The Sun.
London, England, 1865-02-11 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—So the Prince and Princess have very
nearly had their house burnt down—of course not
over their heads, for that very seldom happens, but
when their backs were turned ! The proper season
for the combustion of a country house is not when
it is full, not when there is a blazing fire on every
hearth above and below, when lamps and candles
are burning on every table, every mantelpiece, every
toilet ; when careless people are hurrying to: and
fro, making draughts, waving drapery, and whisk-
ing crinolines ; but when the house is all but empty,
and perfectly still, and not so much life in it as in
the lodge at the park gate. Any hour in the
twenty-four is equally appropriate, though perhaps
the fire is more likely to be confined to the " wing,"
or the offices, if it breaks out in the night, as it
thereby gives intelligence of itself to the villagers
two miles off, and the nearest fire-engine ten miles
off. The housekeeper is darning her stockings, or
in bed, or making a call, when a wreath of light
smoke, an unusual light, and a flame successively
announce that a great house of ancestral interest
and historic fame is soon to be a blackened ruin.
The causes are familiar, almost certain, and not
many. The plumbers have gone to their dinner,
leaving a fire just built up on a narrow lead gutter,
between two slopes of old tile roofs, or they have
gone for the night, leaving the arrangement to burn
itself out. Or a glue pot or a varnish pot has been
left somewhere on a good fire of wood, surrounded
by shavings several inches deep. Or the house-
keeper or her deputy has made an immense
fire in the state bedroom, hung up closetsfull
of linen on "horses" and chairs, and then gone
off to something else, forgetting all about it.
Perhaps she has only made a fire in a very small
grate, in a very disused room, but left it to take
its own course. In these several cases the next
thing is an overboiling, or a smouldering, or a spark,
or a flying coal, or, far more likely than all, some
woodwork in the structure too near the hearth or
the flue. Sometimes the beam comes right into
the fire, sometimes there intervenes a thin and ill -
jointed screen of brickwork. The soot lodges or
coats, as it may do for many reasons. It ignites,
and remains ignited for hours. It has done so many
times before. The beam end or the joist ends under
the hearth have long been charred, dry, and ready
to communicate ignition to almost any substance.
Once in a flame the fire runs up and down through
the hidden cavities and interstices of the building.
Half an hour after it breaks out all is over in that
part of the building. At Sandringham they seem
to have been either very prompt or very fortunate.
A bedroom was burnt out, and a billiard-table un-
derneath destroyed by the fiery droppings. The
demon, we, should think, must feel disappointed of
his prey, and must now be brooding, in some odd
twist of the old family chimneys, how to do his
'Work better another time. According to pro-
gramme, nothing but some pictures and a little
furniture ought to have been saved. Unless we are
mistaken, the next attempt to burn down the house
will be with hot-air flues. The case of a country
house is just like all country things, safe, good, and
specious, till all goes in a moment. It is not per-
petual danger here, an inch scope of deadly colli-
sions, as in our London streets, or a powder maga-
zine, but perpetual safety, and the incuriosity bred
thereby. You go to a theatre prepared to stand fire.
There are firemen about, with buckets and hose,
and you are thankful to have escaped. But in a
country house all is as serene and as secure as in a
green field or a sea-side cave. Once left to the pru-
dent old housekeeper it is out of harm's way. It can't
burn ; it won't burn. How often have they tried to
make the chimneys draw, and they won't. The fire-
wood is green; the coals are just dug out of the snow.
It was a piece of work to make a fire at all. The
damp settles on the walls, the mirrors, the chairs.
The air is damp enough to put out a fire. The long
corridors with their stone floors were never warm
since they were built. Then there is a legend of a
vast water-tank somewhere in the attics or the roof,
which no doubt will do its duty, if a fire should
ever break out. But this very house, where a fire
cannot possibly occur, and where it must imme-
diately put itself out, is the place of all others where
fires do break out, and once alight are sure to work
their wicked way. It is seldom—seldom, compara-
tively—that you have a fire at a inn or at a college.
Nay, there are not many fires at sea, considering
that a ship is a fire ready laid, with a match always
on the point of being applied to it. The reason—
that is, the general-law—of these country-house fires
is to be found in the proportion of these three parts
—the inflammable material, the ordinary human
agency, and the governing faculty. A man does not
often set himself on fire, and cause himself to be
burnt up, because so far as regards a fire he is al-
most exclusively the governing faculty. In hotels
and other busy and much frequented ouildings there
is a good deal of ordinary human agency and a fair
amount of superintendence. In colleges you have
a crowd of careless, but wakeful and intelligent men.
In a country house you have a vast pile of combus-
tible matter, with the least possible amount of human
intellect to take care of it. There is a housekeeper
who is accustomed to her own ways, and never
dreams of the house catching fire. Her fellow-ser-
vants think the house like the church—a thing that
can only be burnt by lightning. This is the state
of affairs that the fire demon loves. All he wants
is time and secrecy. If he is not watched, he lays
his train of soot or dust ; he saps the timber, and
penetrates from flue to flue and floor to floor, blessing
the old or modern scamps who made his work so
easy. When all is ready he watches housekeeper
to her gossips or to her bed, he ascertains the tank
to be empty, the waterworks out of order, the kei.s
mislaid, and he breathes the spark into a flame. lie
can then perch himself on the topmost cowl of the
old chimney_ stacks, and laugh to see the elements
do the rest of the work for him. It appears to be
considered an object by all architects and builders to
make the arrangements connected with fire and
water as complicated and inaccessible as possible to
human oversight, and as exposed as possible to the
undesired action of these elements. It seldom happens
that any living being understands the flues, or the
pipes, or the drains of a large house, or can make them
out except in the same way that he would explore
for coal under your property by digging and boring.
The architect considers it his business to hide the
sinews and nerves and veins of his house, and all its
curious anatomy, as in the human frame, under a
fair skin, or half a dozen skins. An operation is
necessary to get at them. The burning soot flakes
of a neighbouring chimney falling down your empty
grate reveal for the first time that the two flues run
into one, or have an irregular communication. A
blazing fire is made on an old hearth ; the flames
run higher into the chimney than your eye can
follow ; a second fire piles itself up below the grate
and spreads through the cinders ; nothing can be
more cheerful. Is not the flue brick, and is not the
hearth stone ? But that stone may have cracked,
or may have parted from the wall, and there may be
fissures of half an inch opening a way to ancient
cavities full of coal dust, and surrounded by wood-
work as dry as tinder. In the flue there are ledges
and easy slopes on which. any amount of soot can
lodge ; nay, sometimes a wide shelf all round the
throat of the chimney. The culprits, of course, are
past inquiry, or justice, when the catastrophe comes
to pass. But even these old-fashioned chimneys,
modernised for register stoves, are not a tithe so
dangerous as the recondite varieties of apparatus
for warming large buildings, and which seem to know
no medium between freezing point and combustion.
We are disposed to think that architects are of that
susceptible and imaginative quality which leaves
them quite at the mercy of hard, designing trades-
men, who undertake to warm a church, pocket the
money, and sit down next Sunday at their fire-
sides thanking Heaven that they are warmer than
you are. Can art achieve nothing more in these
days, and must we always live in fear of being
burnt, or blown up, or drowned, or frozen ? This
is a building age, but we see signs of a sickening
and repenting. Architects and builders must see to
it. A few more houses just built in order to be
burnt will turn the tide, and make people content
with the old houses. Old and new, to be sure, are
in equal danger, but the first sensations on hearing
that an old house is burnt to the ground are not
quite so disagreeable as in the other case.
POST.—Herr Grabow, the Speaker of the Prus-
sian House of Commons, has, as it were, just been
crowned in the capital. The people f Cologne
have just sent him the present of their civic crown
as a testimony that he is the true representative of
Prussian citizens. But the address which he makes
in acceptance of the token, expressive and touching
as it is, seems to betray some of that misgiving
which is perceptibly working in European opinion
as to the success at the present moment of the course
to which the Prussian Liberals are committed to-
wards the CroWn. He says he will persevere in the
hope of bringing about a reconciliation between the
House of Representatives and the Executive until it
shall appear that every attempt to reunite the
Crown and the people is useless. The King of Prus-
sia appears to have seen from the first that the war
he had with his own subjects was quite as much to
be decided upon Danish soil as his claims upon Den-
mark themselves. The love of conquest, even in an
inglorious war, seems to have satisfied, or at least
allured away, a good many who, two years ago,
were content with nothing less than constitutional
freedom. The Prussian Government has just affected
to bridge the chasm between itself and the public by
an inappreciable approach towards the opposite
side. It has introduced a bill to regulate the mili-
tary organisation, which leaves matters very much
as they were. The gist of the popular grievance
remains almost altogether unredressed by it. The
Liberal party in Prussia demanded that the term
of military service which the laws of the country