The Sun.
London, England, 1863-10-01 00:00:00

The Warning to the Pressei

A letter from Paris says :—M Emile de Girardin's
irrepressible audacity has at length drawn upon the
Presse the warning which, as we were informed
yesterday, had been kept for some days in pickle.
The Government fixes as a justification of the warn-
ing upon some passages in an article of his in the
Presse of yesterday evening, which are, after all,
infinitely less strong than the things which he wrote
before, and which it was thought expedient to pass
over. The crime as set forth in the warning is as
follows :

Considering that the author of the article repre-
sents the conduct of foreign affairs as being dis-
quieting for the country and compromising for
public credit ; and that he thus seriously distorts
the policy of the Government.
The only passages in the incriminated article
which can possibly be cited as bearing out the con-
demnation are the following :
If the minister had conducted the negotiations
with prudence, would France be asking, as she
now does every morning when she wakes up, who
ther she is to fix bayonets, sell her Rents, and hoard
her gold ?
We ask of all those in France whose interests are
suffering from this insoluble question of Poland, and
of all those who have read M. Drouyn de Lhuys'
numerous despatches, whether he has acted in
accordance with M. Billault's speech of March 19,
1863. We ask whether the " execution"—to use
the words of the I'lonitcur—has responded to the
" direction ?''

We think that the means of execution of the
Government idea adopted by M. Drouyn de Lhuys
were the worst possible, because (amongst other
reasons), in case of failure, which it is always pru.
dent and necessary to provide for, there was no other
prospect than war, or at least a rupture with Russia,
the only sincere and useful ally of France, and,
moreover, a situation for the country relatively
weaker than the admirable situation which France
had attained at the congress of Paris.
It is a truly miserable thing to think of that at
a great European crisis like the present the French
Government should think to make a diversion by a
warning to a newspaper. And such a warning too !
What becomes of the admitted principle that the
acts of ministers are open to discussion if it is not
permissible to hazard the opinion that a particular
line of conduct by a minister is calculated to alarm
the country and compromise credit? According to
the doctrine of the warning the Minister whose
conduct is criticised is entitled to say authorita-
tively that this criticism is a libel upon the Govern-
ment—and there an end.

M. de Girardin to-night abstains from all com-
ment upon the warning, but, with his actual acute-
ness, contrives to embody in a few words some con-
siderations which show the follow of the Minister
who plumes himself upon diplomatic success.
Quoting a few apt words from Lord Russell's
speech, reiterating the determination of England
not to go to war at the beck of France on behalf of
the Poles, be defies the Constitutionnel, Pays,
France, and .31emorial Diplomatique to talk any
more about the "European understanding and the
accord between the three powers."
The Pays, however, does this very evening per-
sist that the accord between the three powers has
not been sterile, and it founds its observation upon
the fact that Lord Russell declares that Russia, not
having fulfilled the obligations of the treaties of
1815, has forfeited her title to Poland under them.
Notwithstanding the pacific accompaniments of this
declaration, the Pays holds it up as one of great
n3por tance.

LITERATURE,

Breakfast in Bed ; or, Philosophy Between the
Sheets. By George Augustus SAla. One vol.,

pp. 334. Maxwell and Co.

Foremost in the second rank of our English men-
of-letters now living, stands the author of these, and
of we don't know how many other, delightful pages.
Mr. Sala will not take the phrase here employed by
us (as distinctively expressive of his position) in any
way invidiously. Of that we are certain. He is
himself a critic of too much discernment to be de-
luded in thin matter into any such misapprehen-
sion—even by his remembrance of those halcyon
dreams he must, doubtless, at times have in-
dulged in eagerly enough during the earlier clap
of his adoption of the intellectual craft of author-
ship—cherished hopes and wishes in regard to his
assumingiais place, sooner or later, in the front rank,
among the most distinguished of his literary con -
temporaries. Further than to one of the foremost
positions in the second rank of authorship, he must
be himself as conscious as anyone that he has not
advanced. But in that second rank, to our thinking
tie has taken his place by this time, not merely
among the foremost, but par excellence as the Fore-
most. While in the first rank, stand the literary
Sauls of cur generation, towering each of them
by far more than a head and shoulders
merely above the average intellectual sta-
ture of their age, men of conspicuous genius
who have already hewn out their own niches,
or built up their enduring pedestals in the
Walhalla of our National Literature, an incompar-
able Humorist like Dickens, a Crichton of Letters
like Bulwer, a Poet like Tennyson, a Satirist like
Thackeray—others there are, amongst the most in-
dustrious writers of the time,who have signalised in
a variety of ways the possession ef gifts securing to
them a great deal of oar, attention, attracting a
large share of our sympathy, and even fre-
quently winning from us our very cordial admira-
tion. At the head of these we unhesitatingly place
Mr. Ssla. Daring the last ten or fifteen years he
has plied his pen with extraordinary assiduity. It
would make a goodly list, we should imagine, by
this time, the mere enumeration of the periodicals to
which he has, in succession, been, all this while, a
contributor—a contributor whose individuality
could not but arrest the observation at once of
readers and reviewers. Whether writing in this
way with an ever flying pen for the wonderful
twopenny double columns of Household Words,
or for the übiquitous penny broadsheet of the
Daily Telegraph, whether following London Life,
7wice Round the Clock, in companionship with
his whimsical artist friend William M'Connell, or
recounting, in the earlier chapters delightfully, in
the later chapters most disappointingly, the per-
sonal history and the artistic career of the most
original and the most national of our English
painters, " William Hogarth," in the pages of the
Cornhill Magazine—whether editing a shilling
magazine of his own, The Temple Bar to wit, or re-
lating his voyaging in the Baltic, and his journey-
ing onwards to St. Petersburg, whether penning a
romance like that entitled " The Seven Sons of
Mammon," or recounting in old-fashioned diction
and in old-fashioned ways the " Strange Adven-
tures of Captain Dangerous "—Mr. Sala is always
readable. He is coarse occasionally, but he is
always entertaining. We only remember one of his
more pretentious works that we could feel at all,
even at rare intervals, to be in any way wearisome
—namely, a work already here particularised, and
that, too, with a hint of disfavour or depreciation,
meaning his biography of Hogarth. Otherwise
than in that one exceptional instance, we have
never yet been tempted to throw aside anything to
which Mr. Sala has put his hand, whether asa writer
of books or as a contributor to the periodicals, out of
a sense of its tediousness. Least of all, perhaps,
among his many vivacious and varied performances,
should we be tempted to do thia by the very book
now under notice. And we say this in spite of its
titlepage—to us an unpleasantly affected, and even,
it might be said, a positively unattractive titlepage.
"Breakfast in Bed—or, Philosophy between the
Sheets—a [what is it Mr. Sala calls it 1)] a Series
of Inoigesable Discourses !" The last (generic)
designation of the book, besides being intensely
disagreeable of its kind, is, to our mind, beyond
that, nothing less than a flagrant misnomer. In-
digestible these dozen discourses are not—at least
we have not found them so. Devouring them with
a relish, we have found, on the contrary, that from
page 1 to page 334 there was nothing in the whole
collection of this really appetising hotch-potch
or gallimaufry of innocent fun and humorous
observation upon men and things, that we could
not, with perfect satisfaction to ourselves,
" read, mark, learn (some of it almost. by heart),
and inwardly digest!" Mr. Sala's " Breakfast in
Bed," without having about it any of the sardonic
wit, has much of that perennial vivacity for which
the famous breakfasts of Mr. Rogers in St. James's
were so remarkable, They are, one and all of them,
frolicsome, discursive, and anecdotal. The only
thing especially noticeable in it is that our host has the
whole of the, talk to himself. That talk, while it is
throughout conversational in its character, is not by
any means conversational in the sense of the ordinary
give and take of remarks among a cluster of inter-
locutors. It does not even widen into Dialogue.
It is a series of Discourses—strung together like a
succession of Monologues. Upon themes, too,
whimsical enough to draw mirth from an anchorite
—even from a dirty, unclad, unwholesome
anchorite like Mr. Lucas, of the dilapidated farm
down in Hertfordshire. Instance—" On a Remark-
able Dramatic Performance," meaning my Lord
Dundreary, " On a Little Boy going to School,"
" On the Condition of My Poor Feet"—" On a
Remarkable Dog"—" On a Young Lady on a Bal-
cony," and so forth. While the almost distasteful
title of the book is disagreeably suggestive of
notions such for example, as that when Mr. Sala,
was correcting the proof-sheets of his " Breakfast
in Bed," he must have found them unpleasantly
full of crumbs—we, as among his readers (and
reviewers), as one of the guests bidden to this
matutinal banquet of his providing, sitting there
by the side of the well-spread fourposter, have never
once felt disposed so far to enforce Poor Richard'a
recommendation of early rising, as to administer to
its occupant whit might be properly called a sort
of cold pig of criticism, viz., by throwing cold
water upon our Entertainer, or upon these Twelve
very capital " Breakfasts in Bed" pleasantly pro-
vided by him for our entertainment.