The Sun.
London, England, 1830-06-01 00:00:00

MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

This is a clever instructive number, but not
quite so entertaining as it might be, or as it has
been. The " Royal Address to the King of the
Beggars" is lively and epigrammatic. " Lord
Mountcashel and the Church" is an article re-
markable for the surpassing absurdity of its
observation, that " the clergy are ill-paid." It
is not devoid of research, but that research is
brought from the wrong side of the question.
How can a church be called ill paid, which
ranks among her chosen sons such expensive
ornaments as a Bishop of Derry, a Prince Bishop
of Durham, a Bishop of Winchester, or even a
Bishop of London ? " Anecdotes of Brazil"
is amusing, and will serve to while away an idle
hour. " Naval Administration of Great Bri-
tain" is a sound, temperate, practical essay on a
popular and important subject. " Newfound-
land Adventures" displays vigorous graphic
talent, of no ordinary quality. " Notes of the
Month" are smart, caustic, anti agreeably
varied—en voici.

" We wish that some philanthropist a little more honest
than Mr. Hume and a little less prosing than Mr. Goul-
burn would make a memoir on the number of people an-
nu Illy drowned in the metropolis and its environs by the
Commissioners of Woods and Forests. Not that we charge
little Lord Lowther with any direct activity in this whole-
sale havoc, nor believe that a man of his pleasantry would
wish to stop any other man's jest by cold allusion in a
canal. But if the maxim gut Tacit per alium facit per se
is good law, little Lord Lowther is the culprit as much as
if he stood and plunged the unwitting into any of the hun-
dred and one contrivances for drowning, which he suffers
to exist in full convenience and in the face of day.
" A young man employed by the Commissioners for
watering Hyde Park was nearly drowned a few days ago,
in the Serpentine River, the horse having got out of his
depth while he was giving it some water. It was impos-
sible to save the horse, which was valued at forty guineas.
" This is the very tenderest case on the subject. And
no doubt the lamentation at the office would be that the
scales of fate were not changed, and that the horse was the
substitute for the man. But there is actually so singular
a neglect of life in those matters, that we shall be doing
Lord Lowther and his well-paid board a kindness in re-
minding them that the Serpentine River does not exhibit
the most trivial prevention to any one's running headlong
into twenty-fathom water; whether the individual he
blind, or a child, or an idiot, or drunk, or benighted. A
great thoroughfare from Oxford-street to Knightsbridge
runs along the edge of a slope, down which if a man
tumbles, and a mere trip of the feet will do it, he has no
alternative but to roll until he rests at the bottom of the
river, when he will probably roll no more. To scramble
up against the side wall is out of the question. There is
nothing more for him, but to lie quiet and wait the coro-
ner's inquest to be held after the first fishing party on the
river.

" The reservoir in the Green Park is in preci.ely the
same condition. The banks are walls ten feet high, as
smooth as the chisel can make them. The bed provided
for the patient is a slope of forty-five degrees, beginning
with seven feet of spring water, and ending in a central
channel of twenty feet of slough. There a slip is as cer-
tain a quietus as if the individual had slipped off the tem-
porary stage in sight of St. Sepulchre's.
" The chief mortality of the park ponds is, we will ad-
mit, reserved for Christmas, if we happen to have a frost
luckily followed by a rapid thaw ; for then gather the
skaters, and down they go. Why those ponds should be
twenty feet or fathom deep,'instead of as many inches, is
to be of course accounted for on the Malthusian principle.
that the population is surcharged, and the fewer mouths
the more bread. But we have a capital exit at all seasons
of the year in the canals. London is fairly surrounded
with them ; and no citizen can visit a tea-house out of the
smoke of Aloorfields, no milliner's maid take a walk with
her admirer, and no disappointed candidate for the Com-
mon Council can love along their smooth and slippery
banks, without finding a single step...-a step from the sub-
lime to the ridiculous--enough to set him at his ease in all
matters respecting this world for the next thousand years.
We call Lord Lowther's attention to the subject, and we
rely on his humanity to his own character."