The Express.
London, England, 1846-10-23 00:00:00

111011 WATER AT LONDON-BRIDGE.

THIN DAT. —Morning, 21 111i7. pant 3; Afternoon, 38 min. past 3.
TOOdeallOW.—Morning, 36 Min. past 3; Afternoon, 14 min. put 4.

LONDON, FRIDAY, OCT. 23.

IT is to be hoped that the reports which have just
arrived from La Plata are true, and that Mr. HOOD
has succeeded in putting an end to that little and
futile war which our vessels have been carrying on at
the mouth of the Parana. Every successive bulletin of
this petty war has been more and more disgraceful ;
from the sack of Colonia by mercenaries whom we
enrolled, to our own inglorious combat against the
batteries of ROSAS, before which the British flag
should never have been unfurled, unlesato silence and
carry the defences of so inferior a foe.
They are certainly wonderful towns, these on
La Plata; and marvellous countries around them.
They seem to reverse all the rules and laws that
prevail in other quarters of the globe. In Europe,
we have had ample proofs how completely mari-
time cities and territories are at the mercy of great
naval powers. Yet here is a maritime city, Buenos
Ayres, which has successively defied the power of
England, the power of Brazil, the power of France,
nay, continues to defy the power of all united. Nor
is this done by superior skill; as ARCHIMEDES enabled
the Syracusans to repel their enemies, by making
defence a scientific art. On the contrary, the pecu-
liarity of this South American resistance is, that it is
the resistance of barbarism to civilisation. It is the
overcoming of all that is advanced by all that is
retrograde. These united provinces have well nigh re-
lapsed into savage life, and appear to have retained of
civilisation only its powerful engines of destruction.
This is precisely what the savage has done. He
has borrowed the use of the brandy bottle and the
gun from the European invader, but seldom anything
more useful. So it is with the mixed race, European
or indigenous, which people the southern portion of
America. _

No statesmen ever conceived a more philan-
thropic or perfect plan than those able men who
founded the republic of Ls Plata ; and nothing
could be more removed from possibility. It was
that of a government of enlightenei citizens, or of
deputies from the interior enlightened by civic ideas,
who were to enable the capital to extend the benefi-
cent influence of its administration over the vast and

uncultured regions of the republic. But Buenos Ayres
proved too tiny and too cold a star to be the centre of
so vast a system. Its pastoral and savage population
were too numerous and predominant for its civic and
its educated portion ; especially as the military men,
who had naturally taken the lead in the war of
liberation, were too corrupt, too ambitious, and too
blind, to head the enlightened against the ignorant.
The more able chiefs, such as ROSAS, preferred making
followers of the wild pastoral hordes ; and rushed with
these to the destruction of towns and the annihilation
of the civic class, under the shallow pretext that they
were Federalists, throwing off the yoke of " savage
Unitarians." ROSAS is the concentration of this bar-
barous, rustic, pastoral spirit. The provinces are at
kis beck ; the towns beneath his thrall ; and, could we
suppose such a system permanent, fears might be en-
tertained for the remains of the Spanish race and
Spanish civilisation, low as it was in the regions be-
tween the Andes and Brazil.

Enmity and war on the part of Europe have, how-
ever, the sole effect of giving strength to Rows, and
to his rule. Our efforts and those of France have made
no impression whatever upon him. They have merely
ministered to his strength ; and this has made him a
hero with the savage population. If, instead of these
continued efforts at coercion and intimidation, the
powers of Europe had continued amicable and commer-
cial relations with Buenos Ayres, they would have done
more to accredit and restore ideas of amenity
and civilisation, than all their blockades, and me-
nacing ultimatums, have done. We made the same
mistake with Brazil. We laboured to force and in-
timidate her into the ways of civilisation ; and by
treaties wrested from her Portuguese nobles, we ob-
tained pleas for coercing her into the emancipation of
slaves, and the allowance of free trade. Both these
are noble aims; but we took the wrong means for
obtaining them in Brazil; and we are wisely retracing
our steps.
We must also retrace our steps in La Plata ; by
leaving the Peninsular races to conduct matters more
after their own fashion, and without European inter-
ference. It is certainly vexations to see a war like
that of Troy—of petty, harmless skirmishes between
besiegers and besieged—endure from year after year
before Monte Video, stopping the trade and inter-
cepting the property of European merchants. But we

have not mended matters by our interference, nor are
we:likely to mend them. Monte Video, under purely
civic and commercial rule, is just as unfit to command
the country of the Uruguay behind it, as Buenos Ayres,
under its old civic and enlightened statesmen, was able
to command the allegiance of the Pampas. The fact
of the majority of Montevidean citizens being foreign-
ers, made up of French and English and Basques,
renders it still more difficult for it to command the
guachns. And as long as ROSA 3 and ORIBE repre-
sent this wild, rustic party ; whilst their opponents
are merely soldiers of fortune, who come with the
gold of France, or Brasil, or England, to raise a mer-
cenary army ; so long will ORIBE or ROBAS remain
as invincible to the east of the two rivers, as they are
to the west. Diplomatists in the Plata are fighting
about names, and are leaving aside all consideration
or mention of things.
. .

After the treaties which have taken place between
England and Brazil, and between England and
France, it is impossible not to insist on the indepen-
dence of the Uruguay. But if we make it a point
that its governor or resident must necessarily be the
enemy of Roans and the antagonist of his party,
we simply perpetuate a hopeless war ; and a war, the
continuance of which mars all the hopes that might
be entertained for the regeneration of the country, and
the introduction into it of a better spirit.

WF. may speak at last. The Duke is extricated
from his timber cage ; and the critic can catch a con-
tinuous view of his gigantic proportions.
Our previous attacks upon Mr. WYATT'S work had
reference to its proportions as compared with the arch
on which it stands. These remain altogether unaf-
fected by the fait accompli. There was no experi-
ment wanted to settle this part of the question. A
figure of thirty feet on an arch of sixty-five, must
infallibly degrade the arch into a pedestal, and a
pedestal as large again as is required to exhibit the
work to the best advantage.

So stood the subject, a priori, to all educated percep-
tions. •
A colossus ; an arch too small by half, or a
pedestal too large by half. If the horse and his rider
had been the work of PHIDIAS or LYSIPPUS, their
merits could not shake this damning fact. We have
no especial partiality for the unlucky arch ;
it has never, we believe, excited much admiration,
or enlisted much sympathy. It spans a road that
leads nowhere. It has the air of a bit of building
which has got drunk on its way to Buckingham
Palace, and lost its road. There it sticks, refusing to
move on, jammed into a convenient angle, and defy-
ing the police. Besides, it reminds us unpleasantly of
II GEORGE THE FOURTH. No one knows what triumphs
it was meant to commemorate. It has been from the
first a sort of vacant, do-nothing, no-thoroughfare,
don't-know-what-Fm-stuck-here-for, sort of an erec-
tion. We should not have been very much sur-
prised, passing by Hyde-park-corner some fine
morning, to have found its site vacant; and to hear
that an under-ranger had met it early stumping
through the park towards Pall-mall, to look for a
situation where it might make itself generally useful.
We wonder very much it did not leave town alto-
gether last month, from a filial regard for its designer,
Mr. BURTON ; and we cannot conceive how, having
submitted to its crowning abomination, it still ventures
to hold its head up. But whatever faults the poor
arch may have, it never did anything we know of,
to deserve its present degradation into a pedestal for
Mr. WYATT'S man-mountain of bronze.

We have said that the ques'ion of proportion be-
tween figure and arch should be kept altogether
distinct from criticism of the statue itself. But if,
arguing from all existing theories of art in such
applications, we objected to the erection of any figure
of the size proposed in such a position, much more
earnest should we have been in our remonstrances,
infinitely more agonised in our deprecation, had we
foreseen w hat Mr. WYArr's work would turn out.

For the horse more may be said than for the rider.
If the body be tame and lifeless, there is a great deal
of superfluous vitality in the head. Having thrown
such a preternatural liveliness into the cock of the
ears, communicated such a melodramatic roll to
the eye, and such a galvanic distention to the
nostril, it would have been highly cruel to
the memory of Copenhagen to have expended a par-
ticle of the Promethean fire on legs and body. So
cool a hand as Field Marshal the Duke of WELLINGTON
would hardly have chosen for a field-day, much less
for a general action, a charger with so much of what
horse-dealers call " playfulness," and cockneys
" wice," about the look of him. The Constitution-
arch Copenhagen has not even been broken to stand
tire. He says to the sound of the trumpets not " Ha!"
but " Oh dear !" and will certainly shy over into the
park, at the first roll of the drum for the advance
which the Duke is ordering. We have the authority
of several omnibus-drivers of distinction for saying
that the horse is in a state of serious nervous excite-
ment. One of these very " competent persons" was
in raptures with the head ; which he declared re-
sembled exactly in its expression that of the mare he
was driving "when she sees a rat in the manger."
Besides, it is not only all the life of the horse that
has got into his head, but that of his rider also. The
block face of the Duke, under the penthouse of the
cocked hat which robs the head of whatever dignity
it might derive from the straight, narrow, firm brow,
is quite lifeless enough for the block body on which it
rests. We cannot express its utter want of expression,
animation, or fleshiness, more completely. As for the
trunk, the short cloak has all the disadvantages of
drapery in concealing the figure, and not one of its
advantages in lending grace and dignity to the form
and line of the composition. We cannot conceive a
hero in a Mackintosh cape, any more than we could a
martyr in a Welsh wig. As the figure-head of an
East Indiaman, the upper part of the Duke might pass
muster ; though there are works at least equal to it in
the docks.

And now a word as to the public judgment and the
three weeks'terra of trial. They have passed—reckon-
ing from the erection of the figure : perhaps, however,
we ought in fairness to allow three weeks' clear and
unobstructed view to "the competent persons," dating
from the uncaging of the statue. Meanwhile, we are
very anxious to know who these "competent persons"
are, or are to be. The committee have put themselves
out of the field. Artists are unanimous in condemna-
tion. Connoisseurs confirm the artistic judgment.
The Press, as one great exponent of public opinion,
with one or two exceptions (in which respect fur the
illustrious duke may be supposed to have some effect
in blinding the writers' eyes to any blemish in his
effigy), is decided in its disapprobation. To set
against this we have certainly the omnibuses. A
sagacious City merchant remarked, early last
session ; " PEEL is safe. The house may be against
him, but the omnibuses go with him to a man." In
that case, however, it was the passengers who formed
the tribunal. Here, it is the drivers. There, the
judgment was passed on a political, here it is ap-
pealed to on an artistic matter. However, we are
bound in fairness to give the committee the benefit of
the fact. The omnibus drivers are almost unanimous
in favour of the statue.

Were these " the competent persons" to whose
verdict the committee expressed their willingness
to bow? This respectable body have considerable
practice in a sort of extempore criticism. Driver
and conductor keep up occasional arguments on
matters of art, with much liveliness of expression,
and a fluent though familiar style of illustration.
The large pictorial posters on the dead walls and
advertising vans, have, it cannot be denied, de-
veloped the minds of these men in the direction
of art. The woodcuts of the Poses Plastiques have
no doubt familiarised them with the naked model ;
and they are certainly under the constant ennobling
influence of our great monuments, such as the National
Gallery, tLe Nelson column, the Northumberland-
I house Lion, the Coekspur-street George the Third,