The Sun.
London, England, 1863-07-07 00:00:00

already well known to Europe, upon a subject of inte-
rest both to England and to France. Upon this simple
incident is based the statement made by Mr. Roe-
buck, a statement in which the Emperor saw with
amazement himself represented as having sent a
message to the British House of Commons, and as
having selected Mr. John Arthur Roebuck to be the
bearer. We did not need the announcement in the
Moniteur to comprehend the exact truth. Before
that announcement appeared most persons who knew
anything of the character of the French Emperor
and of Mr. Roebuck had made up their minds that
the statement of the latter originated in that morbid
vanity which is of all human passions the most likely
to give rise to grotesque delusions. Some words
of good-natured complaisance were sufficient to
make the person to whom they were ad-
dressed imagine himself an accredited agent of
an Emperor ; and the same vanity which sug-
gested the delusion of necessity prompted the an-
nouncement to the astonished House of Commons.
Another member has however rushed into print to
claim his share in the Imerial confidence, and his
participation in the mission from Napoleon 111. to
the British House of Commons, and Mr. Roebuck
and Mr. William Shaw Lindsay are the illustrious
Ambassadors through whom, if we are to believe
themselves, the Emperor of the French conveys his
wishes and sentiments to that assembly. This is
something more than silly impertinence. It is a
grave offence against the constitution and the
law, It is a violation of the first duty which sub-
jects owe to their Sovereign, and Englishmen to
their country. Great lawyers have held that any
pablic communication, on matters of State, between
a British subject and a foreign Sovereign is a
high misdemeanour. But unquestionably it is so
for any British subject to thwart and oppose by
such communication the councils of his Queen.
Unquestionably it is so to bring to the people of
this country a message from a foreign Sovereign in
opposition to the policy of the Queen. The Queen
is the only representative of the nation to foreign
States. With the Queen alone rests the right of
holding intercourse, in the name of the nation, with
the authorities of those States. The right of send-
ing and receiving ambassadors is one of the highest
prerogatives of the Crown. That prerogative is
infringed when any one of the Queen's subjects
presumes to make himself the medium of communi-
cation on matters of State policy between a foreign
Sovereign and any portion of the people of this
realm. The House of Commons must judge what is
due to their own dignity and to their respect for the
constitution and the prerogative of the Queen. If
they think fit to permit Mr. Roebuck and Mr.
Lindsay to play out on the boards of St. Stephen's
the little farce of " The Twin Envoys; or, The Im-
perial Ambassadors," the best that can be said of it
is that everybody will perfectly understand that it
is a farce. It may have one advantage. It may
teach persons in high station the dangers of con-
versing too freely with the Roebucks and the Lind-
says who may find their way into their presence.
We have a very strong suspicion that there is no
one more heartily sick of the names of his illustrious
visitors than the Imperial personage whom they
assumed to represent. The moral of the whole
matter may perhaps be nothing higher than this—
that frankness and politeness are very good things
in sovereigns as well as common people, but are
not the only qualities requisite in an interview with
a gentleman who cannot resist the temptation of
publishing to the world that he has actually had a
conversation with a real live Emperor upon affairs
of State.

HERALD.—The accident of London life which
allows as to live without any knowledge of our ,
next-door neighbour, has had a curious exemplifi-
cation in the state of things which has just been
discovered in the interior of a respectable trades-
man's shop. Who would have thought that in a
genteel part of Hackney the worthy inhabitants
have been having through months an undertaker in
their midst who has been systematically turning
his house into a burial-ground, and evading the
dues of sexton and parson by taking charge of the
corpses of his neighbours as permanent members of
his household ? The skeleton was not in his cup-
board, but under his work-bench. The memento
?non: never took a more palpable form even with the
skull and open grave of the Trappist Brothers.
Death was here, and death there, and death every-
where. Three children lay about him in as many
coffins in various stages of decay. One had been
so long with him that it had shrunk to the skeleton.
Another was so far decayed that the head fell off as
the body was touched; and all three bore traces of
attempts to subdue the effects of decomposition by
the corrosive action of lime. There were two other
large coffins enjoying a like family distinction, but
were void of their adult tenants. As we run
through the catalogue of the inmates of his house
and home, and recal the months through which they
were allowed to sojourn with him, one is tempted
to ask with Hamlet, " Has this fellow no feeling of
his business that he sings at grave-making ?" and
to inquire how it happens that houses under the ken
of the police, and subject to visits from all sorts of
legal authorities, can have been allowed to have
remained under such ghastly tenantry. " The
custom that made it a property of easiness" to the
Danish grave-digger, no doubt had a like effect on
the English undertaker; but the public have in-
terests that hardly allow of so free an indulgence
of taste; and it would be charitable to hope that
there was no worse motive in Lotion. He had
the coffin in the cases of the adults, the skeletons
in the case of the children, and he saved possibly
some paltry fee in reference to the burial ;
but, except for these trivial considerations,
the only repayment which this respectable trades-
, man, enjoying the full confidence of the parochial
authorities, received for the proximity of the most
offensive and revolting of nuisances, was that "feel-
ing of the business" that bad at last given it a
"property of easiness." The long use of the most
repulsive calling will end iu giving an artistic re•
lish for some of its traits and characteristics. The
associations growing up of time are like the lichens
covering the rock, they give a new surface to ideas
nakedly not prepossessing. The daintiness that at
first repelled is succeeded after long use by another
that appreciates, and the enthusiasm of the laun-
dress, in " Dickens," over the corpse of the dead
husband, is, perhaps, quite as natural as the refined
appreciation of a Correggio or a Canova by a higher
class of connoisseurs. But, beyond the study of a
phase of character that we may well wish to be
unique, there are some important public considera-
tions involved in this strange neglect of all the de-
cencies a healthy state of society associates with the
treatment of the dead. There is no better law than
the old Roman one—lntra mums mortuos ne sepelito
—but it asks some vigilance as the price of its full
utility. The passing of the Burial Act, which in-
hibits the use of cemeteries not situate at some dis-
tance from towns, has made interments at once
more expensive and troublesome, and the tempts•
tion to offences like those of the Hackney under-
taker must be too strong to be resisted by many
poor persons who are not aided in their duty by the
fact that their professional calling obliges them to
visit cemeteries and bury the dead. We have re-
peatedly been hearing complaints of the length of
time poor Irish families are accustomed to keep
shut up with them, in narrow rooms, the I odies of
children or deceased relatives; and accordingly, as
occupation may prove pressing, money wanting, or
the people themselves indolent, it is easy to see that
the cae of the undertaker may be that of hundreds
through the different parts of the metropolis every
month. For a week or more the corpse is retained
in an every day increasing state of offensiveness;
but when the decomposition is past tolerance, the
first expedient may be expected to be adopted
which offers itself as a means of relieving them-
selves of a nuisance, whose existence they tell must
wellsuspect to be a legal offence, and which h
know to be a serious danger. It is as
h not
to know that a contingencywhiic-d for by
likely to be growing less .s provided
appoint
the provisions of the statutes w
medical inspectors for districts and
11 the police,
nuisances; and the public, but es.petcots.inspectors of
opyeratiou the
should not be slow in bringing
mayln call for it. The
interposition whenever a case
licence, too, assumed by this
ht be made to cover
Hackney undertaker,
is one which, if permitted, mix
identity of the dead is
a great deal of crime. The
t of the living, and the
still more uncertain than tha
theof another. There e
certificate that applied toone death might be mad
inspector of healthw were
to facilitate the coveringrinbg
and h
two coffins discovered
might
w atever the
which no tenants werey found,
wanner of their disappearance we
thinking that it •
kn° w th.
0 long
which prohibits our
be ex.
tended to subjects reaching such a 1,1
spring.
„ace h
o-
painful public
c,bily. The encouragement to infanticide
in. up has already been a subject of •
rumour, and we are not certain that thPere should not
legal forms
be an increasingly active use of whatever
we have, in order that the publ'
better guarantee in reference I le rnay have some
n still-born. Every
Lo the f •
infants supposed to have been furtive burial of
innovation which tends to cheapen the value of life
in any of its stages is a
calamity in which
we have all the most impportitalnict of stakes, and the
public authority cannot be t . .
co vigilantly or energe
tically interposed to Protect society from the mis-