The Press. — London, England, 1856-08-23 00:00:00

798 The question of the supply of food is occupying general attention. The harvest has been bad, and a dread of " famine " k general among the lower classes. Large importations of wheat are taking In Lisbon some serious bread riots have occurred. Intelligence to the 14th states that everything was then tranquil. TURKEY AND THE PRINCIPALITIES. The announcement of the approaching arrival of M. de Boutenieff to the Grand Vizier by Prince Gortschakoff, instead of to the Miaister of Foreign Affairs, had produced a considerable sensation. The Journal of Constantinople also announces that Sir Houston Stewart, who is cruising in the Black Sea, had appeared off Odessa. General Strogonoff, governor of that town, after demanding instructions from his G overnmen t by telegraph, ac quainted Sir H. Stewart that orders had been given for the evacuation of Kars, of Ismail, of Reni, and of Kilia, and that the evacuation would be completed before the expiration of the term of six months fixed by the treaty of Paris. The eight Russians, it is reported, on the Isle of Serpents, had been removed and landed at Odessa in a British man-of-war, by orders of Sir Houston Stewart. The Journal Francais of Bucharest gives a de tailed account of the installation of Prince Alexander Gliika as. Kaimakan or Lieutenant-Governor of Wallachia, including the text of the firman, the speech of Kiamil Bey, and the reply of the Prince. In the firman Wallachia is spoken of as an integral part of the Sultan's empire, and as " our Imperial province," and mention is made of the privileges granted by the Porte to the Wallachians. Another unsatisfactory passage was the following Until the moment of the revision of the statutes actually existing, those statutes must necessarily be conformed to in principle. Every act concerning the administration and future state of thc, country which shall not be conform. able to the existing regulations must be considered in prin ciple as non avenue. In his speech Kiamil Bey made use of words which were listened to, says the correspondence from Bu charest, in mournful and expressive silence : Wallachia is to maintain a calm and dignified attitude, and to have full and entire confidence in the sentiments of exalted benevolence of his Imperial Majesty the Sultan, to hasten the internal administrative ameliorations which will be diwussed, approved, and put into execution by the Sublime Porte. Prince Ghika's reply was brief, and included the following sentence : I beg your Excellency to believe that I will do my utmost in order that the inhabitants of Wallachia, happy in the consolidation of their rights and of their welfare, may un ceasingly bless the august name of his Imperial Majesty. The words in italics, upon which the Kaimakin laid particular emphasis, were received with enthusi astic arplaii.e. _ . The consuls of Prussia and Austria were not present at the reading of the firman. AMERICA. Tntelligence from New York to the Bth inst. has arrived. In Congress, the Army and Navy Appropriation Bills had been passed. The President had commu nicated with the Senate in answer to the resolution calling for information relative to affairs in San Francisco, together with the correspondence on the subject. The President informed them that the Governor of California had requested the use of both naval and military forces of the United States to restrain the insurrectionary, movements. The President, sup ported with the Attorney-General Cushing's opinion, declined to interfere. Mr. BUCHANAN, the candidate for the American Presidency, according to the scandal of the American papers, lately repressed an opinion on the outrage by Brooks. At the recent annual Commencement of Franklin and Marshall College, held at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Mr. Buchanan was present, and a young orator, named Davis, made a speech, in which he referred to the degeneracy of the politicians of the present day : So truckling in their character and destitute of moral courage and political integrity, that men are found who applaud the attack of Canine Brooks upon the noble Sumner for defending freedom. At the delivery of this sentence the whole house heartily applauded. On retiring to his seat Mr. Buchanan said to him, loud enough that the whole class could hear—" My young friend, you look upon the dark side of the picture. Mr. Sumner's speech was the most vulgar tirade of abuse ever delivered in a deliberative body." To which the young orator replied, that he " hoped Mr. Buchanan did not ap prove of the attack upon Mr. Sumner by Brooks and others." To which Mr. Buchanan rejoined, that " Mr. Brooks was inconsiderate, but that Senator Butler was a very mild man." THE PRESS. THE CORONATION OF THE EMPEROR OF RUSSIA. " OUR Special Correspondents " have already trans ferred themselves to St. Petersburg, and letters upon the coronation of the Emperor may now be looked for as regularly as those a few months since from the " Head quarters' Camp, Sebastopol." AU correspondents unite in declaring that the magnificence of the ap proaching ceremony will surpass every effort of modern times. Fetes, fireworks, reviews, and re joicings are to be upon a scale befitting a nation of seventy millions. The actual ceremony of coronation will, however, be witnessed by very few, for the church at Moscow is so small that scarce a thousand persons can be accommodated, and if each of the many foreign ambassadors intend, like Lord Gran ville, to be followed by a train of a hundred valets-d- pied, there will be little room for the principal actors in the scene. The three principal foreign ambassadors, Count Esterhazy, Count Morny, and Lord Granville, appear to have created an immense sensation : PRINCE ESTERHAZY. Among other personages here is Prince Paul Esterhazy, the Austrian Envoy, whose appearance at the coronation is expected to be surrounded with a magnificence inferior only to that of the French and English ambassadors. His diamonds are known to be among the finest possessed by any private person in the world, and far excel those which several crowned heads could boast; they constitute, it is said, a large part of his entire wealth. These diamonds are actually to decorate his housings. All the envoys— the representatives of all the powers and states of Europe —seem to have orders to spare no expense to do honour to Alexander 11., and to increase by their emulous magni ficence the solemnity of a coronation which is understood to be ,a sort of sacred ratification of the general peace. Hero at St. Petersburg nothing is talked of but these splendid preparations ; stories are told of the credit which this envoy and that envoy, or the distinguished individuals that accompany them, have brought upon Baron Stieglitz and other bankers ; everybody pretends to set everybody else right respecting the exact amounts, and the most enormous sums are mentioned. In the midst of this tattle and this pretended exactitude about thousands and hun dreds of thousands, there is one " credit" which eclipses all the rest for exactly the opposite reason. It is the French Ambassador's. " Sir, 1 have seen the letter with these eyes," says a well-known wholesale merchant of gossip. "And the amount? What is the amount?" He draws in his breath with a whistling sound ere he will gra tify the curiosity of the silently expectant group; and then, in an awful undertone, pronounces these words, No amount—any amount. The credit is unlimited—Wimiii. When the mind has recovered from this shock, a polite Frenchman observes—" C'est 4,4 nothing can equal Milord Ciranville's horses and carriages ; and he will have the last English envoy's house at Moscow, which was turned into a magazine after Nicholas's coronation, and will be turned back into a palace for Alexander's.—Post corr. COUNT MORNY. The tribute of respect which the French Envoy paid to the Empress Mother—fur the sake of visiting whom as he passed he himself announced that he had selected the route by which he came—is deeply felt, and much praised here by the Russians. One lady of great rank—a Russian Rus sian— remarked that she thought far more of that mode of arriving in Russia than if he had come by sea in the finest line-of-battle ship. M de Morny is already a very great favorite. One obvious means of winning the Rus sian heart has certainly not been neglected by him. M. de Morny's mode of living touches the very chord which most readily vibrates in Russia into goodwill and admira tion. One little fact will show the scale on which his estab lishment is conducted. Every morning regularly a hun dred bottles of Medoc are delivered at his door for the use of his domestic servants till next morning. Among the vulgar in Russia the number of a great personage's domes tic servants is, in the higher and more princely sphere of life, all through the year, that gauge of his social preten sions which the fur in the collar of his shooba constitutes in a more humble station during the winter months.—lb. LORD GRANVILLE. The Hotel Demouth, where Lord Granville is sojourn ing for the short time before the corps diplomatique set out to Moscow, is situated on the first canal that crosses the Nevaky Prospect, and crowds of isvostchiks, and other Russian idlers of the lower class, succeeded each other all day long, Friday, Saturday, and yesterday, on both sides of the canal, and upon the police bridge, or Politziiskoe Most, to gaze at such of the new inmates as occasionally ap peared upon the massive balcony. One, an English naval officer, attracted the greatest attention, thanks to his thoroughly professional look, and to the uniform which set it off. The isvostchiks were never tired pointing to him, and then to their own shoulders, to indicate the gleam of his ponderous bullion epaulettes, exclaiming, " Ah ! dobrah eta! Ah ! carasho ! " " Ah ! how fine he is ! how splendid!" I told you in a former letter about the 100 bottles of regularly ordered diurnal Medoc for the Count de Morny's servants. Our Embassy, tender of the calves of those colossal footmen, vigilant for the stomachs of those imposing haul-kale (or " indoor•louts," as I have heard this translated) on whose physical condition so much of the majesty of our island depends, has been at least as provident. Lord Granville is quite right to attach importance to his being attended by a hundred vakts-apied at the coronasion. The Russians cannot conceive what ambassadors come here for, if not to spend plenty of money—and then to have considerably less than the full benefit of it. Everybody, from the iavostchik who drives you to the landlord who lets you his house, cheats every body else in a good-humoured spirit.X If the impostor is SATURDAY, detected by you, he respects your acuteness as having beaten him ; but it is all a sort of game—better luck next time. If his imposition passes good, he still respects you as being able to stand it. None are despised but those who have nothing to be cheated out of. The French Am bassador is revered, venerated at this moment in St. Petersburg; and if a story which I have just heard be true, as I believe it to be, Lord Granville (who, by the way, has just this instant arrived at Cronstadt) will be held in equal veneration at Moscow. The statement is this :he has, of course, taken a house at Moscow; but he has taken it only fcr a month, the requisite period. Prince Dolgoroulti, the Minister at War, has also taken a house at Moscow for a month. There is not very much diffe rence in the accommodations of the respective houses (ex cept that Lord Granville's has no suitable ball•room) ; and what do you suppose each pays? Lord Granville pays 40,000 silver roubles ; Prince Dulgorouki 8,000 ; the One 7,0001., the other 1,2001.—1 b. When Lord Granville arrived at Cronstadt a small imperial steamer at once came out and took his Excellency and suite on board. Entering the passage round the granite fortresses of Cronstadt, is a moment of special interest to all English tourists Of course, when we approached that world-renowned chain of marine fortresses, every one rushed upon desk, and spy-glasses were in instant requisition, and eager questions were asked about the famous place that had laughed at the fleets of two great nations, and at which British admirals had contented themselves with looking at the longest possible ridge. I must confess that at first the general feelingowas ao llte ,of surprise, and every, one asked his neighbour, err these the forts before which Napier hesitated, and Dundee declined to attack ? We saw three stone forts standing at long distances across the harbour, which appeared to us not much larger than Martello towers; and each armed with three tiers of only twelve guns.: Seaward there appeared a broad expanse of water, in w • a large fleet might manceuvre ; and to the north the 1 which Admiral Napier himself dis covered, and of dh, up to that time, even the Russians had no idea. To unprofessional eyes it appeared that the prudence muit have been great which prevented the attack on Cronstailt in the early part of the war. It is, however, only fair to airtdc,that the naval and military men on board were of a diffeent opinion, the former pointing out that although the seeming expanse of water was broad, the real channel was exceedingly narrow, and the latter, amongst whom was an Italian officer who had served in the defence of Rome, averring that a hostile fleet going up in twos and threes would inevitably be sunk the moment they came within range of the guns.—D. News cor. The new regime at St. Petersburg is spoken of very favorably:— In due time we arrived at St. Petersburg, and had a foretaste of the improved regime which every one here hopes for, in the great courtesy and forbearance of the Customhouse officers, who to my great surprise were perfect lambs in comparison wtth the stern functionaries of Dover or Folkestone. They did not even open the books in my portmanteau, although the word " Russia " appeared conspicuously on the back of every one of them. It is generally understood that this is only part of the new system, and that the new Emperor contemplates even more startling innovations than this satisfactory relaxation of the rules of the Douane. One little instance I may mention, as the straw showing the way the wind blows. In the late Emperor's time smoking in the streets was strictly prohibited, but shortly after the accession of the present, his Imperial Majesty was himself seen smoking along the quays—a quiet hint that the " counterblast " had been allowed to die out of itself. The Count de Morny has presented to the Em peror of Russia the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Legion of Honour from the Emperor Napoleon. Le Nord publishes some details respecting the re ception of M. de Morny by the Emperor. At the grand ball given on the occasion of the anniversary of the Empress's birthday, M. de Morny had the honour of dancing with her Majesty and with her Imperial Highness Alexandra, the wife of the Grand Duke Constantine. During the supper the Emperor, who was walking round the tables, conversed re peatedly with the members of the French Embassy. At four o'clock on the afternoon of the same day an official dinner took place in the palace of the Eng lish Garden ; M. de Morny proposed as a toast, "The Emperor Alexander 11. and the Empress," expressing, in a few graceful words, his grateful sense of the reception he had met with, and which he considered as a new proof of the sympathy exist ing between the two States. He concluded with saying he was persuaded that the relations so happily and cordially renewed between Russia and France would be consolidated more and more. The Count of Borch, grand master of the ceremonies, in reply, proposed " The Health of the Emperor and Em press of the French," and thanked the French Am bassador for his friendly words. _ Le n ord also accounts for the apparent preference shown to M. de Morny over Count Esterhazy in the earlier reception : Count Esterhazy, having learned that the Count of . Morny was leaving for St. Petersburg, made his prepare. tions so as to arrive at that city before the French repre sentative. A few days after he desired to be presented officially to the Czar; but his presentation could not take place, for Count Esterhazy had forgotten to bring with him his credentials. 1n the meantime M. de Morny arrives, who a few days after solicits and obtains his official pre sentation. He had not forgotten his credentials. Of all