The Sun.
London, England, 1854-04-27 00:00:00

RANDAL LESLIE'S NEW
WORK.

The Right Honoiirable Benjamin Disraeli, M.P.
A Literary and Political Biography. Addressed
to the New Generation. Second Edition.
Richard Bentley.
Whether is it despicable—we .would place this
cause, with implicit confidence as to the nature of
the verdict, before a jury selected from the first
chance foot-passengers one might happen to meet
any day at Charing-cross— whether is it despic-
able to stab another man's effigy through the me-
dium of an ingenious satire upon the title-page of
which your own name, as its author, is boldly and
manfully emblazoned, or to stab another man him-
self, not his effigy, but the man himself, through
the medium of a most elaborate, a most malignant,
and a most scurrilous invective,—an invective given
to the world, moreover, under the dastardly, cut-
throat, crape-mask of the anonymous, written less
with ink than with vitriol, not so much with the pen
as with the poignard, a literary performance, in fact,
partaking less of the character of a Biography than
a deliberate attempt at assassination ?
A question—this—which has been forced upon
us by a consideration, firstly of the charge directed
against Mr. Disraeli by his many nameless assail-
ants ; and secondly, of the manner in which those
nameless assailants have preferred their accusation.
It has been maintained by the enemies of the
right hon. gentleman the ex-Chancellor of the
Exchequer, these, his secret and masked anta-
gonists, that he has, both as an orator and as a
novelist, rendered himself in the manner already
specified peculiarly amenable to the authority, to
the laws, to the punishments of the censorship. It
has been insisted by these remarkable moralists,
that Mr. Disraeli, both in his fictions and in his
speeches, has betrayed au extraordinary dereliction
of duty, a perfectly wonderful and altogether incom-
prehensible obliquity of judgment ; and this espe-
cially in the former, by assailing several of his
actual contemporaries under the shadowy hut
easily recognisable form of imaginary personages.
It has been asserted by these astute and most subtle
discriminators between right and wrong, in the
conduct of a politician and a man of letters, that
in the career of the right honourable gentleman
the member for Buckinghamshire there has been
something peculiarly dastardly in his mode of deal-
ing blows about him, both as a romance writer and
as a debater in Parliament. In explanation or justi-
fication of these formidable charges directed against
Mr. Disraeli, there have been poured out of the
press in rapid succession, and in overwhelming
numbers, treatises, and epistles, and essays, and
criticisms—in fact, every imaginable species of
paper pellet that could be discharged from the
culverins and pop-guns of literature, from,
a carefully-elaborated review in a Quarterly
to a slashing leader in a morning newspaper, from
a " thin, acid pamphlet" to a big book, like the
book before us, pretending to be a sort of ante-
humous Biography.
Now, between the assailants and the assailed
there is, as our first sentence has already indicated,
this very glaring and remarkable difference : Mr.
Disraeli writes, as he speaks, in propria persona,
avowedly, boldly, and manfully in his own charao-
ter—Mr. Disraeli's censors, on the contrary, as-
saulting him and his reputation, whether through
volume, or pamphlet, or review, or newspaper, all
of them, anonymously ! Which of the two, there-
fore, let us ask again, is in truth the dastardly
politician and man of letters—Mr. Disraeli or one
of Mr. Disraeli's assailants ? We leave the solu-
tion of that very transparent problem to the com-
mon sense of any man in the three kingdoms
who can contrive to consider the matter, only
for five minutes, dispassionately.
It need scarcely be observed in these columns
that with Mr. Disraeli's political opinions upon
many most important subjects we have no particle
of sympathy whatsoever. His persevering advo-
cacy of the Protectionist principles we were op-
posed to from first to last diametrically. As Free-
traders from deliberate conviction, as amongst the
earliest advocates of the Free-trade system, as
amongst the journalists who from the outset de-
manded its adoption not by halves, but entirely
and thoroughly, we regarded Mr. Disraeli's perti-
nacity in defending, down to the very last, the obso-
lete scheme of the monopolists, as a species of abso-
lute infatuation. True, the Country Party, as
such, has at length been broken up and
by common consent we have all agreed
to abandon henceforth every remembrance of the
stormy struggles long maintained between the
opponents of the corn laws, and the advocates of
the same corn laws, the agriculturists. During
the continuance of the struggle, however, both in
regard to the Protectionists and in regard to Mr.
Disraeli as one, of the conspicuous leaders of the
Protectionists, we were always outspoken in our
opposition. Precisely in the same manlier that we
aro nowadays amongst the most earnest of Mr.
Disraeli's antagonists in his character as an avowed
enemy of further reform in Parliament. It is per-
fectly obvious, therefore, that we cannot in any
way be viewed as amongst the number of his par-
tisans. Nevertheless opposed to him, diametrically
opposed to him as we have been so often upon matters
of vital importance, socially and politically speaking,
opposed to him repeatedly as we are at this present
period, opposed to him as we fear we may be very
frequently hereafter—we cannot assuredly, on that
account, remain blind to the variety or splendour
of his abilities, any more than, as hero-worshippers
in the nobler sense applied to that phrase by Mr.
Carlyle, we can remain indifferent to the curious
spectacle of the rise and development of his reputa-
tion. Mr. Bounderby was not one jot more a "self-
made-man" than the ox-Chancellor of the Exchequer.
In Mr. Disraeli we recognise an intellectual athlete
who has striven for the prize on the legislative
arena, and not seldom successfully, with many
notable, some of them historical, competitors—the
political gladiators of a generation. Himself the
son of a poor scholar, we find him, without
any extraneous aid, without the prestige of an uni-
versity education, without advantages either of
birth or connexions, but instead of all this, encum-
bered with the manifest disadvantages of a Jewish
name and a Jewish extraction—winning Fame,
winning Power, rising to considerable eminence
both in the Senate and in Literature, admitted
while yet in the ripeness of his manhood to the
councils of his Sovereign, the recognised chief of a
great Party, and as such, in fact, at this moment
in the House of Commons, the Leader of her Miss
jesty's Opposition. Signs—these--if such signs
there ever have been, of more than common capa-
city, of more than usual energy, of more than ordi-
nary skill, daring, and perseverance. Without this
combination of capacity, of energy, of skill,
of daring, and of perseverance, Benjamin
Disraeli would never have attained his present
elevation among his contemporaries. Faults he
has, some of them grave faults—but who amongst
us is unblemished ? Mistakes he falls into every
now and then, and among these mistakes some of
them very grievous ones sometimes—but what man
has passed well through the summer of his life
without having occasionally tripped and blundered.
He has told us himself that the Press is his only
escutcheon. But it is an escutcheon, at least, un-
flawed by a bar sinister—with a dint, it may be,
gained here and there in the conflict, but without
being anywhere blurred by one of those indelible
stains which are the "damning blots" on the
blazonry. Without some better and nobler quali-
ties than those conceded to him by his concealed
calumniators, he could scarcely have attained the
popularity of which he cannot be derived by
p
the deadliest hatred of his opponents. Other-
wise how would it be possible to account for
the enthusiasm of his ovation in . the Acade-
mic Theatre at Oxford, at the period of Lord
Derby's installation ? Adventurers of dastardly and
sinister repute are not usually the favourites of
those not wholly depraved children of alma mater,
the undergraduates. No—there must, perforce, be
something more remarkable here than the diatribes
directed against Mr. Disraeli by the mob of his
lurking detractors would lead the public to conjec-
ture. Otherwise the object of their affected scorn,
and the theme of their scurrilities, and the subject
of their sustained and malignant vituperation,
could never, we repeat, have risen to his present
elevation in the Senate and in Literature. Other-
wise, the student, and the son of a student, could
never have won go brilliantly for himself the
privilege of leading a powerful section of the
Legislature, or of himself representing iu it
the county for which John Hampden sat of
old—that of Buckingham. Otherwise, again,
the popular novelist, the writer whose love stories
and romances-of-chivalry are littered about the
bookstalls of the railway stations with the fictions
of Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, could scarcely
have won at the same time with his literary repu-
tation the political glory and power of aiding in the
equipoise of parties in the House of Commons, as
the acknowledged leader of the Legislative forces
opposed to those of the Government.
Distinguished, however, amongst the ablest of
his contemporaries by these strongly contrasting
evidences of his ability, Mr. Disraeli is scarcely
less distinguished among them all by the variety
and virulence of his anonymous vituperators. It
has long been thus—ever since, in fact, the novelist
began to have readers and the orator to obtain the
ear of the Commons House of Parliament. Un-
assisted by birth or patronage, the right hon. gentle-
man has, throughout his career, from the first

hour of his setting out on the road of fortune, foun d
it necessary to advance towards the attainment of
the twin reputation of letters and statesmanship,
through the perpetually recurring dangers of an
implacable and ferocious ambuscade. Poisoned
shafts have fallen about by the way—pointless and
unfeathered. There have been continual gleams
of the blunt stiletto, and incessant flashes of
the unloaded blunderbuss. Perhaps these anony-
mcius attacks were never more numerous, certainly
they were never more violent, or more inveterate,
more violent in language, or more inveterate in
hostility, than they were recently during the win-
ter of 1853-1854, immediately prior to the re-
assembling of the Legislature. The Government
hacks were industrious, every one of them, in be-
spattering the leader of the Opposition. Not a
weapon at command but was turned against
the common enemy—the archfoe of a rather deli-
cately:situated Administration. The Mons Meg of
Printing-house-square thundered at him of a morn-
ing. And before nightfall there was an echoing
discharge from the little Colt's Revolver of the
Treasury. No epithets, as applied to Mr. Disraeli,
were too coarse for his vilifiers. Decorum had no
part in the arrangement of their vocabulary. The
Times decently likened the statesman to a "bawd."
The Chronicle as decently spoke of his descending
to a " detested grave." One might have fancied
at moments that party spirit had become so far
degraded as to seek expression for its malignity in
the language of the brothel and in the phrenzy of
the hell. Judginc, from the fury of the attack,
directed against the Leader of the Opposition dur-
ing the interval which elapsed between the proro-
gation and the reassembling of the Legislature,
there must have been a wonderful dread as to the
force of his anticipated onslaught upon the
Government. The supporters of the Govern-
ment, as was justly said at the time, were cry-
ing out before they were hurt ! At length—
after all these reiterated personalities in journals,
and magazines, and pamphlets, and quarterlies—
the hydra of invective sprouted another head,
bigger than all its predecessors put together. It
was no longer a column of abuse, or half-a-dozen
octavo pages of vituperation. It was a huge volume
extending to 646 of these octavo pages—a volume
embellished with the name of the assailed, " The
scarcely
Right
we Honourableneed Beahiclda,lniwilithDoieutraetlih'at Mof.Pthei
but,
assailant—" A Literary and Political Bi • ography,"
and this, too, "Addressed to the New Generation."
of
Blackwood at once dubbed the authorthe
work
Randal Leslie. And as the performance of Randal
Leslie we at once accept it. In every syllable it is
worthy of him. It is worthy of him in its concep-
tion as well as in its execution. It is clever to a
certain extent ; it is laboriously compiled ; it is
elaborately arranged ; it is scurrilous to the
last degree ; it is by turns pert and then
insolent ; it is, besides all this, flippant and
affected—affected even to pedantry, and flip-
pant to impertinence, throughout. Unfortu-
nately for its writer, indeed, he contrives in al-
most every page to reveal not
only
the spite of
Randal Leslie, but the priggishness of Barnes New-
come. So that the performance altogether might
have been absolutely revolting from its ferocity, but
that, from its ignorance, it became simply ridicu-
lous. Closing this volume of envenomed personality,
and turning back to the title-page, one is almost
surprised to find that Curll is not the publisher,
or that Holywell-street is not the locality from
which it makes its appearance.
It was observed only the other day by a reviewer
in the Quarterly, when speaking of Laurence Sterne,
that his wit was frequently nothing better than the
phosphorescence of corruption. It might so be
remarked of whatever ability may be discovered in
this corrupt and corrupting performance. It has
about it the taint of decomposition. It is utterly
without that soul of books—a noble purpose. En-
gendered by the heat of a most despicable
animosity, it conies forth at once still-born
and an abortion. The beginning of its exist-
ence was only the commencement of its decay. So
will it ever be with those detestable and dastardly
assaults of the hidden traducer upon the reputation
of a living contemporary—be the stab given with
the cutlass of the venal critic, or the dagger-of-lath
of the hireling pamphleteer. What says Pope in
his " Prologue to the Satires ?" Why [sic. verbatim
et literatind, that
" Ne'er one sprig of laurel graced these ribalds,
From slashing Bentley down to piddling Tibbalds !"
No—rather, in lieu of that, a whole forest of birch.
Rather than the rustling bay-garland, the jingling
cap-and-bells. And so, borrowing a phrase from
Bob Sawyer, who talked of quaffing malt liquor in
its "native pewter," let us toss this preposterous
volume from us with a laugh into its native waste-
paper basket.

Alexander Pope's " Imitations of Horace Prologuo
to the Satires—line 163.

METRO£OLITIN GOSSIP,—LONDON, Saturday Evening.
—Perhaps it is only proper that men of shuttle•cock
opinions should be the sport of the winds in popular
caprice ; and accordingly the Cabinet, who have been
sitting in Council several hours this evening, have been
estimated throughout the day with very varying degrees
of appreciation. Since symptoms of negative success,
if one may say so, have begun to be apparent on the
side of Russia, the Czar has been advancing in the good
graces of our commercial patriots ; and now that it is no
longer so certain as it lately seemed to be that Omer

Pasha was going to make mincemeat of the Moseovites,

the Sultan is descending in the scale of the same cos:

mopolitan philosophers, who measure all merit by pro-
sperity. Hence the luggishness of our Black Sea
sailors is made light of by men who would be explosively
indignant were it self-evident that the autocrat was going
to be doubled up in the ignoble manner the Unadorned

One once proposed to dispose of the house of Romanoff
aid all belonging to them. Undoubtedly the Premier
is not censured so freely as he was, notwithstanding
the unexpected scathings of Wednesday's Thunderer on
the procrastinators in the pugnacity line ; and, somehow,
a notion seems to be springing up that Aberdeen, after
all, has been considerably further north than was at first
supposed, and that he will have the world one of these
days his way of thinking as to the wickedness of the
war, and the consequent wisdom of John Bright. Some
strange tales are in circulation about the real, or imputed
real reasons of his lordship's reluctance in beginning the
fight, and in pursuing it as he ought to do. The mode
of getting at these supposed reasons is by a very circum-
locutary process of induction ; but such as it is said to be
here it is :-- Among the frequenters of Argyle-house and
known personal partisans of the premier is the member
for County Tyrone, Lord Claude Hamilton, brother of
Prince Albert's groom of the stole, the Marquis of Aber-
corn. Lord Claude, in addition to the tolerably notori-
ous Kremlin predilections of his family, has lately been
loud-tongued in private society, and not altogether mute
in public, in censuring the quarrel with Russia as a
tempting of Providence, an impiety, a desecration of
Christianity on behalf of Mahoramedism, and an every
thing that is anything but what it ought to be. Now,
it is inferred, with what justice you are just as good a
judge as anybody else, that Lord Claude's opinions are
not merely his own, but his brother's ; that his brother's
are Albert's, and that Albert's are Aberdeen's. The
Premier is reported by some of his Scotch cousins to
have in him a considerable spice of the old Caledonian
Calvanistic predestinarian, being in that respect a to-
lerable Turk ; he thinks, as many of the Osmanlis them-
selves are said to do, that the period of the Porte's po-
litical presence in Europe has arrived at a full stop ;
that it is all up with the Ottoman ; and that, whether
it is or not, it would be an uncorking of all the vials of
celestial wrath seriously to assist such sons of perdition
against a crowned Christian, who makes the cross his
emblem, and the delivery of the faithful from the thral-
dom of the infidel his battle-cry. This being so, if so it
be, adepts in the science of seeing into a mill-stone have
no difficulty in discerning a clue to the creep-mousey
eas
to
eßnrd,uusceshit
aa onr
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in
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and
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affinity very
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alliance.--Liverpool Albion.
A MAN POISONED 13‘1 HIS WlFE.—Scarcely have the
circumstances of the brutal child murder at Milford
Derbyshire, subsided, than the county has been again,
thrown into considerable excitement by the poisoning
of a husband by his wife, at Hardstaff, in the same
county. The facts of the case may be gleaned from
the following narrative :—About six weeks ago a
man named James Cutts, residing at Hardstaff, and
by trade a bricklayer, was taken ill with a fever,
from which he had recovered, and during the time of
his illness his wife was continually quarreling with him.
On Tuesday week she made a pudding for dinner, of
which he partook heartily. In the afternoon he wee
seized with vomiting and complained of great acidity on
his stomach. He gradually grew worse, and on Wed-
nesday he died. After his death his relatives and friends
applied to see him ; but the wife refused to allow them.
On the day that she had been making the pudding, the
deceased's two girls, about 10 and 11 years old, observed
Mrs. Cutts put something from a paper, which was on
a box in the room, in the pudding ; but they were 11(4
aware what it was. They happened, by accident, to tell
the circumstance to the deceased's brother, who made in-
quiries and ascertained that the stuff contained in the paper
was arsenic. The deceased had been buried before these cire
comstances were brought to light. He communicated
with a Mr. Makorzie, the surgeon, and other persons
who advised him to inquire into the matter. The coro-
ner having been made acquainted with the nature of the
case, he ordered the exhuination of the body, which had
been interred in the .Ault liticknall church, and a pose
mo rim examination of the same, which was performed by
two medical men. The contents of the stomach were ex-
tracted and analysed, and arsenic was clearly proved to be
in the stomach. The coron cr, Mr. C. S. B. Busby, held an
inquest on the body at Clay-cross on Monday, when the
evidence of the medical men :mil others was taken, but as it
was deemed advisable to examine other witnesses, and have
a more minute analysis, the inquest was adjourned.
Mr. Makorzie, the medical gentleman who had attended
the deceased in his illness, had not visited him from the
time he partook of the pudding up to the period of hie
death, as he was then almost convalescent. The deceased
and his wife had not lived agreeable for some time past,
as he suspected she had formed an improper intimacy
with other moll. The deceased was thirty-three years
of age, and the father of six children. The case hail
, . excited great interest in that part of the county.