The Sun.
London, England, 1863-01-26 00:00:00

SPIRIT OP THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

SATURDAY REVIEW.—The pleasure of astonish-
ing somebody appears to be a necessary condition
of Lord Russell's political vitality. At a.l times of
the year, and especially during the period of the
Parliamentary recess, he delights to look on the
British public in the light of an old grandmother,
and to exhibit himself in the character of a game-
some darling just home from school ; and he is per-
petually making the poor old lady's life a burden
to her by reason of the combined hardihood and
ingenuity of his pranks. Sometimes it is a letter to
a friendly Bishop, lighting up the flame of religious
discord from one end of the island to the other.
Sometimes it is a sudden resignation, secretly con-
ceived and executed for the purism of tripping up
a body of too-confiding colleagues. Sometimes it
is an a'arming announcemeat that we have broken
with a " trusty and loyal ally." During the pre-
sent recess he has been peculiarly successful in the
conception and execution of these startling per-
formances. There has been something more than
usually audacious and elfish in his antics; and he
has nearly frightened his aged relative out of her
wits. He has forestalled the decision of the House
of Commons by proposing to make away with an
important national possession during its proroga-
tion; and he has picked a gratuitous quarrel with
.the native country of our future Queen. These, how-
ever, are minor gambols. The great summersault
which has fairly set the household screaming has
only just been executed. Those who were most fami-
liar with his wonderful capacity for turning head over
heels were not prepared for the supple agility of the
feat which, in the late French despatches, has been
exhibited to the world. How little could the pious
nurse who listened so joyfully to the first lusty
cry of his infant Protestantism twelve years ago,
have foreseen that the author of the Durham
Letter Mould live to invite the Pope himself to take
up his residence in a palace, st e, in the character eithe,
of a Sovereign or a Bishop, upon the territory of
England ! The dilemma is embarrassing enough. If
it was as a temporal Sovereign that the Pope was
invited to take up his residence in an English palace,
Lord Russell is not only hostile to the conjunction
of tcinporal and spiritual authority, but he is will-
ing to be the means of perpetuating it under the
protection of the British flag. This hypothesis is
clearly out of the question. It would be impossible
that England, which has suffered more than one
friendly sovereign to escape to the asylum of her
shores in secrecy and disguise, and to subsist there
upon private bounty, should assign the British fleet
as convoy, and a palace maintained by British taxes
as a residence, to the one Sovereign with whom she
has never been on the terms of ordinary diplomatic
cosartesy;and whose existing temporal prerogatives
our Government is striving to overthrow. It cannot
be that we shall show to the hostile Sovereign of
Rome a favour which 15 years ago we refused to
the allied Sovereign of France. Why is he to be
preferred to the petty princes of Tuscany, Parma,
and Modena, whom we have suffered to fly from
their dominions with no suggestion of a passage in
a British man-of war, or of a hospitable reception
in a Maltese palace ? It is in some greater eharac-
' ter than that of the petty ruler of a strip of land on
the western slope of the Apennines, that all this un-
wonted courtesy has been showered upon him. But
the other horn of the dilemma meets us with diffi-
culties scarcely less embarrassing. There is no
doubt that it is to the Pcpe, in his ecclesiastical
capacity as spiritual head of one half of Christen-
dom, that the hospitality of the English Govern-
ment has been offered. But is it really possible that
the author of the Durham Letter was also the author
of this pressing invitation ? Is it possible that the
ardent Protestant whose indignatiota burned with so
intense and yet pure a flame because a few obscure
bishops were sent to look after their Roma❑ Catholic
flocks in England, should now ba inviting the Bishop
of Bishops, who claims jurisdiction over the whole
world,to take up his abode, surrounded by all the am-
bitious pageantry of his office, in a palace on British
ground. kis a pity the Pope did not take advantage
of the offer. It would have been edifying to the
Protestant world to study the variety of anomalous
consequences which would have arisen under the
auspices of the great Protestant leader of 1851. The
. Pope would not, of course, retire to Malta unat-

tended, nor would he be inactive during his stay.
Whatever might become of his temporal govern-
ment, his spiritual attributes would still remain to
him. The spiritual allegiance of the whole Catholic
world would still be rendered to him, and its govern-
ment would still be in his hands. All the adminis-
trative machinery through which that government
is ordinarily exercised would follow him to Malta.
The Court. of Cardinals, and the Roman Chancery,
and the Holy Inquisition, and the Propaganda, and
ill the countless establishments by which the mis-
s'onary work in heathen and heretical countries is
carried on, would, of course, follow their great
Head into the second captivity of the Papacy.
LONDON REVlEW.—Sheridan, at the close of
whose speech the house adjourned in order to have
time to recover their dispassionate powers of judg-
ment, was counted out on the question of the Abo
lition of Slavery. Burke, with his fancy and enthu-
siasm, was more than once coughed down. Fox, who
delighted his hearers with his argument, is said on
in illy occasions to have wearied them by its iteration.
Pitt, Fox, and Burke agreed to give the palm of an-
cient and modern eloquence to the speech of Sheridan
just mentioned; and yet some doubts as to the jus-
tice of the verdict cannot but suggest themselves,
when we hear a speech of Lord Radnor, a few years
later, spoken of by both Windham and Canning as
the best they had ever heard. Either the degene-
racy of orators bad taken place very rapidly, or such
judgments must be taken with a little reservation.
Lord Brougham, only 30 years ago, besought the
peers, "on bended knees," not to reject the Reform
Bill. Traces of the prominent personal element are
to be found in every great speech of the time. It
takes sometimes the form of attacks against oppo
nents to which Parliament is now a stranger ;
sometimes that of such painful scenes as the quarrel
between Fax and Burke; but it is most common in
the form of what may almost be called egotism.
Pitt once told the House of Commons of the remi-
niscences of his childhood. Fox declared, at the:be-
ginning of one of his best speeches—that on the
Westminster election—that he did not expect to
meet with bare justice in the house. The words
created some disturbance; Fox dwelt on them, re-
peated them, and overawed his enemies, as the story
goes, when he had pronounced them four times over.
How irresistibly the elle breaks out in Grattan's
celebrated invective in the Irish Parliament against
Flood, by no means a contemptible foe ! The speaker
begins by supposing an imaginary character, whom
he invests with all the faults of his opponent, and
in whom he traces his history. His evident inten-
tion is to keep up the transparent mask to the end
of the speech, and then annihilate his rival by a
word—much in the same way as Brougham, forty
years later, directed a memorable attack on Can-
ning. But in the middle of the speech the orator
can restrain himself no longer; the direct hostility
which inspires the assault is too powerful to allow
the flimsy pretext of an imaginary character, and
Grattan bursts into one of those fiery onsets which
no man ever led with such effect. " The merchant
may say to you—the constitutionalist may say to
you—the American may say to you—aed I, I now
ay, land say to your beard, sir—you are not an
honest man !" The artificial character of most of
he great speeches on record is another feature
which cannot but be remarked. Nearly all exhibit
,t designed, often a complicated, arrangement of the
matter. There is no reason to think that speeches
were prepared with more labour than at present ;
some doubtless were committed to memory then as
now, some depended on the inspiration of the mo-
ment. Cicero himself cannot have elaborated his
Speeches with more care than Lord Macaulay. The
impression which the speeches of the latter on the
Reform Bill left on the minds of the audience was,
that the speaker was an extraordinary clever man,
who did not seem to care much about the debate,

provided that his sentences turned out right. He
quotes in his speeches from his history, and in his
history from his speeches. But in arrangement of
the matter, Macaulay no more resembles Pitt than a
simple equation resembles a problem in the Lunar
Theorem. The only modern debater who has taken
pains in this respect is Mr. Gladstone ; and it is for