The Sun.
London, England, 1865-03-22 00:00:00

"A SUN PORTRAIT."

The Photographic Curiosity announced by us,
some time since, as in active preparation, is at
length, we are rejoiced to say, completed, and
completed, we will add, most successfully. The
difficult task of its production—by means of an
entirely new application of the wonderful art of
photography—has 'been delayed until now solely
by the unpropitious state of the weather, that is
to say, by the unusually lengthened continuance
of a murky and misty condition of the atmosphere.
One bright day, however, has at length put an
end to the difficulty—the result aimed at being
now completely and triumphantly accomplished.
An all but microscopic facsimile of the front page
of The Sun newspaper of MONDAY, the 2d of
January, 1865, has—in other words—been pro-
duced by this hitherto undreamt-of application of
the photographic art. It is hereby announced in
fact as ready for publication, on Monday, the 3d
of April, upon which day a copy of this Miniature
Photograph, entitled "A Sun Portrait,"
will be presented gratuitously to every purchaser of

The sttn
of that evening—the Photograph being accom.
panied by a Supplement reproducing the front
page of our Journal of Monday, the 2d of January.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
Tins DAT.—Morning, Bh. 50m.—Afternoon,
To-Monnow.-Morning, 10h. 18m.—Afternoon, 11h. 4m,

,
-0 ,

LONDON, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 1863

The *House of Commons has passed an important
resolution, which, whatever its ultimate effect upon
our impracticable Chancellor of the Exchequer,
serves to declare in unmistakable terms its opinion
upon one of the most oppressive and ill-placed of
our taxes. The duty on Fire Insurance is, as has
been often said, a tax on prudence. Those who
have a due regard for the protection of- their pro-
perty have, in fact, to pay on behalf of those who
take no thought for the morrow. All the arguments
on the subject have been brought forward over
and over again. We have been told that of
£80,000,000 of insurable property in and around
London only 80 per cent. is insured ; that a very
large proportion of the mercantile property
that is thus protected is insured in Hamburg
owing to .the absence of duty there, and conse-
quently so much money annually goes out of
the country, which, by rights, should go into the
coffers of English insurance offices. But, like many
another grievance, the insurance duty has been
borne so long, that our administrative authorities
seemed to think it must be borne for ever, and the
Chancellor of the Exchequer was virtually indig-
nant at any murmurs against a respectable old
established imposition. Patience and perseverance,
however, make their way at last, even in legislative
reforms, and those who return constantly to the
charge, in spite of all discouragement, at length
have the satisfaction of seeing their efforts crowned
with success. Such was the case of Mr. VILLIERS
and the repeal of the Corn Laws ; such, we trust,
may yet be the fate of Mr. BERKELEY with the
ballot, and those who thus persevere in the face of
"ridicule, and with little prospect of victory, deserve
the thanks of the community for fighting the battle
of the public interests against desperate odds. The
reform with which Mr. SHERIDAN'S name is asso-
ciated is, it is true, far less important than either
the ballot or free trade, yet it must not be alto-
gether despised, since it affects a very large number
of the community, and indirectly causes serious loss
and damage. The first question when we hear of
an extensive fire is naturally whether the property
was insured. If the building destroyed has been a
mercantile establishment it is probable that we shall
be answered in the affirmative, but if it is a private
residence it is more than likely that we shall learn
fiat the loss has been total. In answer to the re-
monstrances sometimes made on their imprudence,
such householders will tell you that they do not ob-
ject to paying a moderate rate to the insurance
office ; but they object to paying to the Government,
from which they will get no return, a sum larger by
one-third than the amount of the insurance. A
man insuring for £3OO has to pay nine shillings
duty for six shillings insurance, and it is not won-
derful, consequently, that so large a proportion of
valuable property in and about London remains
uninsured. Mr. SHERIDAN, however, did not ad-
dress himself so much to the merits of the question
as to its present position in the House. The reduc-
tion extorted with some difficulty from the Financial
Minister last year only coneemedAtock in trade, thus

result, and therefore his friends strongly recom-
mended him to persevere with his motion. Mr.
MALINS very truly said that the reduction of fire
insurance duties was not a favourite measure with
our Finance Minister, and therefore it cannot be
trusted in his hands. A tax of 200 per cent. on

prudence and forethought is, as Mr. MALINS justly
observed, a tax for which no one can say a word.
The opponents of the motion last night did not pre-
tend to defend its principle, but they argued
against its reduction with a curious inconsistency.
Happily the common sense of the House was too

strong for administrative self-sufficiency or in

difference to the public wishes. Possibly the coming

election may have exercised a beneficial result on
the division list. At any rate, after a brief debate,
Mr. GLADSTONE'S virtuous indignation left him in

a minority of 72, and Mr. SHERIDAN rejoicing over
a triumph so decisive that it must certainly exercise

a beneficial effect upon our financial policy.

Those who regard the topic in a right spirit and
with the moderation which such subjects require,
will be satisfied with the result of the discussion on
Mr. MoNsELL's motion. It is true that we should
discard the prejudices and absurd forms of less en-

lightened days and periods when less liberal opinions
prevailed, and the hon. gentleman succeeded in
making out his case in a very creditable manner.
The hon. member showed the unsuitable nature of
the restrictions imposed alike upon Protestants and
Catholics when he alluded to the words which the
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland had to use the other
day, which were calculated to excite jealousy and
inflame discord to a great degree. Confidence is the
only sure way to meet with success in arranging
such important matters as those of Parliamentary
conduct and the combination of those who must act
in concord if they are to effect any desirable object as
the result of their joint labours. Nothing can be said
inimical to the end desired if, by imposing vexatious
restrictions, and insisting upon the maintenance of
antiquated customs, we irritate and annoy a large
portion of our fellow subjects, and thus pervert the
purposes for which Emancipation Acts are passed,
and hailed as the symbol of advanced intelligence
and the triumph of civil and religious liberty. Mr.
MONSELL declared he only asked the House "to have
confidence in the Roman Catholic members, and to
believe that they did not desire in any way to injure
the institutions of the country, but were anxious to

act in perfect harmony with the other members of
the House." This is certainly fair and reasonable,
and it is satisfactory that Sir G. GREY should have
met the proposition of the hon. member in the right
spirit, and consented to the introduction of the Bill.
This is the only wise method of dealing with the
matter, and reflects credit upon the decision of the
Government. , The same credit cannot be given to
Mr. WIIALLEY, who went out of his way to exhibit
as much intolerance as he possibly could, and to
give utterance to the -most extreme opinions. He
thatscorn heed
Wthoeulicideanoo " lm
tf
discussca discussion,"
the nanadt daeucl,arbeudt
vote against the measure whenever it was proposed.
He also informed the Government that they had
failed in their duty in consenting to the bill being
introduced, and assured them he should take every
opportunity of telling them so. It is of no use to
expect that the most moderate and necessary re-
forms can ever be proposed without exciting
the ire of some and arousing the indignation
of others ; but if the principles of religious
liberty be persistently upheld, they must in the end
triumph over every opponent. It is not acting in
accordance with the sentiments which should actuate
a Christian country to impose such forms and ob-
servances as militate against the feeling of confi-
dence and goodwill that should be allowed every
scope for their display and exercise. So far, then,
we may rest satisfied with this introduction of Mr.
MONSELL'S measure ; and there is good reason to
hope that the sense and discretion of the House will
allow it to pass through the successive stages until
it is consummated, and thus add another proof to
the many now existing, that the laws of England do
not rest upon arbitrary form, but appeal to right
and reason, and seek their strength and supremacy
by Winning the confidence and gaining the sym-
pathy of those who observe them.

The Marquis TOWNSHEND took up a point of
some interest when he asked concerning the prac-
tice adopted in the workhouses of turning out the
poor at early hours in the morning, which, in the
present inclement season, is very unsuitable. It

leaving all other descriptions of insurable property certainly seems as if the managers of these places
still burdened with the tax at its old rate. Tired of went out of their way to render them as obnoxious
bringing in bills on the subject, Mr. SHERIDAN possible to the unhappy creatures who are forced to
decided to proceed this year by a resolution of the resort there. As the Marquis truly observed, it is
house, which in brief terms would serve, he said, as not to be wondered at that, under these circum-
a reminder to the Government that the reduction of stances, so large a proportion of the population
duty effected last year ought to be extended to all should turn their attention to crime, and that our
descriptions of insurable property. The Govern- streets should be infested by beggars. Lord GRAN-
ment, he thought, had done wrong in proposing a VILLE'S answer was as unsatisfactory as possible,
reduction only on a special item, instead of carrying for the noble lord went back to the old story
into full effect the manifest wishes of the house, and of the necessity that existed for not increas-
he thought if the resolution which he proposed were ing the vagrant poor of the metropolis.
carried it would stand as a standing instruction to It is not among the class who resort to
the Government, in case of the inability of the workhouses that the regular vagrants are
Chancellor of the Exchequer to carry it into effect found, for these are too sharp to waste their time
this year, that the duty should at the earliest where they can get so little. The full severity of the
opportunity be considered and diminished, rigorous measures of our Poor-law guardians presses
The diminution which was made in respect upon the wretched classes who are too weak or de-
to stock in trade, and which it is now proposed to pressed to enter upon the crafty pursuit of vagrancy,
extend to all kinds of property, amounted to one- and hence the utter want of feeling exhibited in the
half of the tax, bringing it down to eighteenpence arrangements is the more to be deplored. Lord
per £lOO, instead of three shillings. To this end GRANVILLE said that he believed many of these
Mr. SHERIDAN addressed himself, but his ultimate poor people started in the morning of their own
object is to reduce the tax to all equal duty of one accord, but this is not likely to be the case in many
shilling on every sort of insurable property, and instances. No doubt the Poor-law Board may not
this point we hope he will very shortly reach. Mr. be aware of the fact of this early clearance system,
GLADSTONE tried his powers of argument, expostu- but it is their duty to acquaint themselves with the
lation, and ridicule in vain against the overwhelm- particulars of the case, and to sift the conduct of ,
ing evidence against him. His dignity was evidently those officials who persist in dealing out such scant
hurt at the unwarrantable interference with his accommodation, and insufficient assistance to those
department, and he gave the house and the public whom the law has decreed shall receive it during cer-
to understand that it was his prerogative to tain months of the year. What with one excuse and,
impose and remit taxes, and that the rest of another, it is really extremely difficult to come to a
the world had nothing to do but to pay definite conclusion as to what is or is not done in
them. There were, he said, material objet- Unions. The startling fact remains, however, that
tions to resolutions which picked out particular it is always the reiteration of wrongs that we hear
taxes for remission ; they were hostile to the prin- " the sad rehearsal of the past," informing us that
ciple which gave the initiative to the Government, here the casual poor are turned out, and there the
and contrary to that custom which demanded that sick inmate neglected. Then follows the old ex-
the entire financial condition of the country should cuses and the worn-out reasons, and the matter
be placed annually before the House, "so that the fades away from public recollection for a time. But
House, with that financial condition before it, may this is not what it should be, and the sooner some
make a selection as it thinks fit between the different alteration takes place .the better for the reputation
interests:of the country claiming relief." This is a of all concerned. Lord HOUGHTON'S view of the
somewhat novel version of the Budget, and our matter is doubtless that of a large number, and
present Chancellor, at least, does not take hints so therefore it is well to consider some of his state-
willingly as to justify its accuracy. With regard ments. In the first place, instead of its being a
to motions made prior to a Budget, says the right proof that the new workhouse wards are not re-
hon. gentleman, no good ever comes of them, and quired for the reception of the casual poor, be-
in strong terms he denounced the imprudence of cause they are not full, it is rather an evidence
acceding to such a measure. His eloquence so far that the poor are not rightly attended to, and,
impressed some hon. members that they appealed above all, received in such a churlish spirit that
to Mr. SHERIDAN not to press his motion, any other place is preferable, or even the streets are
but others more clear-sighted reminded the chosen rather than the receptacles provided by law.
House that when they declared their opinion before As for the Refuges being full, that is because those
the Budget it was premature ; after the Budget it institutions are provided with more consideration,
was too late. Last year Mr. SHERIDAN had been and their managers do not go out of their way to
advised to trust to the tender mercies of the Chan- insult misery by a supercilious treatment. Lord
HOUGHTON, and those who think like him, need no
cellor of the Exchequer with a very unsatisfactory

be afraid that wholesome arrangements are likely to
prove so attractive as to draw people from the
country to share its comforts. It will be very long,
and a change must come over the spirit of the dream
of poor-law officials, from the highest to the lowest,
before there be any chance of such an inconvenient

practice obtaining. The suggestion of the noble
lord's concerning the propriety of having some one
in the House of Lords who would represent the
Poor-law Board, was a very wise one, and might be
adopted with considerable advantage to those con-
cerned in the discussion of those important matters.

LITERATURE.

Charles Dickens's New Serial Story.
Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens. No.
Chapman and Hall.

This opening instalment of the second volume of
" Our Mutual Friend" is in many ways remarkable.
It is remarkable for its variety—at once in scene, in
incident, and in character. The localities into
which we are here successively introduced are as
diversified, for example, as—Fledgeby's chambers
at the Albany—the interior of Miss Abbey Potter-
son's Fellowship Porters—the Foggy streets and the
Foggy river—and, to crown all, the homely habitat
of Rumpty Wilfer and his intolerable wife
(the lady with the gloves and the face-ache)
on the day commemorative of their nuptials !
" Lodgers in Queer Street" include, amongst
the throng of them, a very conspicuous
representative indeed, selected from 1, from A 1 we
had almost said, in that very questionable locality ;
an arch-representative, recognisable as such, in the
person of Alfred Lammle of the evil eye and the
gingerous whiskers. Between that said Laramie
—and Riah, the gentle-hearted old Jew—and the
flinty-hearted young (soi disant) Christian, to wit,
Fledgeby, the unfledged, as he may surely be called,
in consideration of his no-whiskers-at-all, or at any
rate to speak of—between these three, as they con-
verse together, or in pairs, there is a maze of by-
play, of cross-purposes, of equivoque, of what
not—so life-like, so real, so touched with the
ineffable touch of genius to the vivid semblance of
truth, that they read far more like actual
than like what they are of course, purely imagi-
nary conversations. Lammle's " little game" in
regard to Miss Podsnap, it may be observed, en
passant, is, by this time, completely blown, and there-
fore dropped. He, himself, meanwhile, is fairly
meshed in the trammels of Pubsey and Co.—little
dreaming, the purblind wight, that the said Pubsey and
Co. are no other than Fledgeby the fatuous, as repre-
sented by the benign but seemingly ruthless Riah.
In the subsequent chapter, we accompany the latter,
as he wends his way, hand in hand with the Doll's
Dressmaker, through the city to the river-
side hostelry kept by Miss Abbey, to wit,
the wedge-shaped Fellowship Porters. Thither the
drenched, drowned body of Rogue Riderhood—run
down by a steamer in the fog, but fished up
sometime afterwards from the depths of the Thames,
—is borne in, as a ghastly, dripping burden, upon
a stretcher, to be subjected to the wise process
now in vogue, with a view to the restoration of life
among those, to all appearance, drowned past all
recovery! Chapter Three relates, with extraordinary
vividness, the application of this benign system to
the insensible body of Rogue Riderhood. Al-
together, a very wonderful description it is—
as real, as true, as pathetic, as ludicrous as
anything Mr. Dickens has penned for years.
The breathless continuance—for a long while
quite ineffectually— of the manipulation of
the dead body, as it appears to be, rivets the reader's
attention in an enthralling way. The neighbouring
doctor, who has been called in, upon this emergency,
has as his assistants in this manipulation certain
waterside folks, hight respectively Bob Glamour,
William Williams, and Jonathan, "family name of
the latter, if any, Unknown to mankind !" Their
tender, even tearful care for the drowned man,
when his recovery is matter of profound uncer-
tainty—their grasping each other's hand fraternally,
the doctor's hand inclusively, when the patient has at
length struggled back to life—it is impossible
to read, of as the incident is here related, without a
sense of exquisitely humanising emotion. Then,
however—with the return of consciousness to the
recently deceased, as the wretched creature has
seemed to be—comes the inevitable reaction in
regard to the momentary sympathy the doctor and
his rough assistant have been evidencing to-
wards the vagabond. As he grows warm, we are
told, so do they in proportion grow cool towards him
—" as his lineaments soften with life, their faces
and their hearts harden to him"—the " low, bad,
unimpressible" nature of the rascal emerging to view
as his drowned senses indicate their reawakening.
Out of the disgust, however, with which we needs
must regard the surly rogue on his resumption of
his old brutalities of manner, there peeps forth
under the hands of the great humourist penning

this description—a touch or two the most ex-
quisitely ridiculous. Riderhood, for example, mut-
tering, as he repels the kindly recommendations of
the doctor, that he " Don't want no Poll-Parroting"
—drawing the borrowed shirt on over his head " ex-

actly as if he had just had a fight"—stoppirig twice
or thrice, while he is dressing, to examine

. _.
his arms and hands, as if to see what punishment

he has received in the encounter—underthe impres-
sion that his nose is bleeding, several times draw-

ing the back of his hand across it and looking for
the result in a distinctly pugilistic manner—asking
after his fur cap, and when told of its being lost in
the river, growling out, " Warn't there no honest

man to pick it up ? 0' course there was though, and
to cut off with it arterwards. You are a rare lot,
all on you !"—and so, with a lurch on his unsteady
legs and a savage " Hold still, can't you ?" to his
daughter, upon whom he is heavily leaning at
the moment, " What ! You must be a stag-
gering next, must you ?" taking his depar-
ture " out of the ring in which he has
had that little turn-up with Death." In every
minute touch, we repeat, a wonderful description !
A description, now and then, almost in the self-same
breath, intensely affecting andexquisitely ridiculous.
As a relief to this more sombre chapter, we have, as
the last in this exceptionally good instalment of
"Our Mutual Friend," a most exhilaratingly droll ac-
count of " A Happy Return'of the Day" among the
Wilfers. The Day referred to being the anniversary
of the nuptials of Pa and Ma, otherwise R. W. and

the gloved lady with the toothache. Lavvy's indignant
avowal under her breath to Bella, "I do not believe
there ever was any human creature who could keep

so bolt upright as Ma, or put such an amount of
aggravation into one back !"—gives the key, as one

may say, to the whole fun of the Wilfer household,

Lavvy having, to our fancy, just the best of it all

through—as evidenced in her very mode of laying

the cloth for the festive dinner, "performing that
office in a startling series of whisks and bumps
laying the tablecloth itself as if she were raising the

wind, putting down the glasses and salt cellars as if

she were knocking at the door, and clashing the
knives and forks in a skirmishing manner, sugges-

tive of hand-to-hand. conflict !" Out of the Con-
fidences between Pa and Bella, at the close of this
chapter, there are glimmering hints of the sequel
—very pointed hints, some of them, we are pretty
sure of that—yet hints, every one of them, to this
present moment, utterly inscrutable to us! Espe-
cially the one in which Bella declares quite posi-
tively (what we don't believe, nevertheless, for one
single instant) that Noddy Boffin is being "spoilt by
prosperity." The illustrations are, this month, we
regret to observe, as bad again as ever—just worse
to our thinking than no illustrations at all.