The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-08 00:00:00

BE a.

THE SilN. LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, SEPTEM.BER 8, 1863,

POLICE INTELLIGENCE—This Day.

THE EXILE OF ST. HELENA,

Under the quaint heading of "The man with the
Tortoiseshell Spectacles," Mr. GEORGE AUGUSTUS
SALA, one of the most brilliant and ready-witted
men of letters now upon the English press, has

contributed a remarkable paper to the new num-
ber of the Temple-Bar 21Iagazine for Sep-
tember. Enumerating it this bold and
honest, this thoroughly outspoken and perfectly
truthful paper, some of the many infamous and des-
picable cruelties inflicted upon Napoleon the Great
in the days of his misfortune by the British Govern-
ment of that time, a Government that was at the
very lest anything but m,lgnanimous—Mr. Sala
has the following remarks in one part of this con-
tribution, in reference to—
THE EMPEROR AND lIIS PERSECUTORS.
"There was something ahout this man on the Atlantic
rock that was awfu!, imposing, grandiose, even in his last
and darkest days of desolation and decay; even when he
was squabbling with the hyena Hudson Lowe and the
jackal Gorrequer over disputed rations of coffee and
cheese. The sordid shame of such miserable transactions
rests with them, not him. The High Tcry English ene-
rdes of Napoleon strove, after Wellington had annihi-
lated his power in the field, to complete his demolition of
his memory by contumely and derision. Their hack-
writers and led-captains were ordered to say that he was
no soldier, that he was profligate, that he was ignorant,
that he beat his own servants, that he was false to his wife.
What has become of his High-Tory slanderers now? Liver-
pool, who wanted to give him up to Louis XVIII. as a
rebel,' and to be dealt with accordingly'—that is to say,
to be shot in the same spot of the ditch of Vincennes where
d'Enghien was slain—Liverpool weat mad, and died drivell-
ing. Castlereagh cut his own throat! The superb Prince
Regent, who was too high and mighty to answer the letter
addressed to him by the kidnapped csptive of the Bellerophon,
became a king, and died in corporeal rottenness and mental
execration, leaving a memory so abhorred even in his own
family, that the Queen of England would not suffer the
bodies of her mother and her hatband to lie in the dis-
honoured sepulchre of George IV. Of the crowd of hack-
writers whom High Toryism incited to spurn the dying
lion, John Wilson Croker, the chief libeller of the Quar-
terly Review, is quite forgotten as Secretary of the Admi-
ralty, but is remembered and contemned as the pander to
an infamous nobleman; and Theodore Hook expired a
pauper with a nutmeg liver, and the bailiffs hammering at
his outward gates. And were poor Sir Walter Scott (who,
although he had the misfortune to be a High Tory, was
also a Christian gentleman) alive at this moment, I am in-
clined to think that he would spend his last penny in buy-
ing up the rema'nder of his calumnious ' Life of Napoleon,'
and burn every copy for shame."
In another part of the same contribution the editor
of the Temple-Bar Magazine goes on to describe
some of England's many

ledge, in regard to the treatment undergone by the
greatest man of modern times when lingering out
the last six wretched years of his wonderful life as
the captive of ungenerous England, Mr. Sala's
unthinking assailant would do well to complete his
labours by reading the noble and affecting stanzas
addressed in reproach to England in this mutter
by as truehearted an Englishwoman as she was
one rarely gifted in intellect—the late Elizabeth
Barrett Browning.