis " cernment " (p. 206) ; " his vanity stifled all " affection and deadened all feelings for others " in him " (p. 209); " that he was more capable " of hatred than love in private" (p. 210) — charges that we have no hesitation in pro nouncing to be calumnies upon the memory of a right noble Englishman. In the same way Mr. Grattan is sneered at for "his singular " manners ;" and it is falsely said that "he " was exclusively interested iu Irish affairs " (p. 237). So deeply interested was Henry Grattan iu imperial affairs that in 1808 he called upon the English Parliament to put down "the French party in Ireland," and cast away his Irish popularity by doing so ; and again, in 1815, he zealously supported Govern ment in calling for war against France Lord Holland, as " a French Whig," ought to have recollected such facts. In a similar way the personal honour of Mr. Curran (pp. 167-8) is asperse I ; and so with Sheridan, and almost every other public character submitted to his censure. It is evident that such " memoirs " cannot be allowed to rank with the historical materials already in existence. We have derived only one satisfaction in perusing the volume — namely, that it demonstrates, in its prolix account of the Fox-Grenville Cabinet, how " Coalitions" carry within them the seeds of early dissolution. We have found one good maxim and one well written passage in the volume. The following aphorism we espe cially commend to the notice of the Earl of Aberdeen ; and we bring it under his lord ship's notice, as, though he finds time to read the PRESS, he may not have leisure to pore over the twaddle of Lord Holland : Neithertalent nor luck can confer in this country any permanent influence over our councils on a man who has nothing in his character congenial with the prince or the people. And the solitary passage of clever writing is Lord Holland's characterisation of Addington, Lord Sidmouth : I have no predilection for the individual, and still less for the species of politicians to which he belongs. He has above once been raised by plausibility, servility, and conve• nience, arising from a concurrence of accidents, to an emi nence infinitely beyond the reach of his capacity. Like most men so circumstanced, he has incurred, and probably deserved, the imputation of duplicity. His empty and pompous manner exposed him to ridicule; and old Lord Liverpooljnstly observed that he was laughed out of power and place in 1803 by the beau monde, or, as that grave old politician pronounced it, the biu mood. The folly, how ever. of Lord Sidmouth was of a sort very congenial will - . that of large bodies of the community. Great appearance of moderation, inward admiration as well as outward obser vance of forms, an elaborate and earnest profession of al; the . commonest principles of morality and the tritest mamma of wisdom, uniformly distinguished him in public In private he had no vice but wine ; and his jokes and stories. though frequent and numerous, were inoffensive as well as dall. His respect for all foimer ministers and past transactions was unfeigned, and the importance he attached to trifles was too well acted not tube very sincere. His vet, mediocrity recommended him to those (and they are not • Essay oa Warreia liiiiitings. SATURDAY, few) who dread and dislike all superiority of talent. There were more persons than one who felt what an acquaintance of mine expressed on his (Mr. Addington's) Ministry. " He was glad," he said, " that Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox should know that, in spite of their speaking and fine talents, the business of the country could be conducted in a plain way by a man who had no pretensions to genius." Of such men Lord Sidmouth has always been an idol. He was the fairest specimen, the truest type of the genus, " The knight of the shire, who represents them all." 1 In the foregoing words we fancy that we are reading of a personification of the Peelite nature, which may be accepted as a piece of " philosophy teaching by examples." Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, d.c., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea with the Capitan Pacha. By Captain Adolphus Slade, R.N., F.R.A.S., Admiral in the Turkish Fleet (Muchaver Pacha). Loudon : Saunders and Otley. ALTHOUGH critics are vigilant, it frequentlyhap pens, as in the present instance, that valuable works are permitted to remain in temporary oblivion until some accident occurs to resusci tate them and vocal attention to the merits of their authors. In this case we should probably have heard nothing snore of one of the best books of travel of our time, excepting that such a book had been long out of print, if the interest attached to Captain Slade's position as an admiral in the Turkish fleet had not naturally revived attention to the records of his former experience. Captain Slade, as the original preface stated, was at Constantinople in May, 1829, at the time when the second campaign between the Czar and the Sultan was commencing. Accident procured him the acquaintance of the Capitan Pacha, with whom he cruised in the Black Sea; and he subse quently made an excursion by land, in which he passed through the Russian lines and sur veyed the scenes of the campaigns which had just been concluded by the treaty of Adrian ople. It is singular to what an extent his acute observations on what he then beheld apply to passing events, though the advances made by the Turks within the last twenty years, on which he is a most competent wit ness, have confessedly changed his opinion of the resources of the Ottoman empire. Apart from their political interest, these records have the high, because rare, literary merit of delight ing the reader with the liveliest descriptions in a free effortless style, which combines admirably with the solid judgment and manly sense of their conclusions. It is obvious that if Captain Slade had not been devoted to the duties of his profession he might have achieved a considerable literary reputation, as extracts, which we will select almost at random, evince. The following is his amusing account of a ball on board an English ship-of war then in the Bosphorus in celebration of the recent peace : We, who remained at Pera, had occasion, soon after wards, to behold the Osmanleys in a very unusual position ; viz., mixing with European society with a degree of versatility and comlescension so unexpected, that the dragomans, a race peculiarly unsusceptible and difficu't to beguile into a display of feelings, gave way for the first time in their lives to expressions of astonishment, and declared that nothing more could surprise them. The object was a ballo, the name which the Osmanleys have since adopted, as vernacular, to signify the simultaneous movement of numerous pairs of legs to music, on board the Blonde, which was fitted up for the occasion with a taste and splendour rarely equalled in the British navy, where such things, too, are well understood. Sir R. Gordon was the giver of this fete in celebration of the peace, and the Turkish Ministers were asked to meet the Frank society ; a novel combination, which greatly amused the most of us, in anticipation, but rather ruffled the composure of the true believers, and of the fair Europeans in general. The ladies took it into their heads that they were only invited to dance for the amusement of the Osmanleys—a gratuitous calumny on our worthy ambassador—and declared, whether or no, that, consider ing the estimation in which Mussulmans held women, it was indelicate to exhibit before them at all. They were perfectly correct in their opinion ; but, when the moment came, these, and all such idle considerations, gave way to the pleasure of a ball on board ship. On the other hand, there were a few prejudices to vanquish, and the Sultan's leave to be obtained. He, however, so far from refusing it, would gladly have assisted in his own sacred person, had not state etiquette prevented. The most difficult man to persuade to soil himself by so close an approach to Christian debauchery was the Reis Effendi ; but when he found that his brother ministers were going, and that the Sultan wished it, consented. "Wonderful! if they do, why should not I go ? Inshollah ! I will go." Heavy rains retarded some days this grand experiment on I I I \