The Sun.
London, England, 1863-11-24 00:00:00

A CRUEL CASE.

Amidst the hush of the whole court-house a poor little
wistful child stands there, neatly combed and cared for,
and in a pretty gay walking dress—God forgive them !
worked by the poor mother's hand. The shrinking child
stood there, altogether fascinated by the scarlet robes of
the judge and his terrible wig. His lordship looked at it
with studied indulgence—so pretty, so bright, and inno-
cent it was—a baby terror hi each round eye. There was
a murmur of sympathy throughout the crowd, and all held
their breath as one man. There were fathers there who
felt an uncomfortable thrill, and unwittingly shook their
heads as they looked at that pretty yellow-haired infant,
and bethought them of the loved little folk at home. What
if one of them stood yonder in the dock ?—if young May or
bright-eyed Mat, were there in the witness box against
them ?

There was a universal vigil on all the crowd for one Im-
minent moment. When will the eyes of the mother and
child meet? Rumour has got about that she has not seen
it for more than a month, and never dreamt she should'
meet it thus. Will she scream or faint, or struggle over
towards it? At present she is sitting there with a petrified
gaze of surprise and incredulity. Who brought her child
here ? Who dared to bring it here ? Have they trained
the little fawn to snare its father to death? the being he
gave life to brought here to swear his life away ? What
evidence can his child bring against innocence and truth?
" What is your name, dear ?" said the counsel quietly.
The child's eyes were fixed on the scarlet robes of the
judge, who repeated the question soothingly.
After some preliminary questions, he is asked
who he saw in the room, when he awoke, besides
the murdered man.

"I saw papa."
"There ran a shocked murmur through the crowd, po-
pularly called a sensation, and then a freezing silence again.
" Had your papa anything in his hand?" came the
velvet question—the judge cooed it out, entrapping the
child on as it faltered and sobbed. It hangs on a hair if
the child will speak. Should its gaze once catch the
mother's starting eye, not four yards from it, it will be
struck dumb.

" Speak the truth, Johnnie," came a low voice from the
dock—a low voice—a home voice, The child's eyes fell
upon its father's face. •
" Speak the truth, Johnnie ; don't be afraid,"
" Ho had a hatchet," said the child, and in another
second his eyes, by some strange attraction, were dropped
upon the mother's face. The child quivered as if it had
been suddenly stung, and wailed aloud.
" Oh, mamma I mamma I"

"My lord," said the counsel, amid the buzzing court,
" it is very painful, but really if we arrive at the truth th e
mother must be removed."

Yes, they may remove her now—the worst has been
done, and all is over with her. She was passed along through
them to the door without opposition, and she tottered out
alone. Her shoulders are heaving with hysteric sobs, as
she leans against the pillar, encircled with a greasy sym-
pathy, the villainous pity of the mob, which is shared by
the pickpocket and the felon. The same dirty crowd which
stare at her, and tell her story with rancid pathos, will not
the less throng before the scaffold on which her darling
stands.

A strong pair of shoulders worked through the crowd
towards her. Here comes old Michael, to shield and sup-
port her as well as he can. He gave her his arm and led
her hastily away.
" Bedad," he muttered to himrelf, as he hurried her on,
" a kid in its mother's milk is nothing at all to this.
Come home, roy poor darlint."

This Michael Bryan, who attends on poor Eleanor
in her anxieties, although himself convinced of her
husband's guilt, is a capital character, very happily
described. We have been reluctant, by our extracts,
to spoil the interest of the story, and yet without
quoting some of these passages, we could hardly
do justice to the very forcible and pathetic elo-
quence so conspicuously displayed in these volumes.
We have given but the merest outline, the faintest
sketch of the exquisite tender delineation of the
heroine—" a simple woman"—" a perfect wife."
We commend her story to the lovers of sensation,
and to the lovers of truth, for although a manifest
fiction in its plot, this very powerful novel is true
to nature in its characters and in its emotioas.

My Beautiful Lady. By Thomas Woolner. One
Vol., pp. 159. Macmillan.

The author of this most charming production
bids fair to assume the character of a very Crichton
of Art. Hie reputation is already securely estab-
lished as one of the most gifted sculptors of
his age. By his present venture he has suede good
his claim to be regarded not as a versifier, but as a
poet—non fit, sed nascitur. And, having an eye to
the exceeding richness of the colouring, and to the
exceeding music of the sounds in which he has here
celebrated his Beautiful Lady in most sensuous and
melodious song—we might augur well for his future
as a Painter and as a Musician ! That is, if he were
disposed now to throw aside pen and iok,as he has
here abandoned fora while,w hen writing these pages,
the chisel and mallet, hitherto familiar to his grasp—
and,'in lieu of any of those artistic implements,
were disposed to assume either the brush and mahl-
stick, or the score-paper and pencil. We know
of hardly any one who more signally illustrates in
our day the truth of a very subtle distinction often
before now insisted upon by Sir Bulwer Lytton,
but never more happily than in the pages of his
newly published and remarkable collection of essays
called " Castoniana." The distinction we allude to,
thus, as having been so often before now enforced
by the powerful arguments of that great writer—
(once even it was by him dilated upon by word of
mouth, --when he officiated several years back as
chairman at the Farewell Banquet given to Mr.
Macready the " Eminent Tragedian," upon the
occasion of his retirment from the stage)—the sin-
gularly nice distinction between the comprehensive-
ness and what is called the " versatility"
of genius ! Illustrating as we may say finally
or conclusively this very admirable and just dis-
tinction in the tenth Essay (vol. 1., p. 160) of
" Caxtoniana."—Sir Bulwer Lytton has just now
remarked in the course of his " Hints on Mental
Culture"—" The wider your range of thought the
greater your chance and choice of original combina-
tions." The philosophic Essayist adding—(he who
is himself Novelist, Poet, Orator, Dramatist, States-
man, Critic, Man of the World, Man of Fashion,
and we know. not how many other characters be-
sides)—" The writer who adopts that counsel is
vulgarly called versatile. That is a misno-
mer. It is not that genius is versatile
because the objects within its scope ate
various. If you have twenty thousand a year
instead of one thqusand, you are not versatile be-
cause you do a great many things which a man of
a thousand cannot do." And so is it precisely with
Mr. Woolner, we may here very confidently assert.
In his genius—for genius is his unmistakeably, and
not merely talent even of a high order—in his
gen ius,Thomas Woolner has so essentially the happy
instincts of a true artist, that, we take it, success
might almost with equal readiness have been his,
whether the whim or the accident prompted him to
the choice of the vehicle for the expression of his
thoughts and emotions as an artist, from among the
materials plastic in the hands of the Sculptor, of the
Poet, of the Painter, of the Musician, meaning by
the last-mentioned either the musical composer or
the musical performer. A Sculptor ho is, and one
endowed with very rare gifts and capacities—as
many an all but living and breathing block of
marble attests. A Poet this volume before us de-
monstrates at once that he is—every atom as unmisa
takably. Among the very few poets of the day,
and we might number them up, unhappily, almost
upon the fingers of one hand, he takes his place—

not, observe! among the poetasters merely, who are,
unhappily, nowadays, if anything, more than ever
numerous. "My Beautiful Lady" is itself acomplete
justification for what we are here asserting in re-
gard to its author. He sings in it so very tenderly,
so very melodiously, at times so bewitchingly,
always so gracefully, that he confirms and ex-
tends and advances our reliance upon his intellec-
tual powers. For ourselves Thomas Woolner is a
mere name. We know not what manner of man he
may be. We have no conjecture even as to
his age. We know of him solely through his
productions. We speak of him therefore quite
dispassionately—uninfluenced by any personal
predilection whatever, by any sympathy of
friendship, by any kindliness born of mere
acquaintanceship. But already the name of Thomas
Woolner—though as yet no more then a name to us
—is becoming for us the symbol of an unmistake-
able individuality. The intellectual powers, the
moral sympathies peculiar to this true Poet, to this
true Sculptor, to this genuine Artist, are thrusting
themselves more and more familiarly upon our
recognition—are forcing themse'.ves more and more
upon our earnest and cordial appreciation. The
thought out of which the poem before us
has grown is identically the same thought
that captivated the imagination of Edgar
Poe when he was in quest of a theme
for a short poem, that should at once ad-
dress itself to the hearts and feelings of the
general multitude of readers—the premature death
of some fair beloved : for Poe the Lenore of " The
Raven," for Woolner—" Aly Beautiful Lady !" An
the Poet Laureate sings of his dead friend throughout
" In Memoriam"—so the poet here, who is laureated
already by the garland he has woven for himself
with the leaves of this charming volume, sings
of his dead love. He sings of her loveli-
ness, of her purity, her grace, her gentle•
ness, her virginal soul, her luminous intellect,
of her little wayward freaks and fancies,
all of them bewitching. He celebrates her in a
curious variety of measures. He depicts her under
a singular diversity of moods, and aspects, and acci-
dental circumstances. When he is lamenting, to
himself, the inexpressible loss of her, it is thus, for
example, that his emotions articulate themselves
in words

"No more she hears, where vines adorn
Her windows, on the boughs
Birds chirrup an arouse.
Flies, buzzing, strengthening with the morn,
She will not hear again
At random strike the pane.
No more on grassplat newly shorn
With her gown's glancing hem
Bend down the daisy's stem,
In walking forth to view what flowers are born.
Ah, dearest, shall I never see thy face
Again; not ever; never any more?
I know that fancy was but naught, and one
Born of past hope. I kn3w thy earthly form
Is mouldering in its tomb; but yet, 0 love I
Thy spirit must dwell somewhere in this waste
Of worlds, that fill the overwhelming heavens
With light and motion ; that could never die I
And wilt thou not vouchsafe one beaming look
To ease a lonely heart that beats in pain
For loss of thee, and only thee, 0 love ?
Or bast thou found in that pure life thou liv'st
My soul was an unworthy choice for thine,
And therefore tak'st no count of its despair ? "

While he is brooding over the birth of his exceeding
love for her, he relates with a wonderful and beau-
tiful minuteness, how that love, so to speak, per-
vades and interpenetrates his whole existence. At
the outset he is content simply to ease his heart of
the delicious pang of his love by the mere asser-
tion of it ; as thus—
" I love my lady ; she very is fair ;
Her brow is wan, and bound by simple hair;
Her spirit sits aloof and high,
But glances from her tender eye,
In sweetness droopingly."
He lingers over the memory of her looks as she
bewitched him—
" Her beauty walks in happier grace
Than lightly moving fawns
O'er old elm-shadowed lawns.
A tenderness shows through her face,
And like the morning's glow
Hints a fall day below."
Here, again, as evidence of tho truth of our remark
as to the richness of the colouring thrown into this
poetic picture of the poet's dead and gone beloved—
" Fresh beauties, howsoo'er she moves, are stirred :
As the sunned bosom of a humming-bird
At each pant lifts some fiery hue,
Fierce gold, bewildering green or blue;
The same, yet ever new."
Couplets there are in the poem that ccme to us like
echoes from the choicest of the old poets—the great
poets of the Elizabethan age. Instance—

" My lady walks as I have watched a swan
Swim when a glory on the waters shone."

And what, in its way, could well be sweeter than
this—how like again to the manner of the ou
poets, and again, we would say, how rich a
colouring in it !
" Her mention of a thing, august or poor,
Makes it far nobler than it was before
As, where the sun strikes, life will gush,
And what is pale receive a flush,
Rich hues a richer blush."

The moral inculcated by this poem of " My
Beautiful Lady," is as elevated and as pure and true
as that which dictated to Alfred Tennyson the
exquisite thought—
" 'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."
For as the closing words at p. 149, "Years After,"
Mr. Woolner sings, in his turn-
4, A ray has pierced me from the highest heaven—
I have believed in worth ; and do believe."
Three Parts, the Poem is divided into. The last of
the three being simply and significantly devoted to
the commemoration of " Years After" and of
" Work." The intermediate part, part two, that
is, being subdivided thus, also simply, also signifi•
cantly, "My Lady in Death"—"Day Dream"—
"My Lady's Voice from Heaven." It 18
upon the first part that the poet has
lavished all his epithets of admiration upon
his Beautiful Lady—singing of Herself, of her
Glory, of Her Shadow, of Her Garden, of Love,
Dawn, Noon, Night, of Wild Rose, and Tolling
Bell, of Will o' the Wisp, of Given Over, and of
Storm. The bouk as a first out breathing of the
poetical faculty is very remarkable. It abounds in
beauties of thought, of feeling, of expression. It
indicates a power in the author that assures us he
may readily, if he lists, produce even more enduring
evidences of his genius with his pen as a Poet
than (rarely gifted though he is in that strangely
contrasting art) he could ever carve out of marble
with his chisel as a Sculptor.

Amok's Pocket Book for 1864. Illustrated by

John Leech and John Tenniel. Pp. 192. Brad-
bury and Evans.
Whatever merit there is this year in the Pocket
Book of our little old friend, " with the slight dorsal
irregularity," as Mr. Thackeray, out of a charming
delicacy in regard to the feelings of Mr. Punch,
once circuitously expressed it when referring to
the gentleman's rather prononce hump—Whatever
merit there is in Punch's Pocket Book for 1864, be-
longs of right to Mr Tenniel. Not but what Mr.
Leech's coloured frontispiece representing " A
Rather Fast Steeple chase," is in every way worthy
of that most graceful of all our caricaturist 3. Half a
dozen more of his already very large family of pretty
girls, havein that one print been added by his graphic
pencil to our most pleasant remembrance. But,
when that is said, all is said—for the fast steeple
chase is, after all, nothing more than a merry hater
skelter across the folding page of so much horseflesh
and p:etty girls, mounted jockey-wise, in parti-
coloured riding-habits. Whereas, to the
twittering pencil of Mr. Tenniel—for how
much of gebuine fun and frolic are
we not here indebted ! Of the letterpress his
whimsical hand has condescended to illustrate with
such preposterous extravagance of humour, we have
absolutely nothing to say beyond this—thatitseems
to us, in plain terms, just simply comicality in a state
of delirium! It is a perpetual violation to the reader's
common sense. [t is one of the most deliberate
outrages ever perpetrated in cold blood upon all the
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we have been plunged, by a rash glance at this
astounding exhibition of senile tomfoolery, called
" Britishlion the Bagdificent," to compensate our-
selves with a hearty laugh over the wonderful little
woodcuts, pencilled by John Tenniel, at the head of

the several sections of the Almanack proper ! Vide,
with a grave face, if you can—the grinning "buttons'
in the Royal Household—the awkward squad,
Turk, Russian, Spaniard, Prussian, Steek, tramping
past as " The Ambassadors"—Darby and Dizzy, as
spindle-shanked conspirators, about to plunder of
its baubles the Table of "The House of Commons"
—the Yokels reviewed by Clown, red-hot-poker in
hand, at the head of Army and Navy—with other
most ludicrous conceits. Yet, for the miscellaneous
"Part II." of the Almanack—(usually made up
apparently of the mere scrapings and leavings
dropped about the floor of Mr. Punch's study, from
the overflowings of his plethoric waste-paper bas-
ket)—Mr. Tenniel this year seems really to have
reserved himself, and has certainly, in one or two
instances, jotted down, there, his sense of the ridicu-
lous in the happiest vein of humour. His illustration
to'' The Fast Bride," representing a couple of pretty
girls boxing, is after the gracefully comic fashion
of John Leech himself, the happiest of all the illus-
trators des demoiselles. But, for tte exquisite comi-
cality of every touch of the pencil in it, commend
us to the representation, opposite page 162, of the
snob-ball-room incident, celebrated in certain
" Stanzas to Samuel" or Sydenham Seven Men
The whole of this laughter-moving sketch 'con-
ceived and realised with the most delightful 5030
of the ludicrous. It is worth just double or treble
the cast of the entire Pocket-Buok, being, in effect;
ono of the funniest sketches ever drawn by the
great comic Cartoonist,, whose pictorial drill'
leries are so often, as especially in this in'
stance, not only done by, but done to a T.

The Dictionary of Medical and Surgical Know.
ledge. Ato I. By the Editor of " The Pic"
tionary of Useful Knowledge." Houlston Oa

Wright.

This very useful and compendious medical die'
tionary aspires to be a practical guide in health and
disease for families, emigrants, and colonists. Te
the latter, frequebtly debarred as they are from the
advantages of medical advice, such a practical
hand-book is likely to prove of great value ; while
the advice it contains upon the diet and domestic
management, and other means for preserving
health, will ensure it a welcome with the fathers
and mothers of families. In his preface the editor
expresses a hope that his medical status will inspire
confidence in the advice and prescriptions contained
in this dictionary, but as his name is not affixed to
the work, this claim upon our attention goes for
nothing.

The Theory of Foreign Exchanges. By Georgo J.
Goschen, M.P. Second edition. One vol., pP•

140. Effingham Wilson.
A second edition of this work, carefully revised
by the author, has been rendered necessary by the
great fluctuations which have occurred in the rate
of foreign exchangessince the publication of the first
edition. " The history of the foreign exchanges
for the last two years," says Mr. Goschen, "is a
history of revolutions. The movements which have
occurred in many quarters have been almost uneX-
ampled in rapidity and extent." To such an extent
has this been the case,,that he remarks in continua'
tion that, "the exchanges of those countries which
two years ago were selected as exemplifying the
results of a depreciated currency or excessive irl'
debtedness might have, on the contrary, been cited
as instances of rapid recovery. The Austrian ex-
change has recovered fully 30 per cent. The Res'
sian rouble has approached the par value of gold.
la America, on the other hand, the very opposite
has °centred." The principal alterations in this
edition refer to the American exchanges, which
have received Mr. Goschen's most careful and atter
tive consideration.

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LATEST INTELLIGENCE.

(REUTER'S TELEGRAMS.)

AMERICA.
(Per the Hecla.)

NEW YORK, Nov. 11 (Afternoon).