The Sun.
London, England, 1865-02-13 00:00:00

The Roupell Forgeries.

Roupell disposed of the property is a genuine sig-
nature or not. In consequence of the elevation of
Sergeant Shee to the judicial bench the plaintiff will
not have his able assistance to conduct his cage as
he had on two former occasions. Every exertion,
it is understood, will be made to obtain a decision,
on the present occasion, and the verdict of the jury,
either one way or the other, will be attended with
the most important results. If the plaintiff should
obtain a verdict in his favour, the necessary result
will be that the will and the deed of gift will be
established as forgeries, and the whole of the vast
property that was made away with by Mr. Roupell
will revert to his family, and those who have paid
their money for it will be despoiled of it. On the
other hand, if the defendant should succeed, the
holders of the property will still remain in undis-
turbed possession, and Mr. William Roupell will
have to undergo the punishment to which he has
been sentenced without obtaining any benefit to his
family except the amount that was obtained by the
Guildford trial. The culprit would long before this
have been sent to one of the penal colonies, but by
an order of the Secretary of State ho has been de-
tained in this country to enable him to be examined
as a witness, and to prove the forgeries under which
the heir-at-law claims to obtain restitution of the
property. The trial is expected to last a week, if
not longer. .

MR. STANFIELD'S contribution to the forthcom-
ing Royal Academy will be a large picture of the Bass
)ock, in the Firth of Forth, with Tantallon Castle in tho

istance.

A BUST OF SCRIBE, by Mdlle. Fanny Davesne,
has been placed in the foyer of the Opdm Comique.
Mr. BALFE is in London, busy, we are told, over
his newest opera. If what we have heard has any foun-
dation, this is a work which the world may well expect
with more than common eagerness.—Athenaeum.
PICKWICK, as the product of high animal spirits
in a young genius.—Mr. Dickens has, in the opinion
of most people, never again reached the excellence of this
very early performance. The peculiar charm of " Pick-
wick" is obviously of a nature only to be supplied in a
man's youth. The observation of external circumstances,
and especially of odd and whimsical circumstances, is un-
doubtedly of wonderful keenness. But this alone goes a

very short way. It communicates a certain superficial
brillliance to the story, but it does not penetrate deeply
enough to produce a sense of really good workmanship.
The book will not, in this respect, stand the test
of close inspection. Wo become too quickly aware
that the inferior . characters are mere names of cer-
tain personified absurdities, and even the inimitable Sam
Weller begins to fade into a shadowy unsubstantial form
when too rigorously investigated. The charm of which we
speak is due simply to exuberant animal spirits, associated
with great natural powers of humour. No man could be
in the state of intellectual exhiliration necessary for writing
after the fashion of " Pickwick" after he was thirty. lie
might possess more delicate humour, and have a much
wider stock of observation; but the unflagging vigour
which converted everything that met his eyes into matternt
for inextinguishable laughter could hardly be expected
survive.
of an old Ani
m itat
ion
gentlemano thetrying bw book
t o join in h
would
i:estemegames
of contortions
of a schoolboy.—Saturday Review.
ofß EaAsLerEl,4
0:
oimgonniniaeasl,
,eoannd-
sistlinirg.
presented to Mr;
a fell-length portrait by
Mr.
Lucas,
in the Midland
Beale, M.P., last week by thes
rearent from the chair-
Railway upon that gentleman's
service of .p—latAe the handsomeva l uowfa
sltes,
pplarcee-
, at a dinner at which Mr.
at the Midland Hotel,
3,1 r and other local cele.
Mr. Beale acknowledged the com
Bass, M.P., Sir Joseph
sidedma nshifopr
no f
period the b board r2do ofpy Derby,
Paxton,
directors,n,y
The
. evep.,resewnthnotMionhetohasnk
in a few well-expressed observations,
'
artist, Mr. Lucas, having been pro.
the past few days, which has had the
Joseph Paxton, M.P., was duly honoured.
posed by Sir
P THE WEATHER IN EDINBURGH.—A sharp frost
hasapb nir ii
dmt
pi
teerhsenevtwaipiileeareaiedldtpresent.
during
the
effect of covering the lochs with a thick coating of ice.
Duddingston and the other sheets of water in the vicinity
people,
The
ice,
althoughh o e nn,j
dangerous,o
ayne
and there
somewhatt theh e ee cTlr
was
eh
aare
sto i
no
gn
hs o
in f
places,skating and curling.
cfunrvlienrgy.
of the city were on Friday visited by large numbers of
ewamedallsigponsrteifongiovfm. igt
mgoaordkecdonodfiitaiso
f roons only
shya
way on Friday night.—Scotsman.
ARTEMUS WARD'S SPEECH AS TO WHETHER THE .
NEGRO IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR :--" Feller Sitter-
suns,—The African may be our brother. Severil hily
rispectable gentlemen and some talented females tell ns so,
and for argyment sake i might be injoosed to grant it, tho'
i don't beleove it myself. But the African isn't our sister
and wife unkle. He isn't severil of our brothers and fust
wife's relations. He isn't our grandfather and grate grand-
father and our aunt in the country. Scarcely—and yet nu-
meris persons would have us think so. It's troo he runs Con-
gress and severil others grossery's, but he ain't everybody.
But we've got the African, or rather he's got us, and how
are we going to do about it ? He's a orful noosance. Perhaps
he isn't to blame for it. P'raps he was created for some
wise purpis, like the measles and New England rum, but I
it's mity hard to see it. At any rate he is here, and as
stated to Mr. What-is-it, it's a pity he coodent go off
some-
wheres quietly by hisself, where he could wear red weskits.
and speckled neckties, and gratify his ambition
fuss
sion up about
in wii..
'
interestin wayse without Navin a
eterinda on Cully."
him. Perhaps I'm bearing down too ha

The last act of the strange drama in which Wil-
liam Roupell, the late M.P., performed so prominent,
will
lo only
ensuing
a part, will be played out, if such a term can be
rightly applied to a transaction of this description,
atthe
assizes for the county of Essex. As
all the facts have been so frequently alluded te, it v
be necessary to give a brief narrative of
esxoltnraeoordf intahrye perasinec,ipill
ocrirdceurmtshtaant ctesheopf mlnc,stay
know what is intended to be done when the matter
comes before the Court. It will be remembered
that, in the first instancee,
p 113frb. Reiucghhardn Roupell, the
heir-at-law of old Rou
that capacity at the GuildfordrAssizetsa in 1862, to
recover possession of an estate worth about £15,000
at Kingston, in Surrey, on the ground that William
Roupell, who claimed the property, with everything
else that his father died possessed of under his will,
and who had disposed of it, had no right to do so,
as the will under which he claimed was forged by
William Roupell. The cause was tried before Baron
Martin, and it resulted in a compromise, the then
defendant agreeing to give the heir-at-law £7,500,
or half the value of the estate. This, of course, had
no result so far as the bulk of the property, which
was of the estimated value of nearly £300,000, was
concerned; but, upon his own confession, William
Roupell was convicted of forgery, and senten-zed to
penal servitude for life. Another action was then
tried at the Summer Assizes at Chelmsford, in 1863,
to recover an estate near Romford, the heir-at-law
being again the plaintiff ; and he sought to recover
the property on the ground that a deed of gif'd,
under which the estate had been conveyed to William
Roupell, during the lifetime of his father, was a
forgery. The convict was brought down to Chelms-
ford from the Model Prison, Pentonville, to give his
evidence, and he again swore that he had, forged the
deed of gift in question. The cause was tried before
Mr. Baron Channell, and lasted eight days ; and the
jury, after being locked up till 10 o'clock at night,
were discharged from giving a verdict. • This, of
course, left both parties in the same position they
were before, but it was competent to the plaintiff to
give notice of his intention to try the cause a second
time at any subsequent assize. It appears, however,
that nothing has been done until recently, when
Messrs. Linklater, the solicitors for the plaintiff,
gave notice to the defendant that it was their in-
tention to set the cause again down for trial at the
ensuing Spring Assizes. It is understood that, in
the interval, every effort has been made on both
sides to obtain additional evidence with regard to
the material question in the cause, whether the sig-
nature to the deed of gift under which William