The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1883-03-31 00:00:00

Our Youttrin (ioritspoubtnt.

(We deem It right to state that we do not at all times
Identify ourselves with our Correspondent's opinions.]

Rumours of the retirement of the Premier from
public life, when the Queen's first Minister of State
has attained an advanced age, have not been unusual
for many years past. They were often heard in the
closing days of Lord Palmerston's career. That veteran
statesman held the high office of First Lord of the
Treasury at the amazing age of 81, and there svE-re
oontinual speculations as to the date of his withdrawal
from official life. One October morning, in thc. year
1865, the newspapers announced that the aged Premier,
whilst on a visit to Brookett Hall, had been seized with
illness, and on the next day he was dead. The long.
talked of problem was thus swiftly and effectually
solved. The late Lord Derby resigned the Premier-
ship through ill-health when he was four years
younger than Mr. Gladstone is now. We have Lord
Beaconsfield's own statement that when, at 72
years of age, he proposed to the Queen that he
should retire from the post of Prime Miniater, her
Majesty suggested that a seat in the House of Lords
would lighten his work, and enable him to retain his
high and dignified office. As we all know, this idea
was acted upon, and the Right Hon. Benjamin
Disraeli became the Earl of Beaconsfield.

Comparisons have been made of the ages at which
Lord Palmerston and Mr. Gladstone held the Premier.
ship—the first at 81 and the second at 74. But it
must be remembered that the days of Lord Pal-
merston, compared with the present arliamentary
strife, were calm and peaceful. The noble lord
was, besides, of a different mental constitution
from that of his distinguished successor. He would
met an opponent with the light shafts of his
raillery, and deal with him in sarcastic banter, while
Mr. Gladstone sets to work earnestly by argument to
answer the indictment of his antagonist. To moat of
us a voyage over the sea of life which has extended to
nearly three.quarters of a century would be a period
suggestive of a desire for repose; and no one would
be surprised to hear that the rumours which float
about intermittently will come true some day. Mr.
Gladstone first took his seat upon the Treasury bench
forty-nine years ago, as a junior lord of the depart-
ment over which he now presides, and with which be
has been connected longer than any other statesman
of modern times.

The venerable German Emperor has been eel°.
brating his 86th birthday. He was born in 1797, and
Is the only last century sovereign who now occupies a
European throne. He is old enough to remember the
crushing defeat of the Prussians at Jena by the great
Napoleon, when that all•conquering captain impaled
such terms of peace as he imagined must for ever
prostrate that rising Power. He was in the retinue of
the Allied Sovereigns when they entered Paris after the
withdrawal of Napoleon to Elba in 1814; he was the
guest of the late Emperor of the French in 1867, on the
opening of the Great Exposition ; and once more he rode
through Paris in triumph on the let of March 1871,
upon the surrender of that city after a four months'
siege. He was proclaimed German Emperor whilst the
investment of the French capital was in progress, and
In the Palace of Versailles, that stately residence of
the long line of French kings. The sun shine, out
to-day upon land and sea just as it did in the month
of March, 1797, but upon practically a different
world. To the aged Kaiser Wilhelm the events of his
yeiath must seem no longer a remembrance, but a
shadowy dream, a phantom of the night, unreal, and
unsubstantial as the whistling wind.
Whether the presence of vast quantities of ice In
the Atlantic accounts for the bitter winter weather
which has lately visited thews islands, or what-
ever other cause may be assigned for it, the
result has been the same. Mr. Russell Lowell, the
United States Minister at the Court of S.
James's, has described what he calls the ethereal
mildness of an English spring; but leis well known that
very often, when we have arrived at a time at which
we ought to be bidding winter farewell, a succession
of icy winds sweep across the country, finding out the
weak points In the constitutions of the aged and the
Infirm, and carrying the young prematurely away.
The sun may be shining brightly amid the brilliance
of noon, and as day and night are now equal all over
the globe, twelve hours of sunlight ought to leave
some impression. But no sooner has that great lumi-
nary set than the heat flies of from the land as though It
were so much water, which never retains the heat,
and the nights are piercingly cold. Comparing the
temperature of Easter with that of Christmas, there
Is a difference of pretty nearly twenty degrees in
favour of the latter on the score of geniality.

We are told by those who ought to know that the
abnormally mild winter was to a great extent the cause
of the WON weather later on. The waters of even the
Arctic Ocean were affected by the loweentinued
prevalence of warm winds, and the huge masses of
Ice which stand like sentinels to guard the silence of
those frightful regions were gradually but surely
although slowly loosed from their moorings. One
after another down they drifted from their eternal
eoLitudes into frequented seas, and lately it has been
no common occurrence Lin the Atlantic for a ship to
be beset by a pack of ice 250 miles in extent. This
means not only a cooling of the water, but of the air
as well, and accounts for the late winter which we
have experienced. _ -

It is -curious to- note how antiquarian and quint
customs, originally called into existence by the be.
quests of the benevolent survive the changes which
centuries bring about, By the will of Peter Symonds,
made in 1586, sixty of the younger boys in Christ's
Hospital attended Divine service on Good Friday morn.
lag at Allhallows' Church, Lombard-street, London,
and afterwards reoeivedeach a new penny and a bag of
raising, Another good citizen of London, William
Pills by name, in 1692 directed that the minister who
preached the sermon at Allhallows' should have
twenty shillings, the clerk four shillings, and the
sexton 3s. 6d. It must, of course, be remembered that
money was of more value in those far-off times
than it is now. In another City parish twenty-one
poor widows each picked up a sixpence from a tomb.
stone in the old churchyard. This custom has been
maintained for over 400 years, the gift having been
observed, although the name of the benefactress was
long ago lost. Good Friday was a bitterly cold day
out of the sunshine, and every poor widow who
journeyed to the churchyard in order to pick up her
sixpence from a tombstone richly deserved it.
The Master of the Rolls was removed by death from
the judicial bench on the same day that Sir Robert
Phillimore announced his retirement from the office of
Judge of the Admiralty Court. Our judges do not
remain in the discharge of their duties to such an age as
many of their predecessors did. Sir George Joni was
only 59 when he died, while the late Lord Campbell
was twenty years older than that when he reached the
great ambition of a lawyer's life—the Woolsack. For-
merly the name of a judge or of a law lordkwas synony-
mous with longevity. Lord Lyndhurst on his eighty-
eighth birthday made a speech in the House of Lords
which may truly enough be said to have electrified the
Senate, for it affected a very important party division.
Lord Brougham died at the age of 89, Lord St.
Lamar& at the extraordinary age of 94, while Lord
Chancellor Campbell, at 82, was administering jus-
tice in the Court of Chancery one day, and was dead
the next. But last year the death of Lord Justice
Holker at 54, and now the removal of the Master of
the Rolls at 59, suggests that life is now more rapidly
run out than it was in former times.
The forthcoming Cricket season promises to be com-
paratively a quiet one. Easter falls so early this
year that there will be an interval of nearly five
weeks between the Colts' match at Nottingham and
the commencement of the regular season. But so far
as Easter weather is concerned, two or three weeks
seem to make but little difference in these latitude!.
In 1881 Easter was three weeks later
yet the biting east wind
,of season will be long
remembered, for It W 23 a, early hour in the morn-
ing of EasteF Tisty that Lord Beaconsfield breathed
iti; last.

The remarkable mutations of the climate in these
latitudes was never so strikingly Illustrated as in the
weather of two Bank Holidays separated by exactly
three months from each other. On the 26th of
December last—Boxing Day, when the days were at
their shortest, and the sun was above the horizon less
than a third of the twenty-four hours, the atmosphere
was mild and genial, and warm south-westerly
breezes were passing over these islands. On the
26th March—Easter Monday—when every nation in
the world is supposed to have twelve hours of sun-
shine, the temperature was many degrees lower
than it had been at Christmas; a fall of snow
late in the day materially interfering with the comfort
of many of those who had gone out holiday keeping.
So far, however, as the Volunteer Review at Brighton
was ooncerned, everything paned off well; and one
thing may be safely relied upon, that those of the men
who marched to the favourite Sussex watering place
from Loiadon and had to sleep in barns and outhouses
on the severest night of the winter will not soon forget
such an experience.

Mr. Edward Fordham Flower, who died on the
morning of Easter Monday at the ripe old age of 78,
was for very many years known as one of the best
friends of • the London carriage horse which the
metropolis poisessed. It is now more than twenty
years ago that the system of kindness to horses
initiated by Mr. Rarey attracted so much attention
in this country; and Mr. Flower has taken up the
same subject, and Insisted that the tight-bearing
rein and the /1674Z0 bigAVOretitally minecessarY: Of
late years lies has been heard of Mr. Flower, owing to
gdywiciag age ; but who ba was at the bed of his

powers his influential voice was always raised on the
Lids of kindness to nub a useful animal as that seen
by thousands in the hackney carriages that traverse
the streets of London.