The Sun.
London, England, 1854-01-20 00:00:00

THE "SPRITE" MOVEMENT.

There is one innovation of the last dozen years that
we have seen gradually ramifying and extending throug,!i
our Christmas entertainments with a suspicious dread,
akin to horror, of the consequences. It is the introduc-
tion of a boneless monster called "a sprite" into our old
jolly English pantomime, against which we deem it only
proper to protest. Is there no patriotic, pen-and-ink
loving "Father of a Family" That will undertake to
write down the " Sprite Nuisance" in a series of letters
Have we not among us a play-going " Paterfamilias"
that will head an epistolary crusade to deliver the stage
from these posturing usurpers ? Every year the evil is
growing greater and more difficult of correction. The
time has been when a plain somersault would have been
sufficient to have provoked a tributary round of ap-
plause ; but now nothing less than a man turning him-
self almost literally inside out will awaken the
blunted enthusiasm of an audience growing every year
more horribly familiar with these annual distortions.
Under the stimulus of professional rivalry, and knowing
that their engagement for the next year depends upon
their excelling all their unnatural achievements in the
past, the "Bounding Bricks-of Babylon," or "the cele-
brated contortionists of Circassia," have to devise during
the summer more and more daring deeds for the coining
winter. They must present more puzzling combinations
of figures than a railway share list, they must bend them-
selves into more eccentric forms than could be found in
a sheet of Chinese hieroglyphics. The somersaults,
trebled this year, must be quadrupled in the next, and
so forth, according to the rigid rules of gymnastic, as
well as geometrical, progression. But it is not for the
" professors" themselves that we fear ; it is the dread of
a great epidemic of posturing that may be even now
spreading itself through the land, whilst we are scarcely
conscious of the danger. We do not complain of a man
bending his body into a semicircle, if that be the only
way he knows to obtain for it the requisite sustenance.
We do not object to a father in red tights and
spangled jacket building up a pyramid of his sons
upon his shoulders, if he find that to be the only
method he can adopt of supporting his family.
But we do object to the practice on purely national and
domestic grounds, as all, conscious of the strong imita-
tive powers of children, are aware, that they may be
led to follow those objectionable examples of human
elasticity that are placed so impressively before them.
We have already seen symptoms of the impending dan-
ger in those revolving urchins, who, during the last two
or three summers have been observed exposing all their
" looped and windowed raggedness" in a series of wheel-
like movements, after the omnibuses and their passen-
gers, pelted with mud from the one, and with halfpence
from the other. St. James's may be as likely to catch
the infection as St. Giles's. The aristocratic party of
juveniles in the private box yonder, will enter with as
much zest into the art of tying their little legs into knots
round their necks, as that group of open-mouthed, un-
washed urchins, clinging with eager hands to the rail in
the front row of the gallery above. The nursery of
Belgravia, we have reason to believe, is already surrep-
titiously turned into a training school for performing
precocious feats of flexibility. Fancy the possibility of
this predilection for posturing growing with their growth
and strengthening with their strength. Imagine that
rosy-cheeked schoolboy of nine years old now devouring
every new combination of joints with insatiable eager-
ness, growing up into the bank cler and balancing his
ledgers in a manner unrecognised l mercantile usage.
Picture the possibility, a quarter of a century hence, of
finding the junior partners of our great commercial
firms walking on their hands about the office as an
agreeable relaxation for leisure moments ; or conceive
the rich city stockbroker, whose autograph on a slip
of paper endows it with wondrous virtues, retiring at
dusk to his Clapham villa, and, extended horizontally
on the rug, tossing his children vertically into the
air after the fashion taught by Professor Risley, and
afterwards making a Chinese puzzle of his head and
shoulders as a mere customary provocative for his Six
o'clock dinner. The past generation was stigmatised
as a " nation of shopkeepers," the next generation
may be characterised as a "nation of sprites." We
are not alarmists, but the public should be prepared for
the worst. The remedy is in their own hands, and we
i have only satisfied our conscience by indicating the
source and magnitude of the danger.—The Empire.

DEATH 0111 A CENTENARIAN.—Died at Great Bentley
on the 10th inst., James London, aged 10.0 years. The
deceased, who completed his 100th year in August last,
preserved to the last a beautiful head of hair of
"raven
blackness, with scarcely a tinge of " tell-tale gray."
CLYDE CUSTOMS.- —The Glasgow customs revenue for
the year ending sth of January, 1854, was 688,6021.,
showing an increase on last year of 35,3191. The
customs receipts at Greenock exhibit a decrease,in 185,
of 3,077 i. During the last year 43 ships entered the
Clyde more than in 1852, yielding an increase over that
year of 7,349 tons.
TEE JESUITS IN CHlNA.—Chateaubriand, in his
Genius of Christianity," while observing on theim-
pulse given to the proselytising exertions of the Roman
Catholic Church in the latter half of the fifteenth cen-
tury, when a vital impulse had been given to its dormant
energies by the first development of Protestantism, finely
says, of the missionaries of that period, " Seas, tempests,
polar ice, tropical heats—nothing arrests them : they
live with the Esquimaux upon the flesh of seals ;
they support themselves with oil in the company
of the Greenlanders ; they roam with the Tartar and
' the Iroquois over immense solitudes, mount the Arab's
dromedary, pursue the
.Kaffir roving in the heart of
scorching deserts ; the Chinese, the Japanese, the In-
dian, become their neophytes : no island, no rock in the
ocean escapes their zeal ; and as formerly, when no more
kingdoms could be found to administer to the ambition
of Alexander, so a field is wanting for the exercise of
their charity." About six leagues from Canton, on the
coast of China, is an island, small, but remarkable from
the touching recollections it recals ; for it was on this
island of Sancian, or Shang-chuan-ehan, that Francis
Xavier, the founder of the Jesuits, breathed his last,
almost within sight of that China he had so vainly sighed
to reach ; but his efforts to attain whose shores were
' defeated by the machinations of the merchants of Macao,
who dreaded lest persecution, following the attempts of
the apostle of India and Japan to convert the Chinese
to Christianity, might interfere with their gain.—Orr's
I "Christianity in China."