The Sun.
London, England, 1849-01-09 00:00:00

LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, JANUARY 9, 1849.7

HISTORY OF ENGLAND DURING THE
THIRTY YEARS' PEACE. Part IV.

The historian of the important interval between
1815 and 1845 has, with the close of the present in-
stalment, reached the beginning of the year 1828 and
the commencement of the Duke of 'Wellington's Ad-
ministration. His narrative is still remarkable
for its amplitude and perspicuity. The part
before us is adorned with an excellent
map of the Turkish empire, the kingdom
of Greece, and our insular possessions of Kerigo,
St. Maure, Zante, Kafalonia, Ithaca, and Corfu. The
publication is one of singular importance, as referring
to the secession of Sir Robert (then Mr.) Peel from
the Government of Canning. The writer makes this
emphatic and conclusive statement :—" Private letters
of Mr. Canning's are in existence which declare
that Mr. Peel was the only seceding member of the
Government who' behaved well to him at this time:'
(p. 437.) Was Lord George Bentinck (the private
secretary of Mr. Canning) ignorant Of the existence
of these letters when he brought his charges against
Sir Robert in 1847—accusing that statesman almost
of the assassination of his relative ? For the sake of
the character of the deceased leader of the Opposition,
we hope he was ignorant of the existence of such do-
cuments. Though were his ignorance on this point
proved, we should, neverthelesS, marvel !

CLEMENT LORIMER. Part 111 By Angus

B. Reach.

In this part we find the vindictive Benosa following
up the scheme which he had artfully concocted for
the destruction, soul and body, of the unfortunate
Clement Lorimer, and in order to accomplish this
object he has purchased the assistance of Sir Har-
rowby Trumps, to whom he assigns all the debts
due by Clement, making him Clement's sole creditor
on condition that he shall "follow him up." The spirits
by whom Clement is surrounded are not, however,
all evil. He has a guardian angel in the person
of Marion &lie, the young American girl whose
life he had saved from the wreck on the
Goodwin Sands, and who proves to be the
great granddaughter of Louisa Vanderstein, supposed
to have been drowned by order of Benosa in 1710,
but whose life was preserved by Jin Karl, the mate
of the St. Nicholas, and who afterwards, to escape
from the danger which threatened her, assumed a
different name on her arrival in America, where she
was married to her betrothed. Marion Eske and her
friends General and Mrs. Pomeroy are living in
Cecil-street, and when Clement Lorimer is without
a home it is in Cecil-street that he finds refuge.
" The landlady of the lodging-house in Cecil-street,
in which were installed General and Mrs. Pomeroy,
U. S., was a pale, pinched-in looking little woman, hav-
ing a perfect mania for scouring and scrubbing; and a
remarkable talent, amounting to genius, for scolding.
Her name, as it appeared in fat letters upon the brass
door-plate, was Ginnum. Now there was occasionally
seen slipping about the house, in a meek and stealthy
manner, and with the air of a man who merely existed
on suffranoe, a dirty little person, with a stubbly chin,
no outward appearance of linen, and altogether im-
pregnated with a mouldy flavour. For a long time none
of the lodgers could make out who the mouldy little
man was, and many guesses were made, and theories,
constructed, as to his identity. At length one ingenious
individual hit upon the happy scheme of asking the
mouldy man himself. Tho reply was at once startling
and characteristic.
" Sir,' said the mouldy man with great meekness,
I am Mrs. Ginnum's husband!'
" He was so known ever afterwards. Nobody thought
of calling him Mr. Ginnum, or even plain Ginnum: he
was always ' Mrs. Ginnum's husband.'
" What the particular duties fulfilled by Mrs. Gin-
num's husband were, it would be difficult to specify.
He was sometimes absent from the house, as though he
were attending to some regular calling. At other times
he haunted the lower regions of the establishment.
Glimpses were caught of him in the passages, and his
dirty face was occasionally seen looking up from
the front area. Where he took his meals, and where
he slept, were mysteries more deep than the authorship
withbe theeTe
ever
Iron
omfask., 'Junius,'trhe oornltyhepiiedceentoitfy
loegf
itthime
peered to perform was sitting up at night to let the late
a'iehladnuty
lodgers in. On these occasions he gave loose to his
conversational powers, so far as saying very meekly,
' Good night, sir!' as he delivered the flat-candlestick
to the retiring guest. The other characteristics of the
mouldy little man were, that he was always shabby, and
occasionally not sober."
The " Mouldy Little Man" is one of the most per-
fect sketches with which Mr. Angus Reach has as
yet favoured the public.

THE POTTLETON LEGACY. Part T. By

Albert Smith.

" The Pottleton Legacy" improves as it progresses.
It is superior in point of construction to any work
that Albert Smith has yet composed, and while it
abounds in those exquisitely ludicrous yet at the
same time faithful sketches of the " eccentrics" of
society (witness the " two nice children" in the open-
ing chapter of this part—witness the dinner in the
Beauchamp tower, and the character of Mr. Wynd,
ham Flitter passim—witness the rich scene of the
Rev. Mr. Page taking his dancing lesson) ; it also
contains some of the most beautiful specimens of
description, or, rather, of word-painting, that we have
ever met with. The following snow scene is worthy
the pencil of a Berghem.
" We have returned to Pottleton again—and the snow
is on the ground; those who only knew our village in its
leafy summer dress would be puzzled to find out their
favourite nooks and corners amongst the skeleton trees.
But it is still charming for all that. The air is so vivid
and exhilarating, that your lungs cannot drink in a suf-
ficiency of it at each inspiration ; and the bright clear
sunlight is thrown back in sparkling diamonds, with
dazzling purity, from the snow that crunches beneath
each step. It is as tranquil as in summer ; indeed, the
repose is that of death rather than sleep, broken only by
the sharp ringing echoes of an occasional gun, or the
whirring chatter of a stone, sent swiftly sliding across
the ice by the ruddy urchin, anxious to know if the mill-
tail will bear. The river would freeze if it could; but
the floods have driven it on too turbulently. Where tho
pollards, that its stream has undermined until they
tumbled into it, have collected the reeds and dead leaves
into their harbour, there is a pellicle of ice, rimy and
white, within an inch of where the water washes it: and
some of the drooping sprays of the bramble-bushes,
that bent so gracefully over its quivering lily-spangled
surface in summer, are tipped with long crystal-looking
pendants that would have been elsewise fog drops; but
it holds out no promise of skating. Yet it is freezing
hard, for the place that was broken in the pond, to let
the cattle drink, and get the ice for the Court ice-house,
is already glazed over. Still it is a degree of cold that
no one feels inclined to quarrel with. Indeed, the only
points in the landscape that one might wish to find
fault with, are where the southern eaves are dripping in
the sun, and making a dark unseemly gutter on the
white causeway below.
" The road is spotted with birds—poor little fellows,
hardly driven to pick up a livelihood, fur the hedge-
rows are even too frost-bound for them to scrape out for
the pungent roots that would nourish them; and the hips
and haws have all been carried away—so have the seeds
about the Grange, that were too high for the inmates to
collect. When they settle on the great tree before the
inn, they bring down such a shower of crisp flakes of
snow, that they are frightened into a departure forthwith,
and fly back to the pollards, where they know of decayed
knot•holes and hollowed limbs. Some very old birds—
plump as pincushions—have lived in Baker's barn ever
since the frost began; but this is evidently a secret.
" There is something very solemn about the old grey
Norman church, in its canopy of snow, which also hangs
upon the lych-gate, and covers the grave-yard, until
the tomb-stones are merged in the same hue. You can
now imagine that those who lie beneath it are locked
in a dead and awful sleep—far more so than in summer,
when the daisies and the primroses looked upwards from
the graves towards heaven, or the gentle cowslips bent
their fragrant heads towards the earth, as if in mourning.
In the corner there is a heap of black mould, thrown
up since the snow fell ; but it will be filled in again
before night, and those who have been long separated
—one, perhaps, toiling and struggling on whilst the
other slept tranquilly—will meet again."

THE QUARTERLIES.

THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW. No.

XCIX. With a Supplemental Foreign Quarterly
Review. No. LXXXIV.

One of the most abstruse articles published for a
considerable time in any of the quarterly periodicals
is the essay on the " Notation of Music," in the
current number of the Westminster. Recondite as
the subject is in its character, the writer, who is
manifestly a proficient in musical knowledge, has
contrived to render it both intelligible and entertain-
ing. Two very agreeable chapters of biography and
criticism have been suggested to the reviewers by the
recently published memoirs of Keats and Chan-
and affords the
to the Review
ning. A benevolent argumentin behalf of " The
Distressedwriter
a n
opportunity NeedNeed lew omee
of
" follows,
transferring
(rather late in the day we must acknowledge) the
immortal " Song of the Shirt,„ followed by an
earnest and loving commemoration of the humanity
and genius of Thomas Hood. Happily and beauti-
fully is that stanza quoted from his " Lady's
Dream "

" The wounds I might have heal'd I
The human sorrow and smart I
And yet it was never in my soul
To play so ill a part ;
But evil is wrought by want of Thought,
As well as want of Heart."
Two learned works on Egypt, by Gliddon and
Hengstenberg, are analysed in a severe and exacting
manner, by one who is evidently familiar with the
antiquarian riches of the country bordering the Nile.
A note at page 539 informs us that the author of this
erudite paper, the Rev. Charles William Chalklen, is
recently deceased. Mr. George Poulett Scrope, M.P.,
again seizes the "Irish Difficulty," and strives
to diicover " How it must be met." It would not
have been difficult to recognise his peculiar mode of
reasoning, even had not the authorship been indicated
by his initials. One of the reviewers, hiding his
name under the mask of the rather inscrutable hiero-
glyph " NT-ON," examines from first to last the
whole of the 'correspondence which has taken place in
the public journals respecting the ",Great §ou §ex.