The Sun.
London, England, 1864-05-09 00:00:00

which no other European sovereign can put forward
- - _

the slightest claim.
THE " EXAMINER" ON STREET NUISANCES.—
We have to thank Mr. Bass for bringing in a bill to
protect the public against the noisy nuisances now
infesting the streets. The existing law requires
reasonable cause for the removal of vagabonds
playing on grind organs, or brass instruments of
torture. But magistrates differ as to reasonable
cause, and Justice Midas is of opinion that no one
can :have reason to complain of the sweet sounds
from a decayed hurdygurdy, or the alternations of
grunts and squeaks of a brass band, Another
magistrate thinks only sickness or mathematics
reasonable cause. A third holds the right opinion
that the streets should be kept to their right uses—
traffic,and that there is reasonable cause for stopping
the conversion of them into orchestras, or we should
rather say, places of abominable discord. What
Mr. Bass proposes is to extend protection to serious
occupations which will not bear interruption ; but,
as Sir F. Crossley observed, people have a right to
something more, and ought to be allowed to live
in the houses they pay for in peace and quiet. Be-
cause a householder happens not to be a calculating
machine, be is not to be tormented with noises from
daybreak to midnight. He has a right to as much
• uiet as consists with the necessary traffic of the
streets. There is a time for all things, and the
choicest music intruded upon the ear at every hour
of the day would be intolerable, much more so the
drone of hackneyed tunes by decayed organs, or the
grunts and squeaks of a herd of filthy German
swine. Unhappily, nature has provided no defence
against this crying evil. We can shut our eyes
against disagreeable sights, we can stop our noses
against bad smells, but cannot stop our ears against
the assaults of discordant sounds. The sense of
hearing is completely at mercy, and no mercy is
shown it in this vast, ill regulated town. In Paris
street music is suffered on no pretext, and if people
choose to have it it must be in their houses or court-
yards. And cur own Legislature has admitted the
principle that some consideration is due to the ears
in suppressing the dustman's bell ; but what was
the annoyance of that bell to the detestable noises
that have succeeded it ? and the bell was not ring-
ing every where from sunrise to midnight. The
street nuisance is defended in Parliament by two
lineal descendants of Midas, Sir John Shelley and
Lord Fermoy, and on Mr. Bass's motion the latter
brayed a bray that the attempt was to suppress
street music, and to interfere with the recreation of
the people. The people, in the common sense of
the word, have no interest in the matter. The brass
bands and organs, the Savoyard and German vaga-
bonds, are not to bo found in the alleys and courts,
but in the squares and handsome streets. The Ger-
man gangs are not paid in pence, but in silver and
gold. If your wife or daughter is on a sick bed, or
your mother dying, you cannot buy her quiet at a
less price than half-a-sovereign. The organs are
more moderate in their extortions, in proportion as
their power of annoyance is less, but you must pay
both, and all day long. There is a gang of Ger-
man boys that has carried extortion to great per-
fection by having instruments excruciatingly out
of tune, Their activity is as great as their discord
is intolerable, and they make themselves heard,
detested, and dreaded in every part of the town.
Yet there are people who mistake even this per-
formance for music, and who reward and encourage
it, se that the trade is doubly profitable, chiefly
by extortion, nartly by ministering to a vulgar,
vicious taste. A musician, noticing that
the band by which he was tormented al-
ways played its false notes in the same places,
called the loader into the house the other day,
gave him wino, complimented him on the good
playing of his band (whereat he looked uneasy), and
ado ed,l have especially admired the skill and re-
gularity with which you introduce your discords.
" Ah," said the street bandmaster with a knowing
look, " zat is our business. It is by zat we live." A
Persian Ambassador on his first visit to the opera
was in raptures with the band when tuning the in-
struments, but when they commenced the overture
to " Figaro," he said, " This is poor stuff indeed, but
what they commenced with was celestial music."
There are folks with this sort of taste, and who
really like discords when they pierce their dull ears
with a sharp shriek. Some of the Germans, it must
be admitted, play well, but the greater number are
mere horn-blowers, or else they know that it mat-
ters not for profit whether they play well or ill, for
that certain ears are well pleased with bad as with
good music, and that others are to be tortured into
uff their tormentors. It is curious to ob-
serve the parts of the town of which complete pos-
session is taken by the nuisance-mongers. Aristo-
cratic Dover-street is devoted to them—organs,
bras 3 bands, disgusting fellows with blacked faces
grimacing and bawling negro melodies, are to be
found in that unhappy street at all hours of the day.
We have a suspicion that there is something more
than extortion in this disgraceful phenomenon, and
that Fermoys and Shelleys abound in that locality,
and do not care to disguise the long ears that have
come down to them, and attest the ancient quarrel
with Apollo.
THE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON PRINCE NAPO-
LEON.— Prince Napoleon enjoys a very curious
position. He has all the advantages of the empire,
and none of its drawbacks. Purple and fine linen,
the obsEquiousness;of courtiers, and the admiration
of all whose admiration is stimulated by interest,
surround him from morning to night. And yet he
can do and say what he pleases. If the worst comes
to the worst, and he has been very indiscreet, he has
only to feel a scientific ardour, and set off in his
yacht on some exploring expedition, till his rash-
ness has been forgotten. He is a man who has strong
feelings, and strong likes and dislikes, who chooses
his associates as he fancies them, and espouses heartily
a cause to which he attaches himself. And yet, how-
ever dangerous may be his friends, and however
compromising may be his opinions, he still can speak
boldly out, and utter words which no other royal
person in Europe could utter without giving offence
and seeming false to his order. He is a democrat,
almost a red democrat,and he talks as democratically
and as red as he likes without any one stopping him.
Various causes combine to give him this position.
He is au able man, and is said to be the only human
being of whom the Emperor is afraid. Then he re-
sents one side of Imperialism in a very marked way
and helps to persuade France and Europe that, in
one sense, the Emperor is nothing but a crowned
democrat. The Emperor has far too much sympathy
with his cousin to wish to dissociate himself wholly
from a speaker who is, to some extent, the chief of
the revolutionary party. Perhaps the Emperor
knows that much of what the Prince says is imme-
diately set down as mere vapouring, and ho may not
be sorry to contrast the importance which is attached
to everything he himself says with the indifference
that is frequently bestowed on the strongest utter-
ances of his cousin. Perhaps, too, the Emperor likes
to use the Prince sometimes as an instrument by
which he way gauge public; opinion, and chooses to
encourage or permit the extravagances of his cousin
in order that he may know how far there is any
substantial change creeping over the surface of
French political thought. But at the same time the
Prince holds an independent position of his own. He
is not the mere passive tool of the Emperor. nor is he
the mere impotent mouthpiece of cleverer and
more unserupuloes democrats than himself. He is
allowed to say what hp does hecause it would be so
hard to stop him without causing a
rupture
in the Imperial family, which the Emperor is
anxious above all things to avoid. The Prince, too,
knows what he is about. He sticks by a set of
ideas whiels hayp already some power in Europe,
and which may have More. He is all for what
Garibaldi calls the fated cause of the peoples. And
his very position gives him a weight, when he
talks about fated causes, which no other adherent
of fated causes can have. For no one can be quite
certain that the Emperor is not speaking through
him, and a very plight aecideut might make it of

the last importance to Europe that he should not
have fated causes in which he believes. It the Em-
pernee restraining,- hand were taken away, the I
Prince would almost certainly have a commanding
infleence over the ordering of efflirs in France,
and would let loose elements of strife which are
now hushed in repose. His words have, therefore,
a significance the exact extent of which it is almost
impossible to estimate, and naturally the utterances
of a man who has this exceptional standing are
often taken for much more than they mean. When,
for example, he says that he quite agrees with a
revolutionary committee that the case of Venice is
urgent, and that the time has now arrived when
Italy should be set free from the Alps to the
Adriatic, no one can exactly say whether this is all
nonsense, or whether he is shadowing forth a move-
ment to which his Imperial position may help him
to give life and reality. And if his position is
curious in France, so also is it in Italy. The
Italian Ministry has just made a declaration of the
impression produced on it by the reception of
Garibaldi in England. No Ministry could have
taken a more sensible course. So far as the recep-
tion of Garibaldi was a compliment to Italy, and a
testimony to the personal merits of a great
the Ministry is rejoiced at it. Italy
wishes to stick closely to both the great
Western Powers, and as England is the
harder of the two to persuade to practical action in
her favour,she cannot slight altogether such a means
of influencing England as Garibaldi has discovered.
But, as to Garibaldi himself and the party of action,
the Ministry permits itself to hope that the hero of
Caprera has taken one lesson to heart since he went
there. In England he saw the spectacle of trium-
phant law and order, and a people contented, happy,
and prosperous, because it left the conduct of affairs
to the Government it had chosen. If Garibaldi has
learnt the advantages of this, his excursion will
have done him and his country some good, It will
inspire him with a wish to see Italy acting in the
same way, and to allow the King and his responsi-
ble advisers to decide what is to be done, and when,
and how. The Ministry entirely declined to own
itself at the beck and call of the party of action, as
it is called, and hoped that Garibaldi would see only
the necessity of this, for the King's advisers to have
only a half-power when they had all the responsi-
bility, and they called on the Chamber to choose
between them and the party of action if they wished
Garibaldi to be supreme. And yet, at this very
instant, Prince Napoleon thinks it opportune to ,
come forward and announce that the liberation of
Venice cannot be delayed much longer. The King's
Ministers tell the country to wait patiently, and
the King's son-in-law tells them that waiting is
now nearly over, and that the great call to arms
will soon be heard. Probably the Prince spoke as
he pleased and as he thought, without much caring
what would be the consequences to the Italian
Ministry. And yet, although he seems to be run-
ning directly contrary to the responsible counsellors
of his father-in-law, and to be urging in the very
direction from pursuing which they are most
anxious to save her, they will probable feel little
objection to what he has said, and may even see
that an advantage is to be derived from the very
strength of the language he has used. For, in the
first place, his words tend to keep alive the impres.
sion in Italy that the Royal Family, with the King
at its head, longs to fall with the current
of theipopular wish, and is only withheld by over-
powering reasons of State policy from gratifying its
desires. The hopes of Italy are thus associated with
its monarch ; and, in a country where everything is
so new and so uncertain, and where all that is most
energetic has been so long associated with the
thought of revolution, it may have a powerful effect
towards consolidating the existing order of things
that the nation should look on the royal family as

.
among the chief of its own partisans. Then, again,
Prince Napoleon reminds the excited politicians of
the Italian towns that all talk about freeing Italy
from the Alps to the Adriatic is mere moonshine

unless France is associated with the movement. But

he represents France not as the calculating ally help-
ing Italy from selfish motives, bat as the exponent
in Europe of those ideas which demand the expul
sion of the Austrians from Venice as the first step
towards building up a new and better framework
of European society. He desires to warn Italy that
France must be by her side if she is to win in her
great contest, but he presents France in the colours
which most attract Italians.

Naval and Military Intelligence,

THE NAVY.

Orders were received at Devonport on Saturday to put in
commission the screw steam gun vessel Assurance, 4, of 681
tons, with engines of 200 horse power. Mr Frederick A.
Johnston (borne on the Indus) is her master. Sho is to
heve a complement of 90 officers and seamen.

The following appointments were made on Saturday at
the Admiralty :—Lieut. H. Gland, to the Galatea—Lieut,
It, B, Lambert, to the Rattlesnake—Lieut A. J.Errington
and Lieut the Hon M. F. Murray,to the Wolverene—Lieut
J. S. Eaton and H. C, Wallis, to the Enterprise—W. J.
Cunningham, master, to the Assurance—A. De G. Sutton,
master to the Wolverene—H,Augilar, master, to the Enter-
prise—F. M. Rayner, staff surgeon, to the Eagle—Geo. D.
Maclaren, staff surgeon, to the St. Vincent—lt. Deveson,
paymaster, to the Wolvcrene—M. M. Magrath and J. M.
Hollingsworth, assistant surgeons,additional to the Eurya-
Ins —W. W, Murly,assistant paymaster, to the Wolverene
—H, C. Jones, engineer, to the Enterprise—J. M•Laran,
first class assistant engineer, to the Salamis—W,
Wallace, first class assistant engineer, to the En-
terprise—J. A. Cawley, second class assistant
engineer, to the Enterprise—Thomas E. Semmens, clerk, to
the Wolverene —and Charles Topping, assistant clerk, to
the Wolverene.