The Sun.
London, England, 1864-07-25 00:00:00

the last public occasion on which he wore that sword and
cap. It was the Volunteer Review at Wimbledon, which
will be a year ago next Saturday. He raid that a ccl3
caught upon that day was the beginning of his illness.
Deeply will his corps feel the want of him at the next of
these annual reviews, and often and sadly will they think
that he is gone, and the place which knew him shall know
him no more.

To say that Colonel Brewster died in the prime of life is
almost equivalent to saying that he fell a victim to one of
the valietbl of that terr:ble malady, consumption. It may
be, although we would not willingly think so, that his con-
stitution suffered something by the gallant aquatic feats
of his early years at Oxford. But he endured in Southern
Africa enough of hardship and exposure to lay the seeds
of the disease which in the 45th year of his age attained

its fatal ripeness. He has died a soldier's death as much
as if he had fallen by steel or shot, and because he was
worthy, therefore was he so soon taken; for, as one of the
warrior-poets of Greece has said

116Xcp.os civBll EKWY
aipEL rovripio. cIXXa 70VS xpqa.ra. ad.

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS,

THE " SATURDAY REVIEW" ON THE AMERICAN
WAR,—The military operations in America are
almost as confusing as the Federal finances. It
seems at first eight almost paradoxical that General
Grant should be summoning Petersburg to surren•
der, while General Ewell is approaching Baltimore,
after defeating the Federal army of Maryland. The
correspondents and commentators of the Northern

journals carefully abstain from any attempt to elu-
cidate the warlike movements which furnish them

only with materials for triumph and congratula-
tion. Like preachers they make it their business

not to exp).aiti their text, but to decorate or darken
it by fluent expositions of their own preconceived
opiaions. A careful and credulous study of their
columns has probably convinced their indigenous
readers that Grant was successively in the best
positions on the Rapidan, at Spottsylvania, at
White House, at Chickahominy, on the north bank
of the James River, and at City Point. It is not

impossible that the last conclusion may be acciden-
tally just, but observers at a distance would be
grateful for more definite information, especially if
some distinction were occasionally made between
defeats and victories. The public instructors of
New York are highly gratified with the success of
General Wilson, who escaped with the loss of his
trains, of his artillery, and of a largo portion of his

force; and their enthusiasm is still More strongly
excited by General Hunter's advance on Lynch-
burg, followed by his retreat with the loss of 83V9-
ral guns, and involving the subsequent abandon.
ment of Harper's Ferry, and the passage of the
Potomac by the Confederates. Those who wish
to understand in some degree the progress of the
campaign must wholly disregard the ebullitions
of sanguine patriotism. It is not even safe to
assume that the Federal cause is hopeless because
its supporters habitually disregard all truth and

probability. General Grant is not a newspaper
correspondent, and he is responsible for the
safety of his army. His pertinacity in threatening
Petersburg, and in disturbing the Southern commu-
nications of Richmond, implies his belief in the pos-
sibility of inflicting a heavy blow on the enemy,
even if he ;ails to occupy the Confederate capital.
The defences of Petersburg have been found too
strong for assault ; but siege artillery will now be
brought into play for the first time in the present
campaign. Scarcely any fortifications are impreg-
nable, if they are regularly approached by a supes
rior army. If Gen. Beauregard is conscious of his
inability to encounter Grant in the field, he will
probably, after prolonging the defence of Petersburg
to the best of his ability, retire to some other posis
tion. Gen. Lee has judged wisely in entrusting the
command of the garrison to the best engineer in the
Confederate service. The position of the Federal
army, in some respects, resembles that of the French
and English armies before Sebastopol. In both cases
the assailants were unable to invest the enemy's
stronghold, and Gen. Grant's demonstrations on his
left flank against the Confederate communications
are perhaps as effective as the menaces of the allied
fleets against the Russian line of supply by tha
isthmus of Perekop. The Federal army has the
great advantage of depending on the sea for its
communications, and, since Gen. Grant has blocked
the upper channel of the James River, City Point
is as unassailable as Balaklava, The` Government,
which he serves, notwithstanding its financial em-
barrassments, still possesses a vast superiority of
wealth and material resources; and if it thinks fit
to persevere in its enterprise, and if it can defend
its own territory without recalling troops from Vir-
ginia, it may hold for an indefinite time the
ground which its forces occupy on the James
River. On the other hand, the Confederates are
not, like the Russians, separated by hundreds of
miles from their centres of operation. The seat of
government is in the immediate neighbourhood
of the scene of acteon, and Richmond is connected
by railroads with every portion of the Confederacy.
Their principal danger arises from their unaccount-
able weakness in cavalry, and from the consequent
facility with which the Federal columns can disturb
their communications. If the invader were strong
enough to extend himself across the two principal
lines of railway, General Lee might possibly be
compelled to retire to the South-West, leaving
Richmond in charge of a garrison. It is, per-
) haps, partly fcr the purpose of sparing
I his magazines that he has detached a considerable
force througn the Shenandoah Valley to the coun-
try beyond the Potomac. If he could afford to
diminish his own army in the presence of Grant,
the expedition involved little difficulty or risk.
The presence of Sigel at Herper's Ferry of itself
invited attack. Trio unlucky German -leader is
familiar with defeat, and in Western Virginia espe-
cially his troops resemble Hudibras's connoisseurs
in suffering:—
Some have been beaten till they know
What wood a cudgel's of, by the blow.
Some have been kicked till they know whether
A shoe's of Spanish or neat's leather.
Sigel must be able to judge, as soon as skirmishing
commences, whether Breckenridge or Longstreet or
Ewell is about to administer the accustomed chas-
tisement.
THE " SPECTATOR" ON THE LORD CHANCEL-
LOR'S SPEECH ON CONVOCATION.—No doubt a
certain contemptuousncss, a certain cynical insolen.
tia, has always been of the very essence of Lord
Westbury's nature, so that the exuberant overflow
of it in nis thoughts and speech can, in one sense,
scarcely be said to be of that secondary and Merely
auxilisry character which we have ascribed to
all true unctuousness. It may be said, however,
not-only of his recent outbreak against the clerical
bench, but of his raillery in general, in the words
of the Psalm, " The words of his mouth were softer
than butter, having war in his heart; his words
were smoother than oil, yet be they very swords,"
and it is this power of summoning a milky manner
to his aid in order to second the effect of his thrusts,
this redundancy of soft phrase in which he sheathes
the sting of his remarks,—this " saponaceous" slip-
periness of sentiment through which he lets his real
drift glide like an electric eel,—that justly entitles
him to the epithet" unctuous." No doubt the Lord
Chancellor has in him all the qualifications for
an unctuous preacher, if he needed to use them
in that direction. We remember his address to
the Young Men's Christian Association at Wolver-
hampton which showed very high capacity of that
kind, and many of his official congratulatory
speeches to Lord Mayors and others have disguised
almost completely the scornful and cynical superio-
rity which just gleams for a moment and is gone.
It is but fair, then, to conclude that if he now uses
his great command of gentle phrase only to silver a
dangerous weapon, he has all the capacity to use it
for its own sake, if cues he Could feel that it would
be of more use for its own sake than by way of
contrast. He has been too successful to find any
suppression of his own overbearing intellectual per-
sonality needful or desirable,—but not the less he
shines pre-eminent in the capacity to tincture his
speech with a rich fatly substance not properly
either intellectual or moral, but expressing a sort of
voluptuous desire to indulge unduly, and oven riot,
in the mood of the moment. Instead of going
straight to his object he contrives for himself, as all
unctuous speakers de, opportunities of wallowing
in the sentiment he is expressing; he whips up his
thoughts upon it into a rich, creamy, saponaceous
lather, and this none the less that his thoughts are
now not at all the kind of Bishop-of Oxford-
thoughts he expressed to the Young Men's Christian
Association at Wolverhampton, but rather of a
directly opposite and even scoffing tendency. No-
thing could be more remarkable than the excessive
indulgence of Lord Westbury in this sort of volup-
tuous enjoyment in his speech yesterday week in
the House of Lords, which, by a sort of poetical
justice, was directed against a master in the art,
though on the other side of the art, the Bishop of
Oxford. After describing in his peculiar lisp the
"three modes" of dealing with Convocation, "first
when they are harmlessly busy to take no notice
of their proceedings; next, when they seem
likely to get into mischief, to prorogue and put
an end to their proceedings ; thirdly, when they
have done something clearly beyond their
powers to bring them before a Court of Justice, and
punish them, and thus laid a good basis for the
vitriolic lather, which he was about to mix. and
apply with a leisurely but cruel hand-{Lord West-
bury entered fairly on the intemperate and almost
sensual enjoyment of his speech. The mode in
which he dilated upon applying the penalties of a
pramunire to the episcopal bench—the gloating
language in which he discussed the advantages to
the Exchequer of sequestrating the incomes of all
the bishops, deans, archdeacons, and other digni,