The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-28 00:00:00

their own lack of determination in making them-

LATEST INTELLIGENCE.

LI

selves heard. The rural districts had, he declared.

[REUTER'S TELEGR.k3IS.]

every right to be represented, on the grounds alike
of wealth, numbers, and intelligence. "There is
no other great commercial industry," says Mr.
BENTINCK, "which, when its interests are at-
tacked, does not bind itself together and fight its
own battles with vigour and resolution." He
appealed to the assembly whom he was ad-
dressing, to say whether such was the
course pursued by the representatives of
the rural interest, and loud cheers marked their
coincidence in the opinions of the speaker. Mr•
RENTINCK reminded them that the burden of taxa-
tion pressed with heavy and unequal weight on the
agricultural districts, and this is certainly an evil
which, if they were more efficiently represented,
they might in some degree see mitigated. The
truth is that the farmers have been usually far too
busy in opposing the first whisper of reform to pro-
vide with proper prudence for their own interests.
The possible evils attendant on the train of reform
were eagerly insisted upon by interested de-
claimers, who, with ready volubility, exaggerated
every drawback and doubled every disadvantage.
The real importance and benefit of securing an en-
larged and unbiassed representation were left un-
heeded, and it was found too late by the Tories and
their supporters that by their perverse and obsti-
nate opposition they had left the whole game in the
hands of the Whigs. Since the days of the great
Reform Bill the electoral position of the agricul-
tural population has been a frequent subject of
comment, but little has been done in the way of
substantial improvement. Yet no class stands in
greater need of a political reorganisation. The in-
creasing intelligence and public spirit among the
rural population generally, the gradual dying out
of old and obsolete notions, all point to the ad-
vancing claims of our agricultural districts to a
better and fairer representation. Where steam comes
in prejudice generally goes out, and the application
of art and science to the cultivation of the soil and
the gathering in its products are fast combining
the once antagonistic interests of town and country.
There is some hope for the farmers, judging from
the past, when the party which they are generally
supposed to favour comes again into power ; but
they, in common with the rest of us, had better
expect little " from the veteran reformer Earl
RUSSELL," unless they wish for disappointment.
The liberal public have neither forgiven nor for-
gotten his refusal to allow the DERBY Reform Bill
to pass into committee, followed as it was by a
total abandonment of the subject when the virtu-
ously indignant Opposition changed sides with their
rivals. Some cynics might suggest that the reason
for refusing the much-maligned Bill to run the risk
of improvement was the fear of having any Reform
at all, since, judging by the subsequent conduct of
Lord JOHN and his colleagues, an amended repre-
sentation was what they most dreaded. But what
matter ? The great Reformer of the house of
BEDPORD has reaped the reward due to his disin-
terested and patriotic labours; and ho is taking
good care, by the manner in which he is conducting
the foreign affairs of the nation, to distract men's
minds from the remembrance of his past doings.

THE WEST INDIA, MEXICAN, AND
PACIFIC MAILS,
SOUTHAMPTON, SEPT, 28.
The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company's ship
Tasmanian, has arrived here 'with the above mails,
112 passengers, 3,528,372 dols. in specie, of which
60,403 dole. are on account of the Mexican divi-
dends, and 1,700 p ickages of cargo.
The Tasmania left St. Thomas's on the 13th inst.,
and experienced strong head-winds to the Western
Islands.

The steamer Darien, from Liverpool, arrived at
St. Thomas's on the 6th inst.
General Forey and M. de Saligny had been re-
called from Mexico by the French Emperor.
General Bazaine had taken command of the
troops. The French forces, 1,200 strong, took pos-
session of Tampico on the Bth August.
The expedition against the Government of Presi-
dent Juarez had ben postponed until after the

rainy season.
President Juarez was in San Luis, Potosi, com-
bining his troops, in order to resist the French.
The exportation of specie had been forbidden
from all towns occupied by the French, but large
consignments are shipped by
way of Mansancello.
The rebellion in St. Domingo has resulted in a
large sacrifice of life and property.
The Dominican refugees attacked three garri-
sons, destroying them by fire, and murdering all
the sick in the hospitals, sparing neither women
nor children.
Porto Plata was invaded by the insurgents, but
they were ultimately driven out by troops who had
arrived in a Spanish steamer.
Large bodies of troops have been despatched from
Havannah and Porto Rico to put down the
rebellion.
The dispute between Bolivia and Chile remained
unsettled, Chile was still occupying the disputed
territory.
A steady business was going on at Valparaiso.
Exchange on London, 441 d to 45d.
The news from the West India Islands is unim-
portant.

COVENT GARDEN THEATRE.

MR. ALFRED MELLON'S CONCERTS.

These admirable concerts, which for the last five
or six weeks have attracted overflowing audiences,
terminated on Saturday evening with the benefit
of Mr. Alfred Mellon. The theatre was crowded
to excess in every part, and after listening to
perhaps one of the best selections that has been
performed during the run of the concerts, the
audience parted with Mr. Mellon in a manner
that must have been exceedin3ly gratifying to the
able and talented conductor.

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 28, 1863

The .Necessary Existence 9f God. By William
Gillespie, of T orbanehill. Fourth Edition. One
vol., pp. 483. Houlston and Wright.
One of the most remarkable essays of modern
times, " The Constitution of Man," has for many
years been printed and published in a very cheap
and popular form, the original cost of this same
popular edition having been defrayed with funds
provided by the bequest of an enthusiastic admirer
of George Combe's undoubted masterpiece. Re-
markable beyond all question though the merit of
that performance as a literary production, it has
upon it unhappily the taint peculiar to an argument
characterised throughout by a flagrantly deistical
tendency. The philosophy there taught though
trembling like Hamlet's " twist heaven and earth"

,ends in no way heavenwards. It is on the con-
trary and in the strictest meaning of the phrase, of
he earth, earthy. The thoughtful essayist who
Ilerein weighs in the balance so many of the awful

problems of the universe, dropping them one by o3e
into his own ingenious little scales and testing
them as it were by the rules of avoirdupois, looks
to life here—(as the deadening result of all
his inquiries)—as the "be all and the end
all," as a mere fitful and fleeting series
of perishable phenomena. In his specious exami-
nation of theology, so to speak, through the dull
material spectacles of the phrenological theorist,
George Combo seems to us to have borne a certain
resemblance to those fantastic and eventually deis-
tical anatomists, who at one time, as one might say,
set seriously to work to discover the soul in the
pineal gland I That mysterious little central core
of one of the most complicated portions of our human
structure, that, an anatomist of large experience
in the dissection-room once remarked to us, he had
often crumbled between finger and thumb, always
with one result, that of a gritty gravelly sensation
—as though this idly dreamt of seat of the soul
were, more peculiarly even than any other part of
our anatomy, of the earth earth) ! Precisely of
that character is the result, so far as our own sensa-

dons on reading the famous essay can bo tersely
described—precisely of that deadening, disappoint-
ing, earthly character is the effect produced
by a perusal of Mr. Combe's " Constitution of
Man." Instead of enabling him to soar to
any great philosophical altitude, it leaves
its reader in the end most miserably grovel-
ling in the dust. Reading it, and it alone—sup-

--- _
posing, that is to say, that there were no higher,
or purer, or more elevating philosophy to fly to—
we might adopt at the close of it the epicurean
phrase of the people of old, " Eat, drink, and be
merry, for to-morrow we die." An enthusiastic

admirer of a very different production, indeed—this
remarkable essay upon, or inquiry into, or, may we
presume to say, demonstration of " The Necessary
Existence of God," has, in his turn, and far more
philanthropically than the late Mr.Combe's admirer,
provided funds for the issuing from the press of a
cheap and popular edition of the work—the very
edition here under notice ! Upon the head of the
title page, it is calledi(after the name of this enthu-
siastic friend of Mr. Gillespie's),"The RasselEdition4
—Mr. James Russel, junior, of Arnotdale, being the
individual referred to. Half way down that same ar-
resting and attractive title page, it reads rather oddly,
a'most, one might say, indeoorously (remembering
the awful problem of his inquiry)—when we find the
author's name, there, indicated asWilliam Hony man
Gillespie, Esq,, of Torbanehill. As incongruously,
the "Esq." appears there, as though it were en-
graven upon a tombstone. Of the production itself,
as a philosophical inquiry into what might be de-
fined as, in truth, the one supreme problem of the
universe, Lord Brougham, in his Discourse of "Na-
tural Theology," declared emphatically—" I con-
sider Mr. Gillespie's book on the argument, a priori,
a valuable addition to science of Natural Theology."
Remembering which notable opinion, it is no mat-
ter of surprise to us to find here that "The Russel
Edition" of Mr. GiUespie's performance, the fourth
edition which has just now been published, has
been appropriately inscribed by the writer to the
learned and philosophic ex-Chancellor. The late
Sir William Hamilton went even further than
Lord Brougham, when pronouncing his com-
mendation, for he said, with yet greater
emphasis of praise, " I do not, I can assure Mr.
Gillespie, mean to flatter him, in saying, I consider
his work, on the Necessary Existence of GOD,
among the very ablest specimens of speculative
philosophy which this country has latterly ex-
hibited," High commendation, indeed, coming
from the lips or rather from the hand, from the
mind or rather from the conscience, of such a man as
the late Sir William Hamilton. It is an effusion
thus remarkable for its ability, that Mr. Russel, of
Arnotdale, has munificently contrived to place here
at once (through this edition of it) within reach of the
general community. The argument therein under-
taken by the author of the book, is one lying at the
root of all religion. It is one coming home, there-
'ore, to the heart and soul of every believer alike, of
the philosophical inquirer of every denomination.

Les Noces de la Lune : Legends d Outre-Monde.
Par le Chevalier de Chatelain. Svc., pp. 23.
Basil Montagu Pickering.
Taking as his motto for this graceful poetic trifle
(more than which it affects not to he) half-a-dozen
lines by Theodore de Banville, the central couplet
of which is simply—
" Son Arne s'eleva de tout sa hauteur,
Par la creation jusques au Createur "
the Chevalier de Chatelain, familiar as he is with
every nook and cranny of the great composite
Temple of our English Literature, cannot but have
been conscious, while pencilling down those six
lines upon the fly-leaf of his brochure, that the
couplet we have quoted above is but the feeble
echo of Pope's renowned and familiar line—
" And look thro' Nature up to Nature's God!"
Hardly is this, however, the way to do it! Sin-
gularly accomplished and clever though the Cheva-
lier is, as we have often had occasion to indicate in
these columns, we hardly care to see him playing,
so to speak, a sort of poetic game of cup-and-
ball with the planets and their satellites.
He has his purpose, as the reader will
readily enough discern on running glibly through
these three-and-twenty rhythmical and melo-
dious pages ; and that purpose, that idea which
he is bent upon expressing, he does express
prettily enough and humorously even be it said,
through the medium of what may be called a
rhyming jeux d' esprit. It may appear to the
author himself probably on our part as little better
than mere over-fastidious hypercriticism, when we
say, but say it we must, nevertheless, that the regions
of astronomy seems to us, by reason of their su-
btimity, to be altogether inappropriate as a field or
medium for a seriocomic jeux desprit, even
though poetic in its character. The writer seems
to reveal himself to us here in the very act of taking,
not as having taken, but we repeat, as, in the
act of taking the step hinted at by Napoleon
when talking to the Abbe du Pradt after the retreat
from Russia. His feet, his poetic feet that is, are
upon either side of the dread boundary line. Yet,
for all that, the trifle is welcome to:us, if only for
inasmuch as it is the medium of apprising us of the
fact that our gifted and indefatigable author has
now in the press—appropriately in anticipation of
the 23d of April, 1864—his version, in French, of
" Hamlet ; TrageJie en cinq actes de Shakespeare."

The Manual of Dates. By George H. Townsend.
London : Routledge, Warne, and Routledge.
" Time," according to Hooker, is the measure
of the motion of the spheres." The definition is a
perfectly accurate one in its peculiarly limited form.
Oar clocks and watches merely record the earth's
rotation on its axis; our annals register the pro-
gress of events according to the number of revolu-
tions made by this planet around the sun. If the
earth were to rotate more rapidly, our days and
hours would be shortened with all the pleasures
and the sorrows which they contain; if it
traversed its orbit more swiftly, every year
of man's , life would thereby be shortened,
and our days and years might be gradually and
imperceptibly abbreviated. Of course astronomers
would soon find it out; but the unastronomical
portion of the human race might lose a large frac-
tion of their time without knowing anything about
it. "Geometry," says Sir William LiamiltoD, "is