The Press. — London, England, 1857-05-02 00:00:00

MAY 2, 1857. Could say u much for your conduct on shore, and when o u have been acting upon your own impulse:. But lam bound to sav that, estimating highly, as I do, the great services which professionally you have performed, and respecting, as I do, the noble qualities of which, in your professional career, you have given such frequent proofs, I have seen, with sincere grief, in your conduct on shore, things which sour best friends (and I claim to be one of that number)could not witness without deep regret. I do not wish however to rake up the past ; my present purpose is to answer your application for a public investi- gation of your conduct in nut having attacked Cronstadt. That application being founded upon observations which have lately been made on that subject at some public meetings. My answer is plain and simple : I think no such in vestigation necessary, because I considet your conduct in refraining from attacking Cronstadt to have been judicious and proper, and to h.tve been founded upon a correct sense of -your public duty in the very responsible situation in which you were placed as Commander•in•Chief d the Baltic fleet. The fleet which you commanded in the Baltic was a very fine fleet, and the Board of Admiralty of the day deserve great praise for having equipped and sent to sea iu so short a time so powerful an armanent. That fleet was perfectly sufficient—especially when reinforced by the French squadron—to have enabled you to give a good account of the Russian fleet if it had come out to give you battle. But the fleet under your command was not suffi• cient for the double purpose of attacking the stone batteries of Cronstadt and of afterwards encountering with success the Russian fleet. If you had attacked the batteries of Cronstadt, whatever the result ofyour attack might have been as to the Russian batteries, your ships must have been seriously damaged, and your fleet, after such an action with the batteries, would probiedy not hove been in a condition successfully to encounter the Russian fleet. The consequence of such a state of things might have been a naval disaster, or the temporary ascendancy of the Russian fleet not only in the Baltic but in the North Sea and on the coasts of England. I consider, therefore, that in the then existing state of things you acted with sound judgment in refraining from attacking the batteries of Cronstadt with the fleet under your command, and that in pursuing that course yon best performed the important and very responsible duty which you had undertaken. This is my opinion now; this was my opinion at the time ; and I think you would find it expressed in a private letter which I wrote to yon while you were still in com mand in the Baltic And this is the opinion which I have invariably expressed to all with whom I have at any time communicated upon this subject.—Aly dear Sir Charles, yours sincerely, PAUrERSTOX. Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Napier. It was only after repeated applications that Sir C. Napier was able to extract the foregoing letter from its adroit writer; but between its tone and that of the noble viscount's speech at the Reform Club there is a wide difference. The Quarterly Review. April, 1857. THE Quarterly for April, though containing no one article of that preponderating interest which occasionally is to be found within its covers, is very attractive and well written throughout. " Dred "is a remarkably good review of Mrs. Stowe's last slave tale, and we think, on the whole, impartial. The story we have always thought inferior to " Uncle Tom," and the reviewer takes exception to the cha racter of Nina on what we think sound critical grounds. Her end is not artistically true to her beginning, and her transformation in the space of three weeks is almost ridiculous. On the subject of slavery the writer maintains that the present agitation is no transitory excite ment, or merely the turbulence which must be expected in all the party conflicts of a demo cracy. He believes that it threatens civil war and dissolution of the Union. Neither party, he is convinced, will yield an inch. This accords pretty much with our own view of the case—an issue which, however, we sincerely hope may discredit our talent for prophecy. The article upon lunatic asylums is a very interesting account of all that has been done up to the present time towards amending our treatment of the insane. Of the anecdotes of madmen, perhaps the following is one of the most horrible : The utmost precaution will not always insure safety; for patients considered quite harmless will now and then commit the most horrible acts A black Mali, a butcher, who had been many years in an American asylum, and had never shown any violence, one night secreted a knife, and induced another patient to enter his cell. When his companion bad lain dArn, he cut his throat., divided him into joints, and arranged toe pieces round his .rell as he bad been accustomed to arrange his meat in his shop. He thou offered his horrible wares to his fellow.lunaties, earrying such parts as they desired to those who were chained. The keeper, hearing the uproar, examined the cells, and found one man missing; upon inquiriaig of the black butcher if be had seen him, he Misty rephed, "be THE PRESS. had sold the last joint !" Even those who have apparently harmless delusions, will sometimes, if thwarted, commit unlooked for attrocities. Not many years since an inqui• sition was held before Mr. Commissioner Winslow upon a young gentleman who would travel considerable distances to see a windmill, and cit watching it for d tys. His friends, to put an► end to his absurd propensity, removed to a place where there were no mills. The youth, to counteract the design, murdered a child in a wood, mau• gliug his limbs iu a terrible manner, in the hope that he should be transferred, as a punishment, to a situation whence a mill could be seen. " English Political Satires " is a very com plete account of this branch of our literature, and written with a sprightly air suited to the subject. "Roving Life in England" is a capital review of Mr. Borrow's last work, " The Romany Rye ;" not too long, and properly critical, bringing out all the points with great skill, and dwelling on the author's characteristic defects and merits with great judgment. We now come to what is in our opinion one of the most, if not the most, agreeable paper in the whole number—that, namely, upon Persia. It is an account of that country and its inhabitants, rather than an essay on the late quarrel, though that is briefly and lucidly explained in a couple of pages. The whole is written with great elegance and graphic power. We subjoin an extract on the Persian cha racter The Persians have been not inaptly called the French men of the East. Their elegant manners, their wit, their levity, thei" general scepticism, their taste, their love of display, their hospitality, and their cookery, give them a claim to this title as compared with the surrounding Mohammedan nations. A Persian gentleman is naturally polished and refined. It would be difficult to exceed the grace of his demeanour and his courteous address. He is intimately acquainted with the literature of his country, and will embellish his conversation and his letters with ready and apposite quotations from the poets of his nation. He will be apparently generous and unselfish. His house and its contents are yours. He is your servant and your dearest friend. He shows none of that haughty condescension for the European which the best educated Turk can scarcely conceal. But habit and lung misgovern went, the want of confidence in all around him, the fear of treachery, the constant example of deceit and falsehood before his eyes, have corrupted a character which has many noble qualities, and rendered him mean, treacherous, deceitful, and cruel. Same of these vices, especially a want of truthfulness, to be attributed to similar causes, have exteLded even to the peasantry, otherwise an honest, kind hearted, and enduring race. The propensity to falsehood has become so characteristic of the whole Persian people that it is a proverb in the East. At first the traveller is exposed to continual difficulties and mortifications from not being fully aware of the extent to which the habit is carried ; till at last he becomes so accustomed to it that, like a native of the country, he learns to believes exactly the contrary from that which he is told. For instance, if on a journey you ask a peasant the name of a village on the right hand, he is certain to give you for it the name of that on the left. Unfortunately this habit is carried far beyond the common intercourse of life, and is so universal, and considered so little deserving of condemnation, that to csll a Persian gentleman a liar to his face is no reflection whatever upon his character. This renders all diplomatic intercourse with the Court of Teheran and the Ministers of the Shah difficult anti uncertain in its results. The women, says the author, fully deserve their reputation for great beauty. The political article on the new Parliament is about as damaging a broadside as has been poured into the Liberal ranks for a consider able period. The questions alluded to are— the conduct of the Conservatives themselves (upon which some remarks will lye found in another department of our journal), the character of the new members, the bishops, China, and finance, and, finally, reform. Of the class of members Thom it has lately been the fashion to extol so much the reviewer bays:-- But even if they do make over their whole time and powers to the service of the country, they are not of an age to change their mental habits. The range of the mind is fixed the fibre cannot be stretched, and the attempt would strain and tear it. It is too late, speaking generally, to acquire the aptitudes of the old soldier of politics—his flexibility and elasticity of mind, his varied scope of view, his universality, which finds a common measure for reasons and considerations in them selves utterl heterogeneous, his unlimited freedom in the disposal and concentration of the powers he possesses upon a point, or rather upon a hundred points, taken one atter another, and having no common character, no mutual connection, except that they are massed, or it may be even jumbled together by the exigency of the hour. As Mr. Canning, Mr. Pitt, or Mr. Fox, would perhaps have made bad merchants, manufacturers, or tradesmen, even if they had started in youth, but almost certainly if they had turned to such pursuits at five and forty or thereabouts, so it appears from experience that the middle class men of this country, rising by local desert to local credit, and then turned loose into the House of Commons, add little, in proportion to their numbers, to the political mind and 437 accomplishments of that assembly. It is not that they are usually forward, restless, or unmanageable. Oa the con- trary, u to the general business of Parliament, they are tame and passive enough, and are not bad troops for a Minister to lead into a division lobby. Herein lies a great danger. These men, dazzled by the novelty of their position, and the social rank of their leaders, will be apt to lose that power of independent judgment which distinguished them in private life, and become much more subservient instruments of the Minister than members of a class which has moved from comparative youth in the sphere of politics, is not deceived by the fictitious grandeur of the pursuit, awed by individual reputations, or cowed by supe tier rank. Men who have sat in the same house with a Minister for some thirty or forty years, have heard him deliver more than a hundred speeches, have watched the play of his features, the tones of his voice, the half disguised sneer, the well-assumed indigna tion, the ready compliment, must, of neces sity, be fur better judges of his character and talents than those who know nothing but what they see in the newspapers, and believe, as Gospel truth, in the "loud and protracted cheering" which graces his provincial ova tions. With one short extract referring to the late ecclesiastical appointments we must con clude our notice : Now, by the High Churchman is meant generally the man who is disposed to abi le by the written and fixed laws of the Church of England in their letter and their spirit. and to defend them alike against Romanist, Rs tionalist, and Puritan. This party (if such, fur convt. thence sake, it must be called, but it is not justly liable to the name) still sees in the Queen the representative of Tudors and of Stuarts, to whom, after all, the Church at least has been much indebted, both for its reform and for its preservation. And yet, further, it sees in Lord Pal merston not the man fishing for a parliamentary majority, and bating his book with any garbage that may serve bis turn, but the representative of the Crown, and of the old monarchy of England. This party, like every cther, has its Extreme and its moderate forms of opinion, its vices and its virtues. Among its virtues is the disposition to suffer patiently and long at the hands of constituted authority. It is, therefore, feeble to resist and slow to complain; it is the Persia, the Naples, the China, or the Greece, of the sphere ecclesiastical ; it is, in a word, a safe party to bulb, and, being so, it is pretty sere to be bullied by Lord Palmerston. The remaining points are admirably treated— our financial dilemma stated with clearness and moderation, and "Reform" discussed with equal common sense and boldness. THE COMING LITERARY SEASON. PtiBLISHERS, writers, and readers of books ought to be sincerely glad that the General Election has at last come to an end, and that the social current has again begun to flow in its customary channels. The " season" (what import in that word') has at last begun, and if it be briefer than is usual, its general, and especially its literary, interest will be more highly concentrated. Most of the eminent bibliopoles have announced a goodly supply fur the intellectual world. Travels, Historical Papers, Biography, and Fiction are departments in which every reader will find something important and " new " for the next three mouths. " The Missionary Journal of Dr. Livingstone " (Murray) is looked to by many as being likely to be " the book of the season." It belongs to a class of works which possess peculiar interest for the English mind. It comprises personal adventure, geog►aphical experience, and something of discovery, along with precious and dearly-bought information about the heathen world in Afr►ca. Its interest is not likely to be ephemeral, and since M'Cartney's " Embassy to China " no book of travels was ever so calculated to rouse general curiosity. Travellers, indeed, have their tastes well catered fur this year, and by some " noble authors" too. Viscountess Falkland's " Chow Tow" (Hurst and Blackett), a narrative of Indian travel, will be asked for by many, if it were only for the sake of the piquantly odd title. Lord Dutfetin, whose talents are considerable, announces " The Arctic Islands" (Murray), a subject which has always engaged people ; and the Premier Duke of England. his Grace of Norfolk, is advertised as editor of •' The Life of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel" (Hurst and Blackett). "The Cornwallis Papers" (Murray) are also announced. They ought to be valuable for historical purposes, as the Marquis Cernwallis