The Sun.
London, England, 1863-09-02 00:00:00

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LONDON, WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 2, 1863.

One solitary little cocoon will yield you an as-
tonishing length of silk, however scantily the silk-
worm may have been fattened upon mulberry
leaves. Not one jot less remarkable in its way, that
is as an instance of facile expansion, or rather, it
should be said, prolongation, is the manner in
which the thread of his discourse has been spun out
this month by the most conspicuous contributor to
the New Review (Political, Philosophical, and
Literary), a periodical which, although it has not
yet completed its first half year, has already as-
sumed a high place among its contemporaries as the
organ of the more advanced Conservatives. " The
Session of 186 V is the title of his paper, the theme
of his high argument. It is a short text enough,
and not apparently— to a superficial obser-
ver, at least—so very suggestive ! Yet it is
from this atom of a germ that has here, in the
first quarter-of-a-hundred pages of the opening
article in the New Review for September,
grown forth the ablest resume yet published of
the doings (such as they were) of the two Houses
during the last session—by reason of the debilitat-
ing, relaxing, soporific influence of the regime,
nominally of the Whigs, but actually of Tories
under Lord PALMERSTON ! The " situation," as
our neighbours have it, in the closing paragraph
of this clever and caustic survey is thus hap-
pily epitomised, where it is said that—
" A popular Premier :at the head of an incapable
and divided Ministry, and supported by a gross
majority of from five to ten votes ; a Liberal
Cabinet which came into power upon one
understanding and retains it on another ;
a -Whig Party which owes its tenure of
power exclusively to the aid of the Tories.
and a Radical party which discovers in its official
leaders the humble servants of the Conservatives,
make altogether a wholly exceptional, abnormal,
and unnatural polircal tableau." Not one
single phrase, epithet, adjective in all which,
can, we take it, for one instant be seriously
controverted. The Ministry is—precisely as it is
there described. That it is incapable and divided
is proved to the recognition of everyone, by the
flagrant fact of its doing just absolutely nothing.
Its foreign policy is a nullity. Its home policy has
long since fairly become comatoie. When it has
attempted to interfere even in some minor detail, as
in reference to the City Police, it has floundered into
a succession of mistakes, and has been compelled
eventually and ignominiously to withdraw from its
ill-advised venture at innovation. The incapability
and the division of the Ministry are as undeniable in
eff,,ct (that is to say, literally in their effects), as is the
one isolated merit of the Cabinet, the one exceptional
source of its vitality, the personal popularity of the
First Lord of the Treasury. That it (and he) came
into power upon one understanding, while it (and
he) retain that same power upon another, who shall
venture to gainsay ? It is admitted oven frankly
enough by Ministers themselves—by Lord PAL-
MERSTON as their chief, with a good-humoured
combination of slyness and satisfaction, that must
be to the very last degree irritating to the few inde-
pendent Liberals (Liberals at heart and 'not merely
by name) below the gangway, or sparsely scattered
about the back benches. Nothing in its way could
be more felicitous than the application by the
reviewer to our veteran Premier (p. 5) of those melo-
dious lines applied by LUCAN to the delineation of
POMPEY, beginning " Famceque petitor multa dare
in vulgus"—and more especially of that majestic
comparison to the giant of the forest, " Qualls
frugifero quercus sublimis in agro"—a passage
kindred in excellency to a congenial simile in one
of the opening pages of Sir WALTER RALEIGH'S
noble History of the World.
Scattered though the well-tempered but at
intervals the hardly less than scathing survey,
here taken in the New Review, of the session
of 1863, are other
phrases, and, indeed, at
times whole passages, far more satirical than
complimentary. I
It is the Whigs," we are
comically reminded at one moment, '; who wag
their political pigtails over the dangers of a Tory
Government, and resemble nothing so much as the
old gentleman whom WASHINGTON IRVING saw at
Stratford, who still seemed to think himself hale and
vigorous, with the trifling exception that for some
yews past he had quite lost the
use
of his legs.'"
At another moment we are called upon to
how it has come to pass that this Mosaic .31-m• know
atry
sits powerless in the House of Commons, and utterly
abashed in the House of Lords. Only occasionally
is it, that the bite of the satirist is little less than a
mere mumble with a toothless gum—as where he
s tys with a spiteful but innecuoua acrimony thet
" Sir GEORGE GREY is a weak end obstinate
man, and very much a clerk, who certainly doss
nothing towards compensating for the blunders of
Lord RUSSELL." The two new men inducted into the
Government—it is erroneous here said into the ranks
of the Cabinet—are more accurately described the
Marquis of HARTINGTON as the Ascanius of the
Whigs, and Mi-.
STANSFELD as one holding the
same position among the Radicals as a " promis-
ing junior" holds at the British bar. Refer-
ring to Mr. DISRAELI'S memorable con-
trast on the 26th of last June, his
contrast between the Conservative and Liberal
creeds, without doubt very admirable of its kind,
but here described rather extravagantly as one
" which for terseness, clearness, pregnancy will bear
comparison with the style of DEMOsTIIENES ?"
the New Review observes, after quoting a passage