The Sun.
London, England, 1849-01-23 00:00:00

U 174

17.1 ,-=,-__--_-,F.i..
and the Scourers, the Nicker, the Haweienfti,:tali'--- •• Le; \`
the Mohawk. In the same comprebensitieriyet-,;4f.:;,,,:t -Yl._ 1
grammatic manner he scans the charact ristie4xeete2:f.,,,it-i!':'
'ow W
es and demerits of the contemporar ,iriters"'\ - ---,,,- '
ii(
the poets, the dramatists, the clerical seOlies,' thi.l; -
..,..--5t,:
philosophers, and the journalists. Of the cbmiceliral .„..7:
matists he speaks in language of grievously jeirfsda`;lll:3'
reprobation (I. 403). " Whatever they fertiChed,"
says he, "they tainted: in their imitations, the
houses of Calderon's stately and high spirited Cas-
tilian gentlemen became sties of vice, Shakspere's
Viola a procuress, Moliere's misanthrope a ravisher,
Moliere's Agnes an adultress." Alluding to those
immortal bards who remained uncontaminated in the
midst of this intellectual debauchery, our historian
has penned this magnificent sentence upon Milton, a
sentence of touching and superb eloquence (I. 401) •
—"A mightier poet, tried at once by pain, danger,
poverty, obloquy, and blindness, meditated, undisturbed
by the obscene tumult which raged all around him, a
song so sublime and so holy that it would not have mis•
become the lips of those ethereal Virtues whom he saw,
with that inner eye which no calamity could darken,
flinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of
amaranth and gold."
If for nothing else, the chapter to which we are
now making reference would deserve our most earnest
approbation, for, inasmuch as it casts derision upon
those who commend the preceding, at the expense
of the present generation. "It is now the fashion,"
observes the writer (I. 427), " to place the golden age
of England in times when noblemen were destitute of
comforts, the wants of which would be intolerable to
a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers
breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would
raise a riot in a• modern workhouse, when men died
faster in the purest country air than they now die in
the most pestilential lanes of our towns,' and when
men died taster in the lanes of our towns than they
now die on the coast of Guiana." Previously he has
demonstrated these facts by statistical comparisons ;
he has shown that while the daily earnings of a brick-
layer were formerly half-a crown, they are now four
and tenpence ; that while the ordinary Mayes were
formerly oaten, they are now wheaten ; that while
the farm labourer formerly gained five shillings a
week, he now gains fourteen. He has advanced, as a
striking illustration of the enormous increase in our
commercial transactions, the fact that whereas the
customs of London amounted in 1685 to about
330,0004 a year, the net duty paid annually
in that single port, from 1842 to 1845,
very nearly averaged 11,000,0001. -He has
contrasted the splendour of our highways—
stretching out into a length of almost thirty thousand
miles—with the miserable paths trodden of old by
our ancestors. He has compared the darkness of
their miry streets with the paved expanses in our
provincial towns and watering-places, illuminated by
a thousand jets of gas, brighter than the feast of lan-
terns in the pagodas of the Chinese. He has placed
cheek-by-jowl the ignorance of yesterday and the in-
telligence of to-day, the packhorse and the railway,
the news-letter and the daily journal, the book
stalls and the libraries, the beershops and the
mechanics' institutions, the alchemist and the
natural philosopher. Coupling these things together,
he has found himself impelled to acknowledge the
immeasurable superiority of that age of which we are
fortunate enough to be contemporaries, when mea-
sured by the standard of its vaunted predecessors.
"The more carefully we examine the history of the
past," he says in conclusion (I. 420), " the more
reason shall we find to dissent from those who ima-
gine that our own age has been fruitful of new social
evils : the truth is, that the evils are, with scarcely an
exception, old : that which is new is the intelligence
which discerns and the humanity which remedies
them." Such are the encouraging reflections of one
who has conned the lessons of the past not
lightly ; and his reasons for congratulation are
in no respect restricted to mere matters of provisions,
traffic, or conveyance. They extend equally to the
habits of the population and to the morals of the
Government. A cursory investigation into the prin-
ciples which of yore guided the acts of English states-
men will flood the heart of every patriotic observer
with an exhilarating sense of improvement. It may
there be discerned that turpitude and corruption were
not merely the most prominent qualifications of the
leaders of The Cabal—Arlington, Buckingham,
Shaftesbury, and Lauderdale—but that they were
conspicuous in their immediate successors, in Osborne,
and Capel, and Sunderland, and down through their
successors again even as recently as the first repre-
sentatives of the reigning dynasty of Brunswick.
There, also, it may be perceived that of old the
law was not well administered when the diaboe
heal Jeffreys was Chancellor ; that the army was but
indifferently organised when Feversham commanded
the troops at Sedgemoor ; that the naval service was
in deplorable plight when Albemarle blundered on
the tack to larboard (I. 301) ; that the ideas of phi-
lanthropy were inculcative, even in the purest tem-
peraments, of a disgusting laxity, when William Penn
—that " mythical person whose name has become a
synonym° for probity"—could become a channel
for extortion to gratify the cupidity of maids-of-
honour, or could visit Guildhall to see Cornish
strangled on the gallows, and hasten thence to Ty-
burn to behold Elizabeth Gaunt burnt alive upon
faggots. To Mr. Macaulay we are grateful for hav-
ing thus endeavoured to dissipate one of the most
pernicious illusions of the day—that illusion which
disposes the mass to repine at the degeneracy of their
fortunes, when, if the truth wsre only once revealed
to their imaginations, they would recoil with horror
before the atmosphere of debasement, of poverty, of
wrongs, of darkness, and of brutality, which enve-
loped their envied forefathers in the golden days of
the Stuarts and the Plantagenets.
Our remarks upon this extraordinary composition
must close : and, in uttering our last syllables of com-
mentary upon the commencement of the "History of
England" by Mr. Macaulay, we would express to him
with simplicity, with cordiality, and with earnest-
ness, those felicitations to which he has rendered
himself eminently entitled—felicitations on his ad-
mission to the Walhalla of Historical Literature.

ST. JAMES'S T tiEATRE.

Last evening we had three lively operettas, the works
of different composers, and each an example of a dif-
ferent school of music, performed at this theatre. The
performances commenced with Le Nouveau Seigneur de
Village, an opera of Boildieu, whose graceful and melo-
dious style of composition is a pleasing medium between
the steady-going of Gretry, and the brilliant, sparkling.
corruscating, dazzling style of Auber. The subject of
this opera is well known to the English public. The
valet of a French Marquis, sent down to a country
village, passes himself, like the mock Duke in
the Honeymoon, for his master, and on the arrival
of that master of course there are some most amusing
contretemps. M. Beauce acted the mock Marquis with
great effect, and he was well supported by Madlle.
Martial, who is not only an excellent artist but a very
pretty girl. This was succeeded by the operetta of
Le Boulle et le Tailleur, the composition of Gaveaux, who
was the contemporary of Salieri and Gretry. The plot
is simple. A musical tailor mistakes the servant of an
Italian singer for the master, and undertakes to give him
a coat for a song. The servant takes advantage of the
fact that his master is singing in the next room, and i
induces the musical tailor to believe that it s
himself, and thus is the schneiderian votary .of
music victimized. The tailor's daughter and the yellsa
servant are in love with each other, she having captivated
him by her skill in a singing lesson. The principal_ pacts
.
were admirably sustained by M. Coudere and
quaint
moiselle Charton, who, not content with the but
pleasing music of Gaveaws, introduced a variety of in-
cidental music. M. Couderc sang
buffo aria by Fioravanti, " Ah perch? %I T, wu
b best &Is;
a spirit that reminded us of De Begms in by M. De.
and Mademoiselle Charton sang a. the
.on.cez.ce,liei,b,rewteaith
profusion
aThe singing
accomplished
mo f e
fiu r(),, i i u withr e
that a
was
perfectly
e xber ea:u
these two
swthawi nnodg .
lesson was admirably given he musical tailor, was exqui-
sitelyares. M. Buguett a
11;. s rat, a
it, imitation
vatashevd esretyohr fvegaoontpotaediriwao
and
singingis
sne
x lovewceals.
humorous.
occupation of the two chairs
superb. M. Chateau
boter
daenug: fins' -
he re
ima-
ginary duet betsivise b
with the tailor's
excel-
lency given.
io effect. The ar
presented each ch -
d by MM. Couderc,Beauce,
0 operetta o,
words by Scribe,
Polichineae, the • • the Music by M.
(rahoiste°r,wnp rtiond du
e e- the
Id at amaiplie Irrt'fano):::emamse
Montfort, bly d
and 11,1 addle. Guic ar , concluded the evening's entertain-
ment.. The house was well and fashionably attended.

OLYMPIMT E
•
Brigands in the Bud was the title of a new drama pro-
duced here last night. The brigands are runaway stu-
dents from Upsal University, their representatives were
the ladies of the Olympic company, commanded by
Mrs. Stirling, who looked more fascinating than ever
in her mthtachios. Add to these attractions that
Compton acted the part of an old woman, and the
success of Brigands in the Bud will no longer be matter
of surprise. The house was well filled.