The Sun.
London, England, 1863-06-20 00:00:00

LONDON, SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 1863.

Last evening, in the House of Lords, the Brazilian
Difficulty was—as the phrase is—ventilated. No-
thing more than that—simply ventilated. There
was a discussion about it in all its bearings, thanks
to the determination of the Earl of MALMESBURY
to arrive, with as lit' le additional delay as possible,
at the facts involved in the mazes of this wretched
little diplomatic complication. For some time past
we have had dropping in upon us piecemeal from
the Foreign-office, now one fragment, now another
of the correspondence that was taken place between
various officials, of more or less importance, here in
connection with the British, here in connection
with the Brazilian Government. Lord MAL-
MESBURT'S motion, duly announced beforehand,
and duly brought forward yesterday, in the House
of Peers, amounted simply to a request for the pro-
duction of this correspondence in is entirety, or at
any rate for the production of any additional por-
tions of it that could by possibility throw new light
upon the transactions to which it referred. There
was no division taken at the close of the debate.
The Earl of MALMESBURY put the whole case as
he himself regarded it ; that is to say, from the
Opposition point of view. The Earl RUSSELL, as in
duty bound, in his high capacity as Her MAJESTY'S
principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, re-
sponded at some length, though—we are grieved
to regard his speech thus in a matter of so much
delicacy—we cannot think altogether satisfactorily.
Lord CHELMSFORD added a few running commen-
taries upon the whole transaction, contemplating it
in some of its bearings, exclusively as a lawyer ; and,
a few additional remarks having been uttered by
Lord LYTTLETON, there, after all this parliamen-
tary pother, the matter under discussion was quietly
allowed, without more ado, to drop. The motion,
as we have said, being agreed to ; no division,
as we have also said, being taken ; the spirit
of party being in no hostile shape aroused—the
question at issue being simply ventilated, and no
more than ventilated, in discussion.

As a diplomatic difficulty, the whole of this
Brazilian scandal, with its (in consequence) volumin-
ous and, as it has occasionally threatened to be, all
but interminable correspondence, comes really as a
twofold illustration here of a quotation, there of an
anecdote. The quotation being simply the second
line of POPE'S " Rape of the Lock"—
" What mighty contexts rise from trivial things."

The anecdote being simply that very ludicrous
one of the gamester against whom ill luck has
been running so persistently all one night at the
gambling house, that, on his at last emerging in a
half-distracted state from the portal, to find some
inoffensive stranger, adjusting his shoetye at the
top of the staircase, he vents his long pent-up wrath
by kicking the said stranger down the whole flight
with a " D--- you! you're always tying your
shoe !" So is it, precisely in this instance of diplo-
matic petulance on the part of Lord RUSSELL, and
the head and front of the offending, on the part of
the unhappy Brazilian Government. Lord RUSSELL
bali been goaded and irritated so long in one direc-
Lion or another, now by this country, now by that,
now _n
uosuch a pretext, now upon such another,
that the perpetrator of the last annoyance
suddenly awakens to find the whole
vial of his lordship's indignation emptied out in a
diplomatic douche of vituperation upon his, the re-
cipient's, devoted head. Out of the casualty of a
wreck and the "trivial" ei,
British
hance of an after-
dinner row between three
naval officers, a
police Brazilian sentry and the local
gveensd'armed
disposed s
—out of " trivial things" like these have
what Parliaments are usually
to regardeige as
the " mighty contexts" of a ruption of the diploma_
tic rlations between two Governments. The
has been altogether too
Brazilian shoe-tying
to the irritated nerves of the

intolerable
British Foreign Sceretary. And in consequauce
of this the astounded Brazilian offender has gone
clean down the whole flight. Lord RUSSELL—
rather naireiy, it must be allowed—owns to the
fact in one of his very last despatches that he had
many an old score to clear off when he resolved
upon clearing off these new ones. His lordship
acknowledges this, of course, not in quite those
-very plain terms, but with the usual
amount of official circumlocution. The noble
earl might have added, what he does not even,
as a matter of course, faintly hint at, namely, that
the
old scores he had such an irresistible inclination
to clear off, at this most tempting opportunity, were
"eh "4 had been chalked up by other Governments
besides the Brazilian Govetnmeut. The fact is so,