The Sun.
London, England, 1838-08-05 00:00:00

LORD CASTLEREAGH.

" Fcsv men of more limited capacity, or more meagre acquirements
than Lord Castlereagh possessed, had before his time ever risen to any
station of eminence in our free country ; fewer still have long retained
It in a State, where mere Court intrigue and princely favour
have so little to do with men's advancement. But we have
lived to see persons of more obscure merit than Lord Castle-
reagh rise to equal station in this country. Of sober and industrious
habits, and become possessed of business-like talents by long expe-
rience, he was a person of the most common-place abilities. lie had a
reasonable quickness of apprehension and clearness of understanding,
bu; nothing brilliant or In any way admirable marked either his con-
ceptions or his elocution. Nay, to judge of his intellect by his clo.
quence, we should certainly have formed a very unfair estimate of its
perspicacity. For, though it was hardly possible to underrate its extent
or eumpfehensiveness, it was very far from being confused and per-
plexed in the proportiori of his sentences; and the listener, who knew
how distinctly the speaker could form his plans, and how clearly his
ideas were known to himself, might, coniparirig small things with
great, be reminded of the prodigious contrast between the distinet-
nest of Oliver Cromwell's understanding, fled the hopeless confusion
and obscurity of his speech: No man, besides, ever attained the
station of a regular debater in our Parliament with such an
entire want of all classical accomplishment, or indeed of all literary
provision whatsoever. While he never shewed the least symptoms of
an information extending beyond the snore resent volumes of the Par-
liamentary Debates, or possibly the files of the newspapers only, his
diction set all imitation, perhaps all escription, at defiance. It was
with some an amusement to beguile the tedious hours of their unavoid-
able attendance upon the poor, tawdry, ravelled thread of his sorry
discourse, to collect a kind of rifle from the fragments of mixed,
incongruous, and disjointed images that frequently appeared in it.
'The features of the clause'—' the ignorant impatience of the re-
laxation of taxation'—' sets of circumstances coming up and cir_
cumstanccs going down'—' men turning their backs upon themselves'
—` the Honourable and Learned Gentleman's wedge gelding into
the loyal feelings of the manufacturing classes'—' the constitutional
principle wound up in. the bowels of the monarchical principle'---
' the Herculean labour of the Honourable. and Learned Member, who
will find himself quite disappointed when he has at last brought forth
his Hercules'—(by a slight confounding of the mother's labour, who
produced that hero, with his own exploits which gained him immortality)
—these are but a few, and not the richest samples, by any means, or a
rhetoric which often baffled alike the gravity of the Treasury Bench and
the art of the Reporter, and left the wondering audience at a loss to eon_
jecture how any one could ever exist, endowed with humbler pretensions
to the name of orator. Lord Castlereagh gad some qualities well.
fitted to conciliate favour, and even to provoke admiration, in the
absence of every thing like eloquence. He was a bold and fearless
man ; the very courage with which he exposed himself unabashed
to the most critical audience in the world, while incapable of littering
two sentences of any thing but the meanest matter, in the most
wretched language; the gallantry with which he faced the greatest
difficulties of a question ; the unflinching perseverance with which he
went through a whole subject, leaving untouched not one of its points,
whether he could grapple with it or no, and not one of the adverse argu_
men's, however forcibly amt felicitously they had been urged, neither
daunted by recollecting the impression just made by his antagoni,t's
brilliant display, nor damped by consciousness of the very rags in which
he now presented himself—all this made him upon the whole rather a
favourite with the audience whose patience he was taxing mercilessly,
and whose gravity he ever and anon put to a very severe trial. Nor can
any one have forgotten) the kind of pride that mantled on the fronts of the
Tory phalanx, when, after being overwhelmed with the powerful fire of
the Whig opposition, or galled by the fierce denunciations of the Moun.
tain, or harrassed by the splendid displays of Mr. Canning, their
chosen leader stood forth, and presenting the graces of his eminently
patrician figure, flung open his coat, displayed an azure riband traversing
a snow.white chest, and declared ' his high satisfaction that lie could
now meet the charges against him face to face, and repel with indignse.
tiou all that his adversaries had been bold and rash enough to advance.'
Such he was in debate ; in council he certainly had far more resources.
He possessed a considerable fund of plain sense, not to be misled by
any refinement of speculation, or clouded by any fanciful notions. He
went straight to his point ; he was brave politically as well as person.
ally. Of this his conduct on :the Irish Union had given abundant
proof; and nothing could be more just than the rebuke which, as
connected with the topic of personal courage, we may recollect his ad.
ministering to a great man who had passed the limits of Parliamentary
courtesy. Every one must be sensible,' he said, that if any personal
quarrel were desired, any insulting language used publicly, where it
could not be met as it deserved, was the way to prevent and not
to produce such a rencounter.' No one after that treated him with
disrespect. The complaints made of his Irish administration were

perfectly well.grounded as regarded the corruption of the Parliament by
which he accomplished the Union; hut they were entirely unfounded
as regarded the Cruelties practised during and after the Rebellion. Far
ttom partaking in these atrocities, he uniformly and strenuously set his
face against them. He was of a cold temperament and determined Cha-
racter, but not of a cruel disposition ; and to him, more than perhaps to
any one else, was owing the termination of the system stained with blood.
His foreign administration was as destitute of all merit as possible•
MR. HORNER.

Mr. Muter haying entered publie, life without any advantage of rank
or fortune, had in a very short time raised himself to a high place among
alike from
stlilnecenrleemcboenlof tiotnh,ealiahfieronpi Warty (to which he was attached
private friendship with its chiefs), by the
onidaio virtuousnsin pociliitai
era:
ttaerloi,itis
opir.i
vate life, a
es a very high
olfiredeacti),°' afadnandeir'iletofTos'etremiEmoinordaaebtrioaentecae accurate and extensive upon all subjects
connected with state affairs. Not that his studies had been confined to_
these; for his education, chiefly at Edinburgh, had been most liberal,
e e .
s
on
ft] and
generala put
plhi s
oinp
hpy, o s
thansessioft
lst o
of far more
lot knowledge iv
moste(i theeEtnegiloitsih stastuesomjc
All the departments of moral science he had cultivated in an especial
,
manner; and he was well grounded in the exacter sciences, although
he had not pursued these with the same assiduity. The
ind
profes-
sion of the law, which he followed, rather disciplined his ra
than distracted it from the more attractive and elegant pur-
suits of literary leisure ; and, his taste, the guide and eau,
trot of eloquence, was manly and chaste, erring on the safer side
fastidiousness. Accordingly, when lie joined his party in Parliament,
his oratory was of a kind which never failed to produce a very
great
effect, and he only did not reach the highest place among de-
baters, because he was cut off prematurely, while steadily
advancing upon the former successes of his career. The great
question of the Currency had been thoroughly studied by himat an early period of life, when the writings of Mr. Henry Thorn-
ton and Lord King first opened men's eyes to the depreciation which
Mr. Pitt's ill starred policy had occasioned. With the Ibriner he had
partaken of the doubts by which his work left the questicu overcast in
1802 ; the admirable and indeed decisive demonitration of the latter in
the next year entirely removed those doubts : and Mr. Horner, follow-
ing up the able paper upon the subject which he had contributed to the
Edinburgh Review at its first appearance, with a second upon Lord
King's work, avowed his conversion,
and joined most powerfully with
those who asserted that the currency had been depreciated, and the
metallic money displaced by • the inconvertible Eank paper. In 1810
he moved for the famous Bullion Committee, and the two speeches which
he made, upon moving his resolutions the year after, may justly
be regarded as finished models of eloquence applied to such sub-
jects. The fame which they acquired for him was great solid, lasting.
.JEREMY BENTHAM.
The age of Law Reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and
the same. He is the father of the most important of all the branches
of Reform, the loading and ruling department of human improve-
ment l` e' He it was who first made the mighty step of
trying the whole provisions of our jurisprudence by the test of ex.
pediency, fearlessly examining how far each part was connected with the
rest; and with a yet more undaunted courage, inquiring how far even
its most consistent and symmetrical arrangements were framed accord-
ing to the principle which should pervade a Code of Laws— their adap-
tation to the circumstances of society, to the wants of men, and to the
promotion of human happiness. Not only was he thus eminently origi-
nal among the lawyers and the legal philosophers of his own country; he