The Sun.
London, England, 1853-09-06 00:00:00

LONDON, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1853,

According to custom, the prorogation of Parlia-
tnertt enables us to amuse the public at intervals
with the record of speeches delivered at political
dinners, banquets, and other convivial entertain-
ments. It is a pleasant way of passing the holi-
days among certain of our representatives. It
serves two good purposes, bringing them into
personal communication with their supporters,
and keeping their names meanwhile conspicuously
before the notice of the population. How much
the latter object is a matter of solicitude to the
Fare ambitious we all know from the tale, or, as
you may spell it correctly enough, the tail, of the
•dog of ALCIBIADES. So that a harangue so many
columns long be delivered, and reported, and
Printed in the columns of a popular newspaper, it
ir,atters little to many of the speakers whether it
).)e the utterance of matured wisdom or of the
crudest commonplace—an outpouring of sagacity
and experience, or a jumble of the emptiest bal-
derdash. HANSARD is sometimes bad enough we
all know—dull as a blue-book, long-winded as
(what is absurdly called) a brief, formal
74 a despatch, and monotonous as a prelection.
But RANSARD is nothing, absolutely nothing, in
all this to the vast majority of ycur after-dinner
reporters. There—rhetoric reaches but too often
a r.iublimity of bathos beyond the imaginings even,
*T.ve should conjecture, of the immortal SCRIBLERUS.
Whoever ventures to toil through the more ex-
tended orations indulged in at the festive board
by those solicitous to see their names prefixed a
day or two afterwards to an unusually large spe-
cimen of the art of the typographer, finds himself
doomed to the perusal of a mass of cooked statis-
tics •and ponderous witticisms such as even out-
Hansards HANSARD. It is seldom that the " Con-
stant Reader" can rejoice over those more delectable
incidents of the vacation, as "few and far between"
as angelic visitants, when the constituents of Shef-
field can listen to the bitter but wholesome truths of
Mr. ROBBCICK, or when those of Buckinghamshire
;an chuckle over the brilliant personalities of Mr.
can IBItAP4I, or when those, again, of Auld Reekie
hearken delightedly to the spoken essays of
audible
cIarLAY, an eloquence so often before now
in t
burgh. If he Commons, and visible in the Bdin-
reported orati a cannot this evening refer to the
of the author of on of theannalist of the Whigs, or
c,
of oningsby," or of the historian
of England, or
of among the more
remarkable rhetoriejannsy
other
have the opportunit—,
.r at leastt' the
present age—we
to a speech not less
sensible, plain-spoken, straightforward, worthy of consideration—a
f calling attention
business
speech, given elsewhere in to-night's i
our journal, delivered as long ago as thenbeginning
of August, and as far away as the
andth
by a man as distinguished as the designer oi
tubular bridge across the Menai Straits, the Ron.
Member for Whitby, ROBERT STEPHENSON
The occasion upon which this speech was de,
livered, it will be observed, was that of a public
dinner given at Montreal, in honour of Mr.
STEPHENSON. This dinner—its object, and not
its viands, let us remind the public, was some-
thing better and nobler than such festivities are
under ordinary circumstances. It was a tribute
of respect from a gigantic colony about to ad-
venture upon the labour of creating for itself a
colossal system of railways--a tribute of respect
from this colony to the genius, the energy, and
the enterprise of the greatest engineer of this
the greatest epoch the world has yet wit-
nessed in engineering. The Chairman of the
banquet well understood the real dignity and
worth of the chief toast of the occasion, that of
the principal guest of the evening, when lie in-
troduced that guest to the assembled company
simply as " the 'son of the celebrated JOHN STE-
PHENSON "—ae,ding that he had inherited (it
might have *said also that he had enhanced) "his
fathers us and his father's reputation." It
was as fax back, it will be remembered, as 1828,
that ROBERT STEPHENSON was called by his father
to assist him in the
So
clieF,ter Railway. Liverpool and Man-
peneskill
d underand
jurligment have that his both been ripened more than a quarter of a century's expe-
"rience. Subsequently, in 1832 he assumed
the responsibility entailed upon him
as engineer
to the grand trunk line between Liverpool and
Birmingham. It was not until 1847 that he was
entrusted with the task of constructing a railway