The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-12-31 00:00:00

Our tronbon Corrtspumnt.

I

4
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, Jr

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Zeteurm ft right to state that we do not at all times
ourselves with our Correspondent's opinions.

On the north side of the Strand, hard by the steeple
of St. Clement Danes, which sends out over that busy
thorou4hfare some of the prettiest chimes to be heard
in London, there has been slowly rising, year by year
for well nigh half a generation, one of the costliest build-
ings in the kingdom. It is in the French form of the
Gothic style, its completion is promised for the summer
of next year, and the structure will be known as the
Royal Courts of Justice. Its architect, Mr. George
Edmund Street, RA., has unhappily not lived to wit-
ness the finishing of the vast pile whose progress he had so
long watched. The hastening crowds who bustle along
the Strand, and give a cursory glance at the Palace
of Justioe, can form little idea of the enormous
amount of labour involved in the inception of the
building. It necessitated the drawing of the almost
incredible number of three thousand plans, the last
of which Mr. Street himself prepared a few days
before his premature death. He has been taken
away at the comparatively early age of 57. Had he
survived until the opening of the Courts he would
have received the honour of knighthood, as Wren did
upon the completion of St. Paul's, and Barry upon
the opening of the Houses of Parliament.
It is, perhaps, owing to the unfamiliar appearance
of the Royal Courts of Justice, that so much difference
of opinion exists respecting the merits of the design.
Certainly the effect is, to a great extent, lost through
the structure being surrounded by buildings, in-
cluding churches, banks, and shops. It is true
that Temple Bar has been removed since the
Law Courts were begun, but it might have re-
mained even unto this day had not its founda-
tions been weakened by the excavations for the new
Courts. As it is, Mr. Street's great work is a huge
pile in a crowded street. Could it stand out alone, as
St. Paul's or the Palace of Westminster, its appear-
ance would be much more impressive. It was
originally suggested that it should be placed upon
the Thames Embankment, and those who know
the effect produced upon the mind of the beholder
as he gazes upon the river front of the Houses of Parlia-
ment, have argued that there, at all events, the
Palace of Justice might have been seen by the tax-
payers who will have the privilege of paying for it,
while in the Strand it produces but little impression.
But in this country public convenience goes for a
great deal, and ut on that ground no doubt the Strand
is the preferable site. After all it is an improvement
upon the spot selected for the Guildhall of the City of
London, which was placed quietly away in a back
street, and not like the Mansion House, the Bank of
England, and the Royal Exchange, in the midst of
great streams of traffic.
The closing year brings us face to face with the fact
that the second half of the Victorian reign has proved
extremely fatal to our eminent men. Moreover, each
successive loss only tends to make more distinct the
blank which has been created. Apropos to the
lamented death of Mr. Street, take the list of dis-
tinguished architects removed from our midst in a little
over twenty years. Sir Charles Barry and his son, Mr.
E. M. Barry, Mr. A. Welby Pugin and his son, Mr. E.
Welby Pugin, Sir George Gilbert Scott and Mr.
Street—here are six names in a splendid profession
whose obliteration from the ranks of the living makes
it very difficult indeed for the survivors to supply.
Again, in literature, in the same space of time, we
have lost Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens, George
Eliot, and Carlyle. It is not possible easily to name
five such intellects that still remain amongst us. Once
more, from the list of our statesmen have been re-
moved Lord Palmerston, Earl Russell, and the
late Earl of Derby, Sir George Cornewall Lewis,
Mr. Sidney Herbert, Sir James Graham, Mr.
Cobden, the Duke of Newcastle, the Earl of
Aberdeen, and the Earl of Clarendon. The losses
amongst our eminent judges in t e same time have
included Lord Campbell, Lord Westbury, Lord Justice
Knight-Bruce, Sir Alexander Cockburn, Lord
Chelmsford, and Lord Hatherley. And in the like
period we have witnessed the deaths of such artists
as David Cox, Clarkson, Stanfield, Sir Charles East-
lake, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Sir Francis Grant.
The grave is richer, by reason of the Mighty intellects
that mingle with the dust, than the world from
which those intellects have been taken; but just as
Nature provides a constant succession in every depart-
ment of her kingdom, BO are giants of the intellectual
world replaced by a younger race of men who attain a
distinction equal to that of their predecessors.
When Lord Beaconsfield was alive, the birthd4s of
two of our foremost statesmen, who had been Parlia-
mentary rivals from their youth up, fell in the month
of December. The late Prime Minister was born in
London on the 21st of that month, 1804, while Mr.
Gladstone was born at Liverpool on the 29th Decem-
ber, 1809. The five years' difference in age told
with fatal effect upon the late Premier when the
east winds smote him last March and exhausted
his vitality. Mr. Gladstone is now 72, but three of his
predecessors held his high office at a greater age. Lord
Palmerston was 81; and both Lord Russell and Lord
Beaconsfield were 76 when they left Downing-street
for the last time. And although Mr. Gladstone's
Parliamentary experience now borders on half- a-century,
it was exceeded by two of the illustrious men already
referred to. Lord Palmerston passed sixty years as a
member of the House of Commons, while Lord Russell
was forty-seven in the Commons and seventeen in the
_ _

Lords.
The mildness of thebeginning of winter hadbeen gene
sally anticipated by those who, had given attention to
the physical phenomena of 1881. The abnormal
severity of hut January has been followed by a re-
action, and anything more unlike the first month of
the year and the last, it would be difficult to imagine.
Some of these December days have indeed been more
like May, and were even warmer than the early days
of June. What power remained in the oblique rays of
the sun was fully given to the earth before it entered
upon another January in which the cold will scarcely
be so terrible in its intensity as was experienced last
winter. It is noteworthy that when the winter is a
mild one, there is a manifest increase in the violence
of the tempests which sweep the Atlantic. While the
icebergs, by the severity of last winter's frost, have
been chained up in their own gloomy regions and
thus prevented from cooling the warmer waters of the
southern ocean, the winds have been unloosed, and any-
thing like the hurricanes in this stormiest of seas
has not often been equalled, and certainly never
surpassed. The graphic descriptions of the Atlantic
tempests which have been lately given in the news-
papers to the public, , excite surprise that any power
exercised by man could prevail against them.
The fruits of American newspaper enterprise are
seen in ways so different from anything to which we
are accustomed in our own country, that some ef the
results are not a little astonishing. Ten years ago
Mr. James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the
New York Herald, equipped the expedition which,
under Mr. H. U. Stanley, discovered Livingstone.
Next, Mr. Stanley was started by Mr. Bennett on a
journey of exploration that lasted for years, and the re-
sults of which have been fully described in the interest-
ing volume, "Through the Dark Continent." In June,
1879, Mr. Bennett, at an expenditure of £lO,OOO, fitted
out the Jeannette for the purposes of Arctic research;
and it has only just been reported that the gallant little
vessel was crushed by icebergs many months ago.
Deserving a better fate, it was, however, only that of
many a noble ship that, in the interests of scientific
exploration, having penetrated into those regions of
eternal ice, has found it impossible to escape.
At this time of the year the newspapers invariably
assume an aspect which tells its own story. Those
speeches by public men on public affairs, or extra-
Parliamentary utterances, or Parliament out of session,
or members and constituents, as they are variously
called by the various journals, now for a time disappear,
and in their places are charitable appeals, advertise-
ments of gift books for Christmas and New Year, and
reviews of the same books in the news columns. The
provincial speeches will come back again before
Parliament assembles, which happily for those of our
legislators who are of advanced age, is not this time on
the 6th January, but on the 7th February. Both
noble lords and honourable gentlemen will have
enjoyed this season all the better for the thought that
in the language of the Royal Proclamation summon-
ing Parliament, they were not "required and com-
manded" to assernole at Westminster on Twelfth
Day, there to run the risk of perishing in coming out
in the dead of night from the artificially heated House
of Commons into the bitter cold of a Siberian winter.
It seems clear that the telephone is destined to effect
a very considerable change in the means of communi-
cation Svailable in large communities. In London
before the telegraphs were transferred to the State,
brief messages could be sent by telegraph for six-
pence; but this privilege was aboliblaed when the
uniform shilling rate for the United Kingdom was
established. From time to time various hopes have
been held out to the people of the metropolis that the
rate should be restored at sixpence within the environs
of the capital; but up to the present these have
not been realised. Now the Telephone affords a
method of communication to its subscribers at an
annual cost so moderate as virtually to create a
system of penny messages—a very different matter
from shilling ones—and it is not surprising that a
large number of these are transmitted. The recent
experiment of sending by telephone the peformanae
of an operetta at the Royal Comedy Theatre to, an
audience at the lristel Hotel, Burlington Gardens, a
considerable distance off, showed that the telephone is
a practical fact, and capable of application and de-
velopment.