The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-14 00:00:00

MR. JOHN RUSSELL.

So call him. He was a lord—Lord John Russell, the
other day, by courtesy--a representative of London by
confidence—a supernumerary member of the Cabinet by
policy. Like the solemn gentleman whom Coleridge met
at a dinner and admired for his pregnant gravity, but
who broke the charm at the introduction of apple dump-
lings, by exclaiming, " Them's the jockeys for me !"
Mr. John was a Solomon until the other day he opened
his mouth wide enough to allow the truth for the first
time in his life to escape, and England has pronounced
him a blockhead. His prestige is gone. He has
been discovered by everybody to be what sensible men
have always known him to be—an aristocrat disguised
as a Liberal, and has received his passport to private life.
The political career of no man who has figured conspi-
cuously in British public life has been more singular.
Without the genius of Burke, the eloquence of Fox, the
talent of Pitt, the wit of Canning, has kept a forward
and successful position in politics, which none of those
really great men—Pitt excepted—was able to secure. His
first aspirations were Parnassian—he composed sonnets,
a tragedy, awl haunted Byron and Moore. The divine
afflatus, unfanned by the slightest critical applause, failing
him, he ascended from poetry to politics, consented to be
an auxiliary of the learned and busy Henry Brougham,
and the busy and unlearned Greye, in their crusade for re-
form ; and, wearing the name of the Russells, was consi-
dered as a fair representative of the old Whigs,
whose support was invaluable in purifying the
reform movement from the odium of Radi-
calism, which Cobbett, Burdett, and Henry
Hunt had conferred upon it. The triumph of 1832 left
Mr. John in a very prosperous way. The reversion of
anything good, to which mediocre talents, plausibility,
and the popularity always earned by an exterior of easy
good humour, are considered titles, fell to his share. He
has since traded on the capital of his party, bating the
splendid thefts which Sir Robert Peel made from it now
and then, and his appearance prominently in politics
has always followed the decline of the Conservatives and
Tories. He has taken the vacant Ministerial berth be•
cause he was respectable, because somebody next to
nobody was wanted by way of interreign—because his
politics, in a general sense, consisted in negations—the
negation of all outgoing doctrines being the cardinal
point, and, of course, a very serviceable one at moments
of change. Whenever, in short, the tempest bad been
weathered, and the craft left floating on summer seas,
—as in 1846-7, for instance—Mr. John was the mac
in whose hands to place the tiller, his supposed lack
of sufficient original power to vary the course
dangerously one way or the other being his chief re-
commendation. His skill as a pilot, however, has of late
been found to consist in a certain mischievous ability to
strand the vessel in a calm, saving himself at the critical
moment, and leaving his shipmates floundering in the
water. Among other of Mr. John's noticeable traits is his
continued favour among the good people of Cockaigne.
Mr. John is found to be a jack-o'-lantern ; he has led his
followers into a bog, and they are over head and ears be-
fore they discover the unreality of their guide. Mr. John
is a clever impostor, whose ready, but meaningless word,
always attended by a ready and meaningless smile—a sort
of intellectual lightning never succeeded by thunder—
kept a confiding House of Commons in a good humour,
and thrilled the very hearts' cores of admiring Cockneys
with affection and respect. Great speeches, great sayings,
great deeds are remembered of Peel, Brougham, of
Disraeli, of Cobden ; but what great thing, deed, or
adage is ascribed to Mr. John ? He has been an illus-
trious nobody ; an article taken at an exaggerated ap-
praisement ; an algebraic quantity assumed through along
problem as equal to something immense, and found in
the answer to be zero. As the class of eligible public
men in England is purged of such shams there will grow
np more solid successors. A shirt on a pole judiciously
placed in a turret or loophole may sometimes delude a
besieging force, but the English Opposition is too shrewd
to be so practised on by even the Ministry of a Palmer-
ston.—Azucricau paper.

THE CHOLERA.