The Sun.
London, England, 1863-08-20 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, THURSDAY EVENING, AUGUST. 20, 1863.

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—The honours of Lord Clyde's life belong
to the past. They were hardly won, and only for
a short time enjoyed. The work was long and the
reward transient. The vision which he had had
before him through life vanished almost as soon as
he approached it; or, rather, the vision remains,
end he has vanished after realising it for a short
hour. The name of Lord Clyde remains, the
full justice done at last to him remains, all his
honours stand upon the register of time for ever;
but he no longer enjoys them,—they witness to the
certainty with which England, sooner or later,
gives her faithful servants their due, and they are
valuable to us, but they are nothing any longer to
him. But though the honours of Lord Clyde's
life belong to the past, the honours of death still
remain to be paid. Lord Clyde ought to repose in
Westminster Abbey. That is the place to receive
him. He belongs to the very first rank among the
great workers of the day, and we prize now and ply
the highest tribute in our power to true work done.
We have buried four great workers lately in West-
minster Abbey—one a mighty man in letters,another
in mechanics, another in statesmanship, another in
war. Lord Macaulay, Mr. Stephenson, Lord Can-
ning, end Sir James etrain lie there. We acknow-
ledge a certain kind of hard work as the criterion and
concomitantof genius and inspiration. Your dull
plodder cannot possibly, let hire try ever so much,
work half so hard as a gifted man,—one who brings
to his work high faculties and an ardent spirit. The
true genius beats the dry sapper even in work—in
laboriousness; for high gifts quicken the pulse
and sustain the stretch of labour; they keep the
man going when, if he was a mere plodder, he
would droop and rest himself; they furnish con-
tinual fuel for the flame, constant material for the
head to work upon; they du not suffer him to
repose and be easy. A lower order of industrious
man is only at work when he is at his desk ; his
mind is empty as soon as ho leaves it. A higher
order of industrious man is always at work, unless
he is exhausted or asleep; he carries his desk, his
portfolio, his books, his correspondence in his head;
he has his task within him, he takes his work with
him wherever he goes; he cannot help himself
doing so, because the ardour of his mind keeps it
in motion and is always following up old matter
or suggesting fresh, and calling up hints, and half
ideas, and flying fragments of conceptions. and
sections of plans from the dark void. A Words-
worth, a Stephenson, a Macaulay must be always
working. They know the importance of every piece
of detail for the effect of the whole, and they know
that details must in their very nature be the work
of time, and therefore they know the extreme
value of time, and the use of Perpetual wakefulness
to catch every casual precious atom that floats in the
dim atmosphere of thought around us, arid must be
caught when it comes, or the slippery visitant is off
in a moment, and beyond the extreme verge of the
horizon again. Wordsworth describes himself, in
one of his sonnets, as pursued everywhere, even at
table and in the midst of company, by the shadow
of an unfound word tkat was wanted to fill a par-
ticular place in a line. The forge of the true poet who
will bend language to his own exact purpose must be
always at work with its obstinate unyielding mate-
rial, beating it and twisting it ; and the great me-
chanist's and statesman's forge, in the same way, must
be always working. Lord Clyde's work spans half a
century; it stretches from Vimiera to Lucknow, and
takes in all the great military fields of this century
—the Peninsular War, the American War, the first
Chinese War, the Sikh War, the Crimean War, and
the Indian Mutiny. The disheartening glories of
Corunna were a noble but a melancholy part of his
introduction to a military life, and Walcheren gave
him nothing but a fever, which imbedded itself in
his constitution end clung, like Dejanira'a shirt, to
him for 30 years afterwards. But a brighter day
followed, and the laurels of Barossa, Tarifa, Vittoria,
San Sebastian, and Bidassoa blossomed into a
brilliant reputation, and sent him back to England
a known and distinguished officer. A time of
peace followed, but he found work to do in the ser-
vice. In the course of time came the first Chinese
war ; then came the Sikh war, with the honours of
Ramnuggur, Chillianwaliah, and Goojerat. A
brief interval over, and we see him loading his
Highlanders at the Alma and Balaklava ; and an-
other short interval over, and he is Commander-
in-Chief in India, demolishing the Indian Mutiny.
His life thus includes all the great military exploits
of this century, and the unceasing work which all
these spheres of action gave him was not mere pro-
fessional work—there was a soul and an inspiration
in it, and that inspiration was the true fire and
heart of the soldier, which lay at the very founda-
tion of his character. Everything was a work of
love with him in war, because he had the genius of
war within him, the spark which lights up at the
thought of a campaign and a field of battle. He
was a zealot and an enthusiast, not an officer merely;
all the high qualities and splendid faculties which
are associated with war—the ardour and rush of
the military mind, its bold impetus, its generous
self-sacrifice, as well as the more sober characteris-
tics of stern vigilance and severe caution, this 'Whole
body of graedeoldierly qualities bad an infinite at-
traction for him. It was the standard of the sublime
in his mind to which he aspired, and the image of
such a character was constantly before him beckon-
ing him on in his career. It was this and no
mere professional spirit which made his work
what it was, and enabled him to go through such
an enormous amount of it. It lightened the day's
interminable drill, and it gave freshness to the
most dry, repulsive, and tedious duties of the
barrack and the camp. All people like the details
that are connected with the main object in their
hearts; the end glorifies the means, the goal con-
secrates the sandiest path that leads to is. You
cannot have too much detail for any man in that
which is his real and genuine line. He loves it and
devours it with a voracious appetite which, give it
ever so much, only craves more. The extreme love
of detail is thus the test of the inspiration of the
man, and it was this inspiration which kept Lord
Clyde up and sent him onward in his trying
career ; which gave him his indomitable perse•
verance. his unwearied imdustry, his power of get-
ting through professional work and never flagging
nnder any length and amount of it; and, lastly,
sustained him under the bitterest disappointments.
It was the soul of the enthusiast and not the plod
der which made him the hard worker that he was.
Let Cohn Campbell, then, lie in his natural resting
place beside the great workers, and the inspired
workers of England, with those men who have made
this country what it is, either in science, literature,
politics or war. Let him repose by the side of the
great departed who, in their different way and ac-
cording to their different gifts, have made life a
serious journey and left grand results of it. Let him
have that resting glace to which 50 years devotion to
his country entitle him. It is no matter to him, but
it is of great consequence to us that great services
should have their duo tribute paid them • and
Westminster will be all the richer in national asso-
ciations, memories, and glories for containing the
last remains of Lord Clyde.
DAILY NEWS.—Never had monarch a fairer op-
portunity for supplanting a rival than the Austrian
Emperor had in his recent antagonism to Prussia
and its King. Francis Joseph had but to outbid
the hesitating and ambiguous liberation of Berlin
by proposing at Frankfort a project of reform or
of union which should be acceptable at least to
the moderate liberals of Germany. Instead of this,
what has Austria offered ? What scheme have the
Princes of Germany and its people been sum-
moned to listen to ? A scheme illusive, unfair,
impracticable, and of a nature to be received by
the assembled Princes themselves as a political
conundrum, by the people as a delusion and a snare.
The first portion of the echemo brought forward
by Austria is that of the new Federal Executive.
Tee German Government is proposed to consist of
eleven members, three to be chosen by Austria, three
by Prussia, three by Bavaria, and only two by the
rest of Germany, with its varied interests and large
population. The majerity of this Executive Council
is at once in the bands of Austria and Bavaria, two
Courts closely united by policy and intermarriage,
both Catholic and both retrograde in many respects.
Such a proposal is nothing less than an insult to
North Germany, and, instead of depriving Prussia
of its adherents, calculated to make all Germany
rally to its side. We had been already warned that
the ideas of Rechbarg, and even of Sehmerling, were
not sufficiently advanced to satisfy the aspirations
of Germany; and certainly the propositions of
the idmperer at Frankfort will not diminish that
mistrust of Austria which prevails in the minds
of the most farsighted German pattiots. In addition
to a Federal Executive so unfairly put together,
there is to be an Upper Chamber in which these
Courts and their aristocracies may entrench them-
selves ; and this Upper Chamber is moreover to have
the power to elect one-third of the members of the
Lower or Representative Chamber. We admit that
Austrian statesmen have some excise for being con-
servative at home. The difficulty of reconciling so
many nationalities and bringing them to narmonice
in one assembly is so great tout the attempt to solve
the problem by giving an immense preponderance
to the aristocracy can be understood. Moreover,
the remote populations of the Austrian empire are
centuries in am ar, and want that middle class which
tempers extravagant tendencies above and below it.
But Germany contains quite a different kind of
population, and quite a different field for the
legis-
lator. It is far too advanced to be governed by
a Senate of Notables. It is far too sanguine and
too agitated to allow a civic minority to be kept
down and neutralised by a Large aristocratic ma-
jerity secured by unfair meeee. Auetrien states-
men, by their Emperoes proposA have merely
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