The Sun.
London, England, 1853-01-25 00:00:00

LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, JANUARY 25, 1853.

111•MMEMER.M.W.Ii17
AW LIFE ASSURANCE OFFICE,
Fleet-street, London, December 30, 1852.
Notice is hereby given, that a GENERAL MEETING of the
PROPRIETORS of the LAW LIFE ASSURANCE SOCIETY w:11
be held at the Society's Office, Fleet•street,"Londen, on Wednesday,
the 2d day of February next, at Twelve o'clock at noon precisely,
pursuant to the previsions of the Society's deed of settlement, for
the purpose of receiving the •k editors' annual report of the accounts
of the Society up to 31st December, 1852 ; to elect two Directors in
the room of John Forster, Esq., end the Hen. the Vice-ChancePor
Sir James Parker, both deceased ; and for general purposes.
The Director to be chosen in the room of John Forster, Esq.,
deceased, will remain in office until the 24th of June, 1853, and the
Director to be chosen in the room of the lion. the Vice-Chancellor
Sir James Parker, deceased, wig remain in office until the 24th June,
1854.

By order of the Directors,
WILLIAM SAMUEL DOWNES, Actuary,

UNITED KINGDOM LIFE ASSURANCE
COMPANY,
Established by Act of Parliament in 1834.
No. 8, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, London.
The distinctive features of the Company embrace, among
others:
Tables of Premiums formed on the lowest scale compatible with
security, and constructed to meet the various wants of assurers,
and every risk to which protection by assurance can be extended.
One-half the Life Premium for the first Five years may remain on
credit.
- • •

Loans granted on approved Personal Security.
Assured not restricted •in their limits of travel, as in most other
Companies, but may proceed from one part of Europe to another in
decked vessels, without License, and to British North America, and
many parts of the United States, without extra premium, by merely
giving the ordinary notice to the Office in London of the intended
visit.
Whole-world Policies granted at slightly increased rates of
Premium, thus rendering a Policy in money transactions a real
security.
Prospectuses, and every information, may be obtained upon appli-
cation to the Resident Director.

NEW FEATURE-IN LIFE ASSURANCE.
THE DEPOSIT and GENERAL LIKE
ASSURANCE COMPANY,

18, New Bridge-street, Blackfriars, London.
CAPITAL—ONN HUNDRED THOUSAND POUNDS.

DIRECTOR!.

R. Yallowley Barnes, Esq., 11, City-road, Finsbury. •
G. Noel Clarke, Esq., late 17th Lancers, Junior 'United Service Club.
George Coode, Esq., Portland-terrace, Wandsworth, and Belvoir, St.
Helier's, Jersey.
Stephen Cracknall, Esq., 1, St. John's-gardens, Notting•hill, and 11,
f,ew-square, Lincoln's-inn.
George Knox, Esq., 15, Connaught-square, Hyde-park, and Tor

Lodge, Staftordshiro.
Alexander Maclean, Esq„ Harrow-on-the-Hill.
David C. Poole, Esq., 32, Upper Seymour-street, Portman-square.
William Prinsep, Esq., 147, Leadenhall-street, and 8, Hyde-park.

place West.
Robert Andrew Riddell, Esq., Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law.
Dr. Scanlan, 21, Upper Seymour-street West, Connaught-square.
Major Sperling, 14, St. James's-square.

AUDITORS.
F. J. Bigg, Esq„ 126, Strand, Actuary and Secretary to tho3ledical
Legal, and General Life Office.
William Jones, Esq., Accountant, 3, Guildhall-chambers.

BANKERS.

Sir Charles Price, Marryat, and CO.; 3, King William-street, London

PHYSICIANS.

Dr. Lewis, Finsbury-place.
Dr. Scanlan, 21, Upper Seymour-street West, Connaught-square.

SIIII,GEONS.
H. T. Chapman, Esq., 16, Lower Seymour-street, Portman-square.
Michael Tcevan, Esq., 44, Gloucester-place, Hyde-park-gardens.

CONSULTING ACTUARY.
Francis G. P. Nelson, Esq., F.L.S.

INSPECTOR OP AGENCIES.
F. P. F. Strousberg, Esq.
STANDING COUNSEL.
William Wellington Cooper, Esq., New-square, Lincoln's-inn.

SOLICITORS.
Messrs. Hill and Mathews St. Mary-axe.
RESIDENT SECRETARY.
Charles W. Bevan, Esq.
The public is respectfhily invited to examine the principles of the
Deposit System of Assurance, which is based upon tables calculated
by, and is under the immediate supervision of, Francis G. P. Neison,
Esq., F.L S., the Consulting Actuary to the CompanY.
Comp,rative Tables to assure 5001 on death, by a person aged
twenty next birthday, on the ORDINARY and on the DEPOSIT system
of Assurances.

LITERATURE.

HARRISON AINSWORTH'S NEW STORY.
The Flitch, of Bacon; or, the Custom, of .Dunmow. A
Tale of English Home. By W. Harrison Ainsworth.
Chapman and Hall.
Harrison Ainsworth redivivus 1 Yes ; and restored
to his admirers under the happiest auspices--by the com-
mencement, with the new year, of a good old English
tale founded upon a good old English custom—a custom
none the less entitled to our credence because simply
traditional in its character. We welcome the romancist
with a cordiality enhanced by his prolonged silence—a
silence only broken recently for an interval by his tan-
talising chapters about "Mervyn Clitheroe." The close of
that autobiography we count upon obtaining ultimately ;

but.rneanwhile we are now enabled to _solace ourselves
for its interruption by the new serial which, in his capa-
city as editor, Mr. Ainsworth has just adventured upon
in the pages of the New Monthly Magazine. It has
been the good fortune of our author to hit upon—or
rather we should say it has been wonderfully to the
credit of his judgment that he has selected—some of the
most admirable subjects for fiction ever chosen, by a con-
tributor to our national literature. The very titles of
some of his most popular works are sufficiently indica-
tive of this themselves. What, for instance, could be
happier as a selection than that famons one of The
Tower of London? Aided by the magic pencil of
Cruikshank, Harrison Ainsworth in that well-known
narrative—perhaps in some respects the most daring
ho has ever attempted—revealed...every noel and
crevice of the quaint old-Tower..k.„of 2.1-nlius, displaying
them to us in their threefold character as Fortress, as
Prison, as Palace, repeopling them with ,the forms of a
vanished generation, and investing dungjtsonT'aiditair-
case, and turret, and corridors, nay, even pillar, and
porch, and lattice with an atmosphere of romance, while
he called forth from the dull stones and mortar some of
the most remarkable and interesting of their great his-
torical associations. What again could be more felicitous
than the notion of repeopling from the Past, in like
manner, the gorgeous fane and verdant haunts of Windsor
Castle ?—an idea further developed afterwards in regard
to the town dwelling of our monarchs—St. James's.
Victor Hugo had celebrated in this way the Cathedral
of Paris in his masterly fiction of " Notre Dame "
aud Harrison Ainsworth did the same by the
Cathedral of London, in his Old St. Paul's—en-
hancing the interest of the story, by recounting in it the
horrors of that Plague and Fire which successively
devastated this metropolis in the seventeenth century.
Happier still was our author's choice of a subject in
Guy Fawkes and happiest of all to our mind, that
of Crichton the Admirable ! In this manner, upon
various occasions before now, he has continued to create
a soul under the ribs of death, by reviving some dim old
legend, or doubtfully remembered story, in the pictu-
resque guise of a living and attractive romance. Alfred
Tennyson has done the same once or twice in verse—as
in the instance of " The Sleeping Beauty ;" or, better
still, in that of the " Lady Godiva." It is with the
like skilfulness of selection that Mr. Ainsworth has
taken now as the theme of his new domestic tale of
life in England. "The Flitch of Bacon ; or, the Custom
of Dunmow." The origin of this old legendary form
he has himself described thus delightfully

nally culled by Bluebell and IVlignionotte. It includes
every variety of colour in style, and perfume in sentiment
—deriving its charms from all quarters of the favoured
parterre—from the evening primrose to the hyssop, from
the pansy to the squirting cucumber ! Altogether it is de-
cidedly, distinctly, unmistakeably (and we say this, re-
member, advisedly)—the most admirable illustration we
have yet seen of—the Language of Flowers.

The Duke'e Funeral. A Poem. By Sir Francis Hast-
ings Doyle, Bart. Clark, Beeton, and Co.
Another of those elegiac strains, sounding like the
pibroch of patriotism over the grave of the brave old
Wellington—another and another. yet succeeds like the
phantom kings before the gaze of the Thane of Glamis.
By this time the public generally may not unnaturally
be supposed to be tolerably well satiated with effusions
upon this particular subject, and of this particular cha-
racter. As admirers of anything at all approaching to
poetic excellence, we should be disposed to regret the
circumstance, if we believed for one moment (which we
don't) that any reader of the poem before us would be
thereby disposed to regard with apathy its merits as a
composition. Nothing can be simpler in aim—nothing
can be more true, more genuine, more unaffected in sen-
timent, than these very graceful
,verses, by Sir Francis
Doyle, in commemoration of the old Duke's funeral.
The opening has an originality in it that is really exqui-
site :

" Child, with fresh cheek upon thy velvet palm,
0 bright-haired child, that sleep is sweet and calm—
Through all those youthful pulses breathing balm ;
But yet I say, Arise !
The unexhausted night hangs damp—
Black yet round each unwaning lamp ;
Against the echoing casement-pane,
raw cold and plangent rain,
The wind of Autumn sighs.
Yet.from that flower-like rest, through all,
Rouiliiales-thirb.blow; chill showers that fall
4
1 day.again, Arise!"
The tenderness of this is very beautiful. There is a
pathos in the idea of the rousing of the young child at
that dead hour of the morning to witness the funeral
pageantries of the memorable warrior lamented by Eng-
land. The incident is, to the author's mind,' a symbol
too—and a symbol, the meaning of which is clear, and
the meaning is this—
" Through thee, from booming gun and muffled drum,
A voice must pass to all the years that come !
It is to thee, and such as thee,
That England, great as yet, and free,
Commits a solemn trust ;
To print, as in a living book,
On youlfs keen brain, each word, each look,
And mark how o'er the nation's friend,
By all poor honours earth can lend,
Our stricken country seeks relief
From passionate and noble grief?,

It would not be difficult to discover reason, by the
way, for cavil at certain flaws in the poem as a work of
art. We might question the nice taste of such a Cock-
neyism in the way of rhyme as the following :

• " From fathomless abysses still renewing
Sea after sea to overwhelm and ruin."
We might object to the distressing sibilatimi of the

" Through seas of blood upheld, through earthquakes bore
His country safe to peace's golden shore."
But these minute blemishes—and there are but few of them
—we forgive for the grace, and the sweetness, and the
feeling, and the beauty of the composition. The follow-
ing passage has a crowning charm in it :
" Child, suns must rise and set, the earth
Through years and cycles onward roam ;
And ever, past the gates of Death and Birth,
Life's ocean-tide exhaustless foam.
We soon must leave thee—soon wilt thou ho sitting
Serenely under silvery hair ;
Whilst bright curls glance, and fairy forms are flitting
Around thy venerable chair.
Then wilt thou tell them, ' Years and years ago,
(I took it as a thing of course),
An old man used to pass me, stooping low,
White-headed, on his horse."
The Duke ! Yes ; and slight though the sketch is, it
is perfect. The effusion does credit to Sir Francis Doyle
—alike to his intellect and his sensibility.