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

PALTRY INSULTS TO THE GREAT CAPTIVE.

" Arrived at St. Helena, he was not permitted to occupy
the only decent residence in the island, Plantation House
—that was set apart for the high and mighty governor,
selected by the Tories at home, and now on his way out—
but after living for some weeks in a hovel at the end of a
garden, in which there was scarcely room to swing a cat,
and which belonged to Mr. Balcombe, the gentleman
appointed to supply his future establishment with
chandlery and butchers' meat, he was thrust into a barn
patched up with boards and pitched paper, nailed toge•
ther by ships' carpenters, and called Longwood. There,
encamping a regiment of infantry at his gates, and postine•
sentinels at every corner and on every goat-path leading
to the sea, and focussing hundreds cf cannon upon him,
and spying upon him if ever he chose to ride on horseback
or walk in his arid garden, they left him to the heat, and
the dust, and the mosquitoes,. and his own miserable
thoughts. They sent him to read only such English news-
papers as were filled with abuse of his policy, his family,
and himself : and even then the Tories took care never to
let him have a complete file, but ingeniously broke the
succession, so that his views of contemporary history
should be muddled and obscure. The high and mighty
governor, whose name was Lowe, and who had been an
orderly clerk to Marshal Blucher, and the commandant of a
horde of Sicilian bandits hired to cut throats by the British
Government, came out in due course; installed himself at
Plantation House; insulted the prisoner by asking him to
a ball as General' Bonaparte; confiscated the present
sent cut by good Lady Holland, merely because they bore
the inscription 'To Napoleon the Great;' discovered that
the party at Longwood ate too much bread and drank teo
much salad oil, and insisted upon the expenses being cut
down accordingly; and stated to Barry O'Meara that he
considered Ali Pasha to be 'a much more respectable scoun-
he sound
drel than Bonaparte.' I forgot to say that he gobbled up all
tpartridges and pheasants which tould be procured
from the Cape for the exile's wretched table, and only sent
to Longwood such game as was utterly putrescent and
uneatable. These delicate attentions, combined with
some thousand more outrages and insults which I have not
space to enumerate here, but which I mean to put some day
in a big book (dedicating it to the infamous memories of
Liverpool and Castlereagh, not forgetting the master of
these wretches, the Regent), produced, in a surprisingly
brief
space of time, the desired effect. The object of the
Tories in sending Napoleon to St. Helena was to kill him
by inches; and by inches he was killed accordingly."
The following is Mr. Sala's reference in this
same paper to the foremost man in England in those
tirncs, one who might, had he cared to do so, have
mitigated the anguish of the Great Napoleon's cap-
tivitY by merely deprecating the continuance of
these infernal cruelties : meaning no other than

THE IRON DEUR I
" With what an astonishing amount of base and sense-
less adulation has this perfectly trustwathy, straight-
forward, clear-
sighted, clever, selfish man (the Duke of
Wellington)
been bespattered! He knew remarkably well
on which side his bread was being buttered, and adhered
to the buttered side with commendable pertinacity. His
public hands were clean—albeit in private he was cool,
resolute roue( and gamester. His motto should have been
Excelsior ,"
for he was continually mounting, knowing
that at the
top of the mountain was fortune,
and a coronet, and a field marshal's baton. As a
Minister—a
Tory Minister—he justly earned the
hatred of the
English people; and in his decline he com-
manded respect (fly
contemporaries because he had lived so long that his
had forgotten his misdeeds, and another
generation had grown up, too young to remember anything
but the fame of his great achievements. In his last days,
in his last rides
up Constitution-hill, Duke Arthur had
passed into the mythical state; and as a myth the mob
capped and bowed the knee to him. I only wonder, seeing
that he was newr known to do a kindly or charitable action
to any human being, that he has not been nicknamed,
Arthur the Good.' "
Accused since the publication of this article in the
Temple Bar magazine
for September, bitterly
accused by one of
written "several his reviewers, of having in it
Pages of nonsense, introducing a
very improbable story improbable
and some equally
history, which is, in fact, a fiction of Mr. Sala's
brain "—Mr. Sala himself has taken the trouble to
answer this preposterous accusation by replying to
his reviewer thus :

t, I should, therefore, advise him, if ho wishes to make
good his charge of falsehood against me, to refer-1, to
Santini's book ; 2, to the
" Memorial de Ste. Helene,"
by the Count de Las Cases
; 3, to the "History of the
Captivity of Napoleon," b' v
, General Count Montholon
(London : Colburn, 1848) ; 4, to 66 A Voice from St.
Helena," by Barry O'Meara (London : Simpkin and
Marshall, 1822) ; 5, to " Letters written on board his
Majesty's Ship the Northumberland,,:
by William Warden,
surgeon (London : Ackermann, 1818) _
; 6, to " Paul's Let-
ters to his Kinsfolk," by Sir Walter Scott, Bart.; 7. to the
same author's " Life of Napoleon Buonaparte" (Edin-
burgh : Ballantyne, 1827) ; 8, to " Peri.; Revisited," by
John Scott ; 9, to " Paris after Watet loo," by James Simp-
son, advocate (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1853) ; 10, to the
"Relation des Evenements qui se sent passes en France
depuis le debarquement de Napoleon Buonaparte, au ler
Mills, 1815, jusqu'au traite du 20 Novembre, traduit do
l'Anglais de Miss Helen Maria Williams," by Buton de la
Martiniere (Paris: Dentu, 1816)) ; 11,
to " Sainte Helene,"
by Adolphe Thiers, thelast volume of the" Histoire du Con-
sulat et do I'Empire," published separately in 1862; 12, your
critic mayread in the newspapers of the period the proceed-
ings of the coroner's inquest, held on the body of Lord
Londonderry (Castlereagh) ; 13, I refer him to the pages
of the Quarterly Review from 1815 to 1822, for the foul
abuse lavished on Napoleon by John Wilson Croker, secre-
tary to the Admiralty; 14, to the report of the trial of
Nicholas Suisse, for information as to the nobleman to whom
to the early numbers of the
Croker was the pimp ; 15,
John Bull for the calumnious articles against Napoleon,
by Mr. Theodore Hook; 16, to Mr. Barham's "Memoirs
of Hook, for an account of the death of that brilliant
writer, the circumstances in which he died, and the
seizure of his effects at the suit of the Tory Government,
whose predecessor he had served so iealously. With
regard to the character of George IV., that which I have
said of him, after the elegies Of Byron, of Walter Savage
Lander, and of Thackeray, need little vindication. Respecting
the trifling incident of the putrid pheasants and partridges
sent to Napoleon at St. Helena, e refer
your critic to
pages of Careme (Le Cuisinier Roya
) where he will find
the anecdote precisely as I have set it down, so related to
Careme, by Chandelier, Napoleon's cook at Longwood.
These sources of information are not very recondite, but
they are extant, for all the world to read. The authen-
ticity of the statements made byMontholon and Las
Cases are not denied even by Mr. Forsyth, the conscientious
and impartial apologist of Sir Hudson Lowe. All the books
I have mentioned are very much at the service of your critic
if he will honour me with a visit; 'and I shall be happy to
Y me before 1 sat down to
show him the passages marked b
write the article upon which he has animadverted."
After having had which timely and evidently
essential " refreshers" administered to his appa-
rently as yet very email amount of higorictli know-