The Press. — London, England, 1855-06-30 00:00:00

JUNE 30, 1855. instances of error cr neglect which have been bla zoned forth do not develop the question fairly, nor .... . • have the Reformers yet offered any reasonable solu tion of the difficulty. The Dublin opens with a good article upon the Reform Bill, " Twenty-five Years Ago," but from which we have not space to make extracts. A review of the " Works of Napoleon the Third" will be found highly interesting, as much from the intrinsic merit of the writings themselves as from the insight, slight though it be, which may be obtained from them to the character of the present Emperor of the French. The whole of his works are here reviewed seriatim, and the writer concludes with this opinion : His political creed, all things considered, is not, we think, a dangerous one. His opinions &renew, but they are not revolutionary. A profound conviction of the necessity of adapting himself to the course of events prevents him adopting any absolute notions. His mind instinctively coalesces with the tendencies in existence. He is anxious to keep in front of the movement, but he never attempts to go in a contrary direction. If, then, we may not expect in Louis Napoleon a regenerator, neither need we appre hend a disturber of the existing order of things. His political conduct since the coup deaf corroborates this conclusion. Nothing could be more just or moderate than his foreign policy ; and his speeches, so pat to the pre veiling ideas that every one hails them as the best expres- sion of his own notions, prove that he is sailing quietly in the strong current of human events. These considerations to a considerable extent allay those misgivings which we might otherwise entertain from Louis Napoleon's avowed idolatry of his uncle, and from► his own deficiency in strong moral principle. He will give due weight to altered circumstances in his attempt to apply the idle Napoleonienne to France or Europe ; and as it is an arrangement of Providence that the truly useful is, in the main, the just and right, we may hope that the strong in tellect of Napoleon 111. will lead him to results which good men would wish to see accomplished. There are many other interesting subjects treated in this number, among which we may mention " Sheridan as a Dramatic Writer," "Polynesia," and " The Ballads of Spain ;" but from the concluding political article upon " The Government and the War " we may extract a passage or two. After reviewing the policy of the late Cabinet and the pro gress of the war, the writer declares that it is obvious that neither Lord Palmerston nor his followers are the men for the time. The want of the country is An honest and firm Government, ready to carry on the war with energy, avoiding the tricks of diplomacy, which gave been all exposed, and preferring a peace earned by victory to tarrying at the door of Francis Joseph's palace or elsewhere. We want a Ministry prepared to reform abuses, to raise the military character of the country, to recover the ground we have lost. We want in the premier ship a leader having the nation at his back, and a compact party to sustain him ; we want in the War•office a man of experience in the conductin ,, of war, of vigour of mind, of independent force of character, and comprehensive genius. Such a statesman has been pointed out in Lord Ellenborough. His late efforts towards the more active and efficient conduct of the war seem to mark him the successor of Lord Panmure. Of the fear that the Conservatives could not form a Government in event of Lord Palmerston's resigna tion, he observes : Lord Derby did not fail on a late occasion. He found it then impracticable to unite the parties he considered ne cessary to a stable and efficient Government, in the pre sent condition of the House of Commons. He was opposed by the Peelites, between whom and a genuine Conserva tive there is, as it were, a gulf fixed ; he was cheated by Lord Palmerston, who to secure undisputed possession of the goal of his long ambition, rid himself of Lord Derby, and then of the dear trio, without whose aid he at first declared he could not accept office. But things are changed much, even within four months ; and so disgusted are the people of every party with the " smallness of the men now in power tout they are ready to force their representatives to give a fair trial to any Cabinet which shall come forward with boldness and determination to apply strong remedies to our national diseases ; and we firmly believe that, even without a dissolution, the Conservatives, by laying aside their peculiar party questions, and throwing their whole energy into the war, would command the suffrages of the country, which, in the existing position of affairs, would be to command the House. Beat/ey presents, as usual, a light and amusing table of contents. We have a political sketch of our present position; another, more graphic, of Kertch and the Cimmerian Bosphor us ; a portrait of the present Emperor of Russia, drawn more favorably than that by De Eustine ; the history of Mormons; end a pleasant, kindly sketch of Leigh Hunt as an essayist. .d Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland. By Sir Bernard Burke, Ulster King of Arms. Part I. London : Hurst and Blackett. Tins is the first of four parts of an elegantly-printed new edition of Sir Bernard Burke's well-known " Dictionary of the Landed Gentry." From its very nature it is almost impossible to reach perfection in so extensive an undertaking. The author has, how ever, by great labour and care, produced a full and valuable record of the lineage and connections of a THE PRESS. multitude of the untitled families of the three king doms, which has the additional advantage of being the only work on the subject, and of preserving much information which in the little attention at present paid to genealogy might have otherwise been lost. The besetting danger, however, of the author of such a work (as well as of peerages) is the readi ness of those to supply information who most fre quently have nothing valuable to communicate, and the apathy of the more ancient families on the subject of modern heraldic publications. This will occa sionally result in the production of genealogies somewhat resembling that furnished to one of his characters by Theodore Hook, and Sir Bernard Burke deserves commendation for the comparatively small number of such epic efforts that he has allowed to pass. Those who were interested in the late newspaper controversy as to "Who are the aristocracy f " will find a full answer in this elaborate book. The simple rule by which they might have decided—namely, whether feudal privileges had or had not remained in a par ticular family—would, on the testimony of these genealogies, have gone in favour of those of the landed gentry who owed neither to the Revolution of 1688, nor to the necessities of Walpole, nor to the more grim extremity of the recent Whigs, their rank in the aristocracy. Had peerages been created at the pace at which they were conjured from 1830 to 1840, Heraldry would have found herself even in a more unfortunate plight than that in which she now labours. The threat of James the Second's Lundle. land, that he would swamp the peers, " should he " have to put coronets upon a troop of horse," was anything but a ridiculous boast in the days of the Whig lordmakers ; and the affectation of taking titles from family names, in imitation of many of the peerages by writ, gave that air of antiquity to the new creations, which sat on them as gracefully as venerable worm-holes in a modern mediaeval cabinet. Such dealings with the peerage made a book like the present desirable, and, as we have said, it con tains much valuable information. There is, how ever, by far too great a space devoted to Irish families, many of them of the most inconsiderable position or descent ; and some, whose Anglicised names were adopted in lieu of their own by pressure of the acts suppressing Irish Celtic patronymics, seem to have a prevailing mania for deriving their origin from noble houses of England and Scotland, in place of their own ancient ancestry. An Historical Sketch of the Crimea. By Anthon: Grant, D.C.L., Archdeacon of St. Albans. London Bell and Daldy. THE history of the Crimea is full of in terest and historic association ; and to suc cessfully detail the ever varying fate and fortune of this " battle-field " of the East and West requires not only the fluency of the accomplished writer, but the genuine knowledge and research of the student. In both these qualities Dr. Grant excels, and his historical sketch reads more like a romance than as a record of bygone ages. For centuries previous to the acquisition of the Crimea by Russia it had been the point of contest or con course for Scythian and Persian, Roman and Goth, Hun and Turk. No country in the world, Dr. Grant tells us, presents such " a series of vicis " situdes so varied, so continuous. The land is " literally scarred with the footprints of bygone " events" : All the great nations of historic times have left on its surface traces of their power. Not for its own sake, but for the sake of other interests, it has been compelled to be the arena or witness of vast conflicts and antagonisms, under which it has groaned and suffered. One of its towns was the capital of a considerable kingdom. and was at one time embellished with the richest treasures of ancient art : another acquired the title of the birthplace of the Russian Church. Two great nations, the offspring of the barbaric period, after perishing in other lands, here lingered as in their last asylum, and then expired. Its waters have been swept by the most renowned fleets that have ever commanded the sea. Its hills have been the refuge of the oppressed ; its valleys the scenes of terrible slaughter: its plains the resting-place of every savage horde in its migration from east to west. And this change ful fate has followed it up to the present time without in termission, and now it is gathering to itself a fresh and more lasting celebrity. Among other facts connected with its history is the remarkable one of the first investment and defence of Sebastopol. Vladimir, one of the early Grand Dukes of Russia, deciding upon becoming a Christian, sought to signalise his baptism by a deed of great daring : In A.D. 9MB the harbour of Sebastopol saw the troops and ships of the Russian chieftain enter its straits, and the former moored in front of what is now called the Quarantine Bay. Hut, as if in early augury of its powers of defence, the town offered a more desperate and pro tracted resistance than he had expected. His besieg►ng works were undermined, and his assaults repulsed. After many failures to take the town, when solicited to raise the siege, he vowed that he would stay there three years rather 623 than not succeed. Yet, foiled he must have been, had not a treacherous monk within the city (his name, reserved for execration, was Anastasius) shot an arrow into the hostile camp with information of certain underground aqueducts which supplied the town from the cut with water. Vladimir lost no time in cutting oil' these channels, and the town was forced to capitulate. He received the city as a gilt of ti 04.1, celebrated his victory by being bap tised and married, and in token of his clemency and thank fulness he at once restored the town to the Emperor. On the heights overhanging the quarantine harbour, among the ruins of Chersou, still stand the remains of the Church of Vladimir, probably marking the very spot where the Russian chieftain received the seal of his Christian adoption. Under such circumstances the gallant resistance of the town speaks highly for the peculiar capability of defence it possesses by natural position. There is one fact worthy of notice. The Russian general in chief has lately exclaimed against the barbarity of the allies destroying the museum at Kertch. The incident is to be deploted, yet as an act of some ignorant marauding Turks there is some excuse to be offered ; but let us bear what Dr. Grant tells us of the devastation effected by the Russian themselves in 1787-8: All that was ancient was doomed and destroyed. Kertch and Kaffa especially were scenes of worse than Vandal devastation. Beautiful mosques and minarets; public fountains and aqueducts, the pride and the great glory of the Moslem; public edifices, however imposing and sacred, were overthrown ; trees were cut down, tombs rifled, the relics of the dead cast abroad, swine led out of coffins, and the monuments of antiquity annihilated. The traveller Clarke, in 1800, watched the rude Russian soldiery pulling down the principal minaret at Kaffa; and while the inmertuibable lurks were breathing deep and bitter imprecations on the enemies of the Prophet, even a tireek turned and muttered, iu scorn and indignation, X x iAsi (barbarians) ! In the few pages of this modest little book the leading facts of Crimean history will be found narrated in a manner equally perspicuous and entertaining. Quintus Horatius Flaceus. London : Bell, and Daldy. A NEW edition of Horace, printed from Mr. Mac leane's text, would not call for remark were it not for the novel and appropriate illustrations which in this present edition embellish the pages of this favorite author. The design of this volume is not only to offer an illustrated edition of the work, but, in the words of the preface, "to put before the " readers of Horace a few good specimens of the " source from which many of his expressions are no " doubt derived," and thus helping to illustrate the allusions, as well as explain the text of the author. Forty-seven engravings from antique medals, and statues drawn w►th care and executed with great finish, all illustrative or suggestive, adorn its pages, while. at a moderate price, and in the excellent taste in which it is got up, this edition has a great claim to the patronage of all who would possess, at little cost, the most elegant edition of the works of this poet. The Romance of the Aristocracy. By Sir Bernard Burke. New and Revised Edition, in Three Vols. London: Colburn. THIS collection of " Anecdotes and Records," com prising the most memorable incidents in the history of our noble houses, seems likely to become a standard work. Independent of the interest attach ing to stories abounding with singularities of cha racter, wild adventure, daring heroism, romantic peril, and exquisite strokes of pathos, the book is useful as an authentic record of that. kind of anec dotical lore which most persons have some acquaint ance with, but which passing from mouth to mouth gets so sadly disguised as to require freque► , t reference to some established authority. The anec dotes, however brief, present animated picture of the manners and sentiments of the times to whit h they refer, and the author appears to have taken great pains to verify the truth of his relations in the minutest particulars. The Jealous Wife. By Miss Pardoe. Three Vols. London : Hurst and Blackett. Miss PARDOE excels in social portraiture. The Jealous Wife " is extremely simple in structure, depending for its hold over the reader's mind on its natural delineation of incident and character in do mestic life. Expectation is the kind of interest it excites, as, until the conclusion of the book, it is im possible to foresee what turn the caprices of Ida, r the resentment of her husband, will take. The dia logue is sometimes a little stiff, as people in real life seldom address each other in such set terms as are often employed here. Ida, when excited, addresses her husband, "But we must not forget our guests; "return to them at once, dear Sydney, while I gather "up my dishevelled hair and make myself present. " able." The familiar conversation of social life, how ever, can seldom be faithfully preserved in fiction. "IN