The Sun.
London, England, 1863-04-30 00:00:00

The Weather---S tzn Office, April 30, 1863.

THERMGMETER.
Highest since Noon yesterday
Lowest during the night
This day at N00n.....
Wind—North-Easterly ; light, with fine weather.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
THIS DAY.—Morning, 11h. 49m.—Afternoon, h. m.
To-mons.ow...Morning, 12h. 14m.—Afternoon, 12h. 34m.

.4 4, 44.
tjjr tc,:.*1T411,047.

LONDON, THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 1863.

The Wednesday afternoons during the last few
Sessions are attaining—increasingly—a high degree
of importance and celebrity. They are the favourite
field-days of Party. Theirs are the chosen sittings
at which the Dissenters and the members of the
Established Church love to contend. These are the
select occasionsupon which the Whig-Tory-Radical-
Conservative Coalition now ruling the destinies of
England—(that is, nominally ruling it, for the
Conservative Opposition, now for a long while
past, have been notoriously pulling the strings)—
these are the occasions upon which this heterogeni-
ous Coalition may scatter, ad libitum, to the right,
or to the left hand of Mr. SPEAKER, flocking, some
with the ayes into one lobby, some with the noes
into the other. And not only this—hut it is
upon these fast becoming more and more
memorable Wednesdays, that Ministers of the
Crown in the Coalition have been allowed the pri-
vilege not alone of gratifying their own political
and religious whimsies at pleasure, but actually—
it must be remembered distinctly that this has oc-
curred again and yet again in very flagrant in-
stances--actually of speaking hot and voting cold,
or vice versa ! Supporting a motion and immediately
afterwards voting dead against it; or it may be
doing the very like by some notable amendment.
Lovingly as the wolf and the lamb may,
according to wont, lie down together in the
pastoral haunts of Downing-street, while that
debonnair young CORYDON, the Premier for
once with a primrose in his buttonhole instead of
a straw in his mouth, pipes to them deliciously—
lovingly as the kid may ordinarily sport with the
basilisk, in the sylvan shades of Whitehall—upon
these same sessional Wednesdays, they are latterly
in the habit of returning each to the indulgence of
its own natural instincts, and of betraying each its
own particular preference. The Tory Solicitor-
General, Sir ROUNDELL PALMER, then, for once,
cannot, for the life of him, find it in his heart to troop
into the same lobby, say, with an accustomed col-
league like that thorough-going Liberal the Right
Hon. MILNER GIBSON, the President of the Board
of Trade, and M.P. for Ashton•under-Lyne. Or
again, still less can he go meekly forth through the
same porch of the House of Commons, at the heels
of a new colleague like the junior Lord of the Ad-
miralty, the ultra-Radical, Mr. STANSFELD, M.P.
for the borough of Halifax. Instead of sauntering
once into the lobby with these—forth again into
the lobby, as of old, with his old friends the Tories,
goes Sir ROUNDELL PALMER, rubbing elbows with
Mr. NEWDEGATE, and with Mr. G.SW. P. BEN-
TINCK, with Mr. DIsRAELI and Sir J. PAKINGTON.
Even the Right Hon. member for the University
of Oxford can for once, forsake the haunts of his
more recently found friends, Mr. BRIGHT and Mr.
COBDEN ; and, not without feeling strange enough
under the old-new companionship, hie once
more with his quondum acquaintance of the
Carlton—numbered, as he was, only as recently
as yesterday by the members for Bridgnorth
and Bedfordshire, with true blue representa-
tives like Sir J. TROLLOPE and Lord R. CECIL.
Among all the Wednesdays of the session, however,
the Wednesday of Wednesdays—what the Derby
Wednesday is in the sporting world—the " bright
particular" Wednesday annually sacred to the de-
molition of Sir JOHN TRELAWNY'S Bill for the Abo-
lition of Church Rates, is beyond any doubt of it.
Year after year of late it has been really and
truly nothing
Opposition (half
less important to the Conservative
in a political, half in a religions,
i
altogether in a distinctly party point of view) than