The Sun.
London, England, 1853-01-17 00:00:00

dered sway because of his age and consequent indis-
position—the veteran and venerable Marquis of
LANSDOWNE. It was not thus when PITT was
Minister at one-and-twenty. It was not thus
when SYDNEY Scrim was post-captain while yet
a stripling—or when the eventful career of
HORATIO NELSON was closed in the forty-seventh
year of his age at the great battle of Trafalgar.
No. But the times would seem to have alto-
gether changed. England has grown older, and
in obedience to some preposterous non sequitur, is
" therefore" confiding her destinies not to men in
the prime .of their manhood, but to men totter-
ing on the verge of dissolution. And so General
GODWIN is still in command of the British Forces
collected together to oppose the warlike Burmese
—an octogenarian remains in supreme power on
the *banks of the Irrawaddy !
" Genius when young is Divine." It was the
apophthegm addressed by SIDONIA to CONENGSBY
—and illustrated by a thousand resplendent recol-
lections. England, in this particular, as in some
other things, does not appear to coincide with the
EX-CHANCELLOR of the EXCHEQUER. It matters
not that ALEXANDER was little more than a boy
when he opened his Oriental conquests at the head
of the soldiers of Macedonia. It signifies nothing
that NAPOLEON Itas in the bloom of youth when
he routed the veteran Austrians on the plains of
Lombardy—when he overthrew the pride of the
Mamelukes under the shadow of the Pyramids—
when, with his good sword, he renewed more than
the success of MONTECUCULI, and won his way to
the iron crown and the golden throne of CHARLE-
.MAGNE. It is nothing that CESAR vas not
so old when he baffled the tactics of POMPEY,
or that Scipio was so young when he triumphed
over the giant mind and practised warriors of
HANNIBAL. England is stubborn against the
logic of experience. She sends Admiral AUSTIN
to die near Rangoon, and fills up the vacant post
by a sailor-chief like Sir FLEETWOOD PELLEW—
gallant enough, no doubt, as becomes one bearing
the name of our glorious Exnfount—but
ill-
suited to the oc asion and the emergency, as
having closed his services on the salt water as far
back as 1816, the year of the renowned victory
of his progenitor. Within that interval of six-
and-thirty years, we may not unreasonably pre-
sume, we may not unreasonably hope, that the
naval system has advanced, and that rather con-
siderably too, beyond the naval system with which
Sir FLEETWOOD PELLEW had by 1816 become
accustomed to. Yet it is to an unpractised flag-
officer like this—unpractised, we mean, in the use
of all our maritime resources in steam, as well as
in our improved system of gunnery, and, in fact, in
the whole of our later and very considerable inno-
vations—that the ships-of-war off the coasts of
the Burmese territories have been confided. A
likely means, forsooth, for rousing General Gor.-
WIN from his prolonged and disastrous torpor—
that torpor which has produced in delays,
death, and discomfiture the fruits of the
over-prudence of an octogenarian. Every
successive budget of intelligence from Hindostan
reveals, alas ! only the more plainly, and thence,
of course, only the more painfully, the melancholy
consequences of the timorous course followed dur-
ing so many months by General GODWIN, as
Commander-in-Chief of the forces assembled on the
Burmese territory. England, meanwhile, is pay-
ing dearly for this in men and even in provisions,
but still more seriously in time and in reputation.
A single instance will be sufficient evidence of this
without going further down the whole lamentable
catalogue of calamities and extravagances. There

was Sir J. CREAPE—according to the last dis-
patches—still lying inactive at Prome with 7,000
troops, waiting to be attacked by a " rabble force
of Burmese," inferior to his own. in all respects,
even, in point of numbers, subsisting all the while
upon inadequate supplies of salt-junk, ob-
tained at very considerable expense from
Calcutta—and this, remember, in the very heart
of a country prolific in herds of bullocks. So
much for our military prowess and military promp-
titude ! Then, again, our largerAeamers are no
longer enabled by depth of water to paddle up and
down the current of the Irrawaddy. The Burmese
have, consequently, grown "impertinent," it is
the phrase of the Bengal Hurkaru, in their various
attacks upon the armaments of England, attacks
which have been multiplied by delays and encou-
raged by impunity. Such is the evidence of
the benefits secured by our naval energy,
skill, and discrimination ! Meanwhile—this
being our position--numerous misfortunes were
anticipated as upon the eve of crowding upon our
troops simultaneously about the period of the de-
parture from Bombay of the latest fragments of
intelligence. It was expected, for example, that
an army of 20,000 Burmese, was about to descend
in the hope of recapturing Martaban. It was
thought that 10,000 more were about to advance
suddenly upon Dalla, for the purpose of
a vigorous, and, if possible, decisive demon-
stration. It was deemed, moreover, by no
means unlikely that a third body of the
enemy, headed by a well-known chieftain, might,
by crossing the river Sitang, and penetrating the
country of Pegu, make a bold assault upon Ran-
goon, such must prove terribly destructive, if not
altogether triumphant. At such a crisis—after
such experiences—with Europe observing the
march of our arms—with the prestige of our
authority in India at stake, (we ask the
question again and again) is it rational that in
this, as in so many other instances before now,
the fortunes of war, if not in some measure the
fate of England, should be confided to the clouded
vision and weakened grasp of a brave but
exhausted octogenarian.