The Press.
London, England, 1854-03-11 00:00:00

Caituarg.

THE MARQUIS OF LONDONDERRY.
OUR sincere regret at the decease of the late Lord
LONDONDERRY is tempered with the recollection of
the great age to which he attained, and that his de-
parture from amongst us has been neither untimely
nor unhonoured. We felt pleased at seeing his fine
soldierly qualities, and his many personal virtues,
cordially attested by journals without any sympathy
for his politics. His name will live in military re-
cords as one of the most eminent, dashing class of
cavalry officers, of which Murat amongst the French
and the Marquis of Anglesey amongst our own
troops were such signal examples. The exploit of
crossing the 'fumes, and engaging and defeating
the renowned Imper al Guard, made the name of
Charles Stewart justly conspicuous amongst Peninsu-
lar heroes. Kind, hospitable, and genial, the late mar-
quis had a host of personal friends amongst all par-
ties, and to the joys of the world of fashion and
social pleasure he contributed by the baronial splen-
dour of his living. His generous sympathy with
Abd-el Kader was in unison with the gallant spirit
which he had manifested through life; and it hart
been well said that there will be mourning at
Broussa on the tidings of his death. Amongst his
other meritorious acts was his collecting for publica-
tion the records of his famous brother's career, and
enabling the future historian to form a proper esti-
mate of the statesman who gave European celebrity
to the title of Londonderry.
The late marquis died at Holdernesse house, Park-
lane, on Monday afternoon. The event was caused
by a sudden attack of inflammation of the lungs,
which, after two or three days' severe suffering,
terminated fatally In addition to the prominent
part which the deceased peer took in all the leading
events of his time, he was marquis, earl, viscount,
and baron in the peerage of Ireland, and earl,
viscount, and baron in the peerage of the United
Kingdom. He was also a knight of the Garter,
a general officer in the army, colonel of the 2nd
Life Guards, knight grand cross of the Bath,
knight grand cross of Hanover, and knight of
the principal foreign military orders of Europe.
His lordship had just completed his 76th year.
Viscount Castlereagh succeeds to the marquisate
and Irish titles, and his second son, Lord Seaham,
to the earldom of Vane, in the peerage of the
United Kingdom.

The Right Rev. EDWARD DENISON, D.D., Bishop
of Sarum, died at the palace, in the Close of Salis-
bury, on Monday evening, after only six days'
illness.
The death of Dr. JENKYNS, Dean of Wells, and
Master of Balliol College, took place at Oxford on
the 6th inst.
The name and character of Sir JOHN Co?molt are
so well known in English society that the announce-
ment of his death will be received with feelings of
general regret. He was a native of Wales, having
been born on the 21st of October, 1786, at Cuerhyn,
in Carnarvonshire.
We are sorry to announce the death of the Hon.
Lady WILLIAMS WYNN, wife of his Excellency Sir
Henry Williams Wynn, and sister of the present
Lord Carington, which event took place very unex-
pectedly on Sunday last, at Wynnstay. Sir Henry
Wynn, her ladyship's husband, was thirty years
English Minister at Copenhagen.

MARCH 11, 1854.

ittraturt.

MOORE AND CROKER.
Correspondence between the Right Hon. J. W.
Croker and the Right Hon. Lord John Russell;

with a Postscript by Mr. C roker, explanatory of
his Acquaintance with Mr. Moore. London :
Murray.

Memoirs and Correspondence of Thomas Moore.
Edited by Lord John Russell. Volume VI.
London: Longmans.

ABOUT the period when the disastrous rebellion
of 1798 was distracting Ireland there might
have been noticed two students in Trinity
College, Dublin, who in subsequent times
became literary celebrities. The elder of the
two was a short, thickset, coarse-looking,
chubby-faced lad, shabbily dressed, and with-
out any outward or visible sign of the fire of
genius or the. light of poetical inspiration.
He could sing a good song, however, and
compose playful verses with much taste and
feeling. Amongst his occasional compa-
nions was a sharp-visaged stripling, evi-
dently on excellent terms with himself, and
with the peculiarly saucy air of self-confidence
common to top boys in the sixth form, and to
promising young men at universities. His
appearance, though slightly bilious even in
these youthful days, before passion had scarred
his face with the furrows of brooding thoughts,
was far more intellectual and more gentlemanly
than that of the vulgar youth first mentioned.
Both were literary amateurs, and " general
readers " rather than hardworking students ;
each had obtained academical honours, though
not of a very conspicuous kind. Many of their
companions and associates might have been
chosen as likely to go further and higher on
the steep and thorny path towards the height
of fame. Both, however, were careless, joyous,
and reckless of the cares of life. One of
them associated with " United Irishmen,"
though his fancy was most conversant with
erotic poetry, for, when Wolfe Tone plotted
and young Emmett raved, he translated Ana-
creon while talking boyish treason, and
chanted " Songs from the Greek" in praise
of wine while he made his libations to Bac-
chus from a more potent and less classical
beverage. The other frequented tea-tables, and
affected dandyism. He was as regular in his
visits to the theatre as to the college chapel,
and criticised everybody and everything with
an assumed omniscience that distanced all
imitation. He was a walking cyclopiedia of
Dublin gossip ; he wrote epigrams in albums,
and elaborated lampoons ; and he was, in
short, so very clever in his way that he did not
well know whether he should honour the
Church, the Senate, or the Bar, with his
prospects of celebrity. For that he would
make a noise in the world, and teach people
to understand that, after all, nobody could
ever be right except himself, and that possibly
without his permission Europe never could be
managed at all—upon these points this aspiring
young collegian had made up his mind !
Such were the lads who in after years wielded,
on opposite sides, two of the most active pens
ever employed in party politics. Such, in
their teens, were the Moore and Croker of our
own times ! Little did either of them foresee
the sort of life to which they were destined,
and that the talents of both would be
put in constant requisition by the chiefs of
English " party." In literary genius of course
the palm must be assigned to the author of the
exquisite " Irish Melodies" ; for the powers
of his companion's plastic intellect were too
often wasted in polemical writing. But the
latter was superior in force of resolution, in
logical combativeness, in a singular
.versatility.
of intellect manifested by him as a brilliant
debater, a hardworking official, an ingenious
essay-writer, an incessant pamphleteer, a for-
midable reviewer, a lacerating lampooner, and,
last not least, an insatiable anecdotist of all
characters in all ages 1
Mr. Croker has often been hardly judged
and bitterly criticised. In his long account of
his "quarrels with authors " we rather think
that, upon the whole, he is the loser, and that

THE PRESS.

he has often been made to suffer more punish-
ment than he ever inflicted. For our

part, we willingly remember the consistent
services which he rendered to the Conserva-

tive party, though it is very possible that these
very services have been exaggerated. With-
out now stretching him upon the rack of criti-
cism, we may make some remarks on his
political writings, suggested by his latest ap-
pearance before a world which had almost
forgotten his existence.
Mr. Croker has committed one of the
most grievous faults in any author—he has
written too mach. In his self-assumed office
of censor of the politics of England
and her empire he appeared too often
in his invidious capacity : the recurrence
of his reviews was not only too frequent,
but his special performances were too diffuse.
Readers were tired with the iteration of his
acrimony, and the mechanical structure of his
style became at last monotonous. The late
Dr. Maginn burlesqued in practice the style of
Mr. Croker. The " doctor " seemed to have
nibbed a shillelagh and written with it, while
Mr. Croker appeared to have flagellated au-
thors with a cat-and-nine-tails dipped in red
ink. He established a rope's-end school of
criticism, and was not satisfied without his
showing us the ropewalk in which his scourges
were woven. He so often flourished his lash
that at last people began to look on him as
compelled, like a gouty foxhunter, to be
obliged to crack his whip, for the sake of old
habits. Chastising and criticising seemed to
him synonymous. He appeared to keep a file
of damaging paragraphs ; he was the historian
of indiscreet expressions ; and he carefully
illustrated obscure particulars of trumpery
scandals. He wrote about Empire, the Consti-
tution, and the Church in a style that made us
think at every page of " Martinus Scriblerus"
and " P.P. Clerk of the Parish." Mighty
questions were treated in a small way ; the
cant of the hour was oftener echoed than
principles were expounded. " Dame Par-
" tington, excellent at a slop or a puddle, but
" unable to keep out the Atlantic," was a stroke
evidently aimed by Sydney Smith at the pe-
riodical scolding which, with Roman capitals
and sentences in italics, used to make its
appearance, always punctual to the day, but
in its matter almost as grotesquely anachronous
as Guy Fawkes in November, or the artillery
corps of the Hoxton Volunteers in the old
pantomime at Sadler's Wells. Much of his
literary character might be traced to his own
idiosyncrasy, affected by the prolonged prac-
tice of controversy.

Of all kinds of writers, none are so unwea-
ried in their vocation as polemical scribes.
Habituated to controversy, they exult in dis-
putation. They asperse where they cannot
confute, they deride where they cannot over-
come. After a course of years they become
callous even to the most hostile criticism.
Never smarting under defeat, to combat and
to conquer appear to them identical. Rebound-
ing with Antican agility from every overthrow,
with untiring nerves and audacious front,
they taunt their conqueror, and again chal-
lenge him to the fray. They resolve never to
acknowledge a defeat, so long as they can em-
ploy woman's miserable privilege of having
the last word.
For our part, our strongest exception to Mr.
Croker's writings is, not so much their defi-
ciency in practical suggestiveness and want of
original thought, as that they essentially mis-
represented the genuine tone of the Conserva-
tives of England. The gentlemen of England
can, when provoked, play their part in a fight
as well as, if not better, than others; and it is
because they are manly and bold, that they
dislike what is habitually sour, peevish, or
splenetic. Nor do they look upon all society
from that class point of view which might be
inferred from Mr. Croker's writings. They
never asked particularly into the antecedents
of Mr. Croker when they accepted the aid
of his abilities; but, from the pervading tone
of his writings, it might be supposed that they
were hostile to the rise of men without an an-
cestor. Too much of the style of Silverforkton
politics was in all of Mr. Croker's productions;
and the wretched aphorism " That nothing
" good can come out of Bloomsbury " might

231

be printed as an epigraph to his essays, if the
questionable experiment of reprinting them
Should be attempted. There was little genial love
for the people, or cordial sympathy with their
aspirations, in his writings. Pugnacity, not
philanthropy, was apparently his animating
motive ; and we may see in our own day how
such a spirit is quite alien from the feeling of
a gentry which earnestly strives to legislate
for the weak, the helpless, and forgotten. It
may also be observed that, unlike the case of
other political writers of notoriety, Mr. Croker
never founded any school ; and in literature
and painting there is no more decisive proof of
conspicuous merit than becoming an exemplar.
Bolingbroke, Swift, Burke, Junius, all had
their avowed imitators ; and, even in our days,
we have seen the influence upon political
writing of the pens of Lord Brougham and
the late William Cobbett. So in journalism,
any one familiar with the political press of the
last twenty years can have seen the power
resulting from two pens—which we name with
honour—one held by Mr. Fonblanque, by
whose imitators his flash is oftener pro-
duced than his fire ; and the other wielded
by that potent controversialist, whose master-
dom over the English tongue is only to be
equalled by his efficiency as a popular writer
—the eloquent and erudite Dr. Gifford.

The fact that Mr. Crokor found no imitators
would seem to suggest that his merits wore
mingled with many faults. His fierce attacks
were not sufficiently relieved by tho fun and
humour which impart geniality to composi-
tion, and amuse those who are careless about
the issues of debate. In his early days youth-
ful vivacity gave something of a joyous tone
to his satirical effusions. Thus, when ho cri-
ticised the Dublin actors in his " Familiar
Epistles," the severe was set off with the
jocose, and the tartness of his strictures
was forgotten in his mirthful manner. So,
when he drew the ludicrous picture of a
subaltern actor of the name of Williams, he
showed that he could mingle together the
comical and caustic

" Next Williams comes, the rude, the rough,
With face most whimsically gruff :
Aping the careless sons of Ocean,
He scorns each tine and easy motion;
Tight to his sides his elbows pins,
And dabbles with his hands like fins.
Would he display the greatest woe,
He slaps his breast, and points his toe.
Is merriment to be exprest,
He points his toe and slaps his breast.
His turns are swings, his touch a thump,
Hia feelings fits, his step a jump.
And, violent in all his parts,
He speaks by gusts, and acts by starts ! "
But as he has grown older he has become
more fierce and less fanny, and we have read
articles from his mordant pen evidently com-
posed under the delusion of mistaking the
bitter for the brilliant, written with the purpose
of a satirist, but exhibiting only the perform-
ances of a scold.
Yet it would be very unjust to throw upon
Mr. Croker all the faults of his peculiar style.
He first became a writer in days when between
the hostile camps in politics there was not the
chivalrous amenity of later times. The dema-
gogues and the popular debating societies of
forty years since were coarse, scurrilous, and
downright savage in their tone ; the Court
was unhappily rife with scandals ; and person-
ality, supported by facts, and intensified with
virulent insinuations, was systematically used
by avowed incendiaries and malignant con-
spirators against the Constitution. Against
such noxious pests of the State rose-water
would have been innocuous ; they were en-
countered
with effusions as unsavoury and
more efficacious than their own ; and the
proverb about those who have sparring
matches with the sable climbers of chimneys was
shown to be applicable to the professional critics
who choose for their special pursuit the bravos
in an opposing host. After a few years their
style begins to savour of the shambles, and
fancy pictures them with a knife from the
stall rather than with the rapier of the gallant.
To two of the parties concerned most in the
correspondence before us many of these re-
marks apply. Both Moore and Mr. Croker
were party-writers from first to last, active in
skirmish, incessant in attack, in many instances