The Sun.
London, England, 1855-10-24 00:00:00

THE QUA.RTEi LIES.

The Edinburgh Review. No. CCVIII.
As many as eleven articles lend the charm of
their variety to the new number of the old Edin-
burgh. The reviewers employed upon it as contri-

butvors have taken it in turns tosdescribe the in-

trigues of the Court of Oude and the political dis-
turbances of the Celestial Empire—the memoirs of
the late King Joseph and the results of the recent
Campaign—the hypothesis of the Plurality of
Worlds and the vicissitudes experienced by the
Fathers of New England—the revelations of the
Educational Census, and those made upon the sub-
ject of Transcaucasia by the Baron Von Haxthausen
—the inconveniences incident to the subdivision
of the Sacred Text into Paragraphs—the beauties
and deformities jumbled together in the bewilder-
ing and altogether unsatisfactory "Maud" of
Alfred Tennyson—and, besides all these, an elabo-
rate, and, everything considered, a more than
merely complimentary, in truth a singularly eulo-
gistic, treatise upon the Newspaper Press of the
United Kingdom. Such are the eleven themes
selected for critical examination by the Radaman thi
of the Edinburgh. And assuredly after the perusal
of some among the papers it will be admitted by
the discerning reader that a few at least of these
formidable critics have not lost all recollection of
the glorified motto selected from the apophthegms
of Publius Syrus to be the standard symbol of the
inexorable truthfulness of the great Whig Quar-
terly. The courtliest tone imaginable is discern-
able, it is true, especially in two instances, in this
the latest outpouring of the wisdom of the Blue-
and-Buff Magnifico ! In the instance, that
is to say, of Journalism and the Laureate. Nothing
could, by possibility, be more Grandisonian than
the politeness evinced on the one hand towards
the author of "Maud" and "In Memoriam,''
and on the other towards the invisible Plurals of

the "Fourth Estate,"—the inscrutably royal pro-
nouns of the daily and weekly newspapers. Speak-
ing of the Press as a whole, the writer of the
paper on that subject does not hesitate to attribute
the undeniably enormous influence of journalism
in this country, nowadays, to " the remarkable
ability with which it fills its place and does its
work," observing, in reference to any suspicion of
dishonour, corruption, or venality among its
editors, that " It would be as impossible to buy a
Journalist as it would be to buy a Member of Par-
liament." Referring to the later productions of
Mr. Tennyson, the reviewer of " Maud" boldly
pronounces the authoritative dictum that "In
Memoriam " will rank henceforth in some respects
with the Sonnets of Shakspere. While in reference
to idyllic poems, such as " The Brook," or " The
Gardener's Daughter," he declares the Laureate
to be in that peculiar class of composition alto-
gether unapproachable. We are delighted to ob-
serve in this very able criticism upon " Maud '
pore than one caustic sarcasm upon certain would-
be High-Priests of Reviewing upon the subject of
Poetry, who have been maundering of late years
about what they imagine to be the aim and the arch-
characteristics of that loftiest department of litera-
ture. " The public are evidently afflicted just
now," says the Edinburgh commiseratively, " with
certain odd notions of what poetry ought to be,
and are ready to catch at anything which suffi-
ciently contradicts the established laws of the art,
as a realisation of their views. The oddest of
these notions is that a poet must belong to his age ;
whereas our forefathers have always held that a
poet ought to belong to no age." Again, "Another
strange notion," says the writer, " which many
persons have adopted of late years, . . . is that
a poem cannot be profound unless it is in whole, or
in part, obscure "—adding, " The people like their
prophets to foam and speak riddles." Whence
the incomprehensible admiration expressed by some
for the "Paracelsus" of Mr. Browning, rather than
for his exquisite " Pippa Passes." Whence also
that homage for the rhapsodical " Festus " of Mr.
Bailey, with his " buttered thunder," and greased
lightning—a homage that has encouraged him to
the production of a work more than usually foggy
and enigmatical, judging of it at least from the
title by which " The Mystic" is prefigured to us
through the medium of the publisher's advertise-
ment. It is not by any means difficult to perceive in
the writer of the introductory article to the pre-
sent number of the Edinburgh, a thoroughgoing
gentleman of the old school, with all his prejudices,
piques, and pertinacities—one bred up from his
cradle in the belief that Boney was synonymous
with Boguey, and that if Mr. Pitt was not in
truth, as the Tories thought him, a Heaven-Born
Minister, Arthur Duke of Wellington was indis-
putably a soldier Heaven-sent and Heaven-directed.
For here, in the October of 1855, under the guise
of a final criticism upon the ten volumes of " Me-
moirs and Correspondence, Political and Military,"
of his late Majesty Joseph Napoleon, King of
Naples and afterwards King of Spain, Prince of
the French Empire and elder brother of the Con-
queror of Europe—we have repeated doggedly, all
over again, the old old charges heaped unstintingly
upon the devoted head of the great Corsican Ad-
venturer. We are told that be was the murderer
of the Duke d'Enghein ; we are assured that he
was spiteful and vindictive ; we are informed, in so
many words, that he was "tarnished with defects"
and "stained with crimes"—and that we must, con-
sequently, abstain•henceforth from ranking him with
Caesar and Charlemagne, even it is said with Crom-
weli and Washington. Greater liberals than this
critic of the old school speaking to us under cover
(under the blue and buff cover) of the Edinburgh,
liberals like Hazlitt in England, like Constant in
France, have thought otherwise—men free in in-
tellect, unbiassed in judgment, unpurchasable in
the Spartan integrity of their character unsullied
in the purity and elevation of their political prin-
ciples. They have thought otherwise. The
world at large coincides in the justice of their
estimate of Napoleon the Great, of his Career
and of his Genius. It is little better indeed than
old-world drivelling nowadays to babble about the
murder in the ditch at Vincennes, about the mas-
sacre at Jaffa,. about the poisoning in the military-
hospital, and the like raw-head-and-bloody-bone
charges directed against the Arch-Enemy of Eng-
land in the good old days when George the
Third was King, days, thank Heaven, long since
gone by—though we have every now and then a
casual reminiscence of them, as in the instance of
this wonderful wiseacre-diatribe against departed
greatness in the obstinate old whig Edinburgh.
Really in instances such as these common sense
seems to be altogether awanting i To hear the hor-
ror expressed at the execution of the Duke
d'Enghein—one would think that there never was
any ruffianly conspiracy at all against the life of
Napoleon Bonaparte among a set of cut-throats like
Georges Cadoudal and his myrmidons, a conspiracy
in which not only were warriors like Moreau and
Pichegru directly implicated, but of which more
than one Bourbon Prince has been proved to have
been cognisant ! As to the destruction of the
troops of the pitiless Djezzar—had they not out-
raged the laws of nations by butchering the bearer
of the flag of truce, having themselves previously
violated the laws of honour by taking up once more
the arms they had laid down with the promise
never again to wield them against the forces who,
on those conditions, had restored them to liberty.
While in reference to the old bugbear fable of the
poisoning—has not history long since recounted in
indelible characters that Sir Sydney Smith and his
companions, upon entering Jaffa in the wake of the
retreating army of invaders, found seven of the
plague-stricken soldiers still surviving on the hos-
pital litters ? Pshaw ! the revival of such old
wives' tales is after all but the merest babbling of
deaf and blind, but alas ! not dumb, senility. It is
the coming out of the flesh of what is bred in the
bone. It is sufficiently interesting, however, to
find the writer remarking at ono moment—" We
have more than once heard the Duke of Wellington
talk of Napoleon, and of his military genius, and
say he thought him by far the greatest general the
world ever saw, and that his campaign of 181.4 was
the ono in which he had displayed the greatest
ability and the most extraordinary strategical art,"
observing at another—" We well remember, many
years ago, having one day met at Holland House,
a mild-looking old gentleman, with very courteous
land dignified manners ; on being presented to him
we became aware that we saw before us a man who
had once been King of Naples and King of Spain"
—in other words, the elder brother of Napoleon,
that Joseph Bonaparte, who died subsequently in
the seventy-sixth year of his age, in the July of
1844, at Florence. It is interesting, moreover, to
learn from the same source that the present Em-
peror
of the French has given orders for the classi-
fication, and as far as such is at all possible, for the
actual publication of no less than 40,000 letters
written or dictated by Napoleon Bonaparte, the
originals of which are now, for the most part, in
the archives of the French Government. Such as
the foregoing are among the more salient points
noticeable in these eleven diversified contributions
making up the aggregate contents of the conclud-
ing division of the hundred-and-second volume of
the Edinburgh.

. The following is the text of the resolution adopted
by the Bank of Vienna in an extraordinary sitting on
the 17th, of which mention has been already made bi
telegraph :—" Fifty thousand new shares shall be created
for the establishment of a mortgage bank, and each pros
prietor of two bank shares shall be entitled to one of the
new. These shares shall be issued at the rate of 700
florins in money. Thus the capital of the mortgage
bank shall not be 20,000,000 florins, as was announced,
but 35,000,000 florins. The payment of the shares
may be made either in specie or in bank notes at tle
quotations of the preceding day. The new shares 0.2,21 l
be completely assimilated to the old ones, and shall De
entitled to the same diyidends.".