The Sun.
London, England, 1871-02-22 00:00:00

LENT.

The Telegraph observes :—Lent has begun. This is
Ash Wednesday; and a very large section of the com-
znunity will doubtless celebrate the day in the conventional
fashion. In the course of the next few days corres-
pondents in various parts of Europe will be sending
accounts of the manner in which the Carvinal has
been kept in Continental capitals. Paris has al-
ready, after a fashion, had her Carnival, and
danced her " Galop Infernal" till she reeled,
staggered, and fell exhausted. She has danced
with a vengeance. It was the Germans who
provided the fiddlers and the pipers for that gruesome
festival ; but it is the French who will have to pay the
musicians. For more than four long months Paris danced
the "Dance of Death "—as hideous a performance as that
which the undying pencil of Holbein has limned upon
the wall at Basle. As in the great German pictures,
Death led the dance, and opened the ball with
all corners. He waltzed with the Princess ;he
made the Bishop pirouette; his grisly arm was around
the waist of the bride ; he dandled the baby from the
cradle. A most merry Death he was—a true farceur, as
Holbein shews him—now tripping his partners up, now
digging pitfalls for them, now pulling the stools from.
under them, At last, in his gamesome mood, having
thinned the lan by disease and pinched it with faznine,
he took to pelting the assemblage with bomb_
shells ; and then the lights went out and the
ball was over, More than four hundred years have
elapsed since the Parisians witnessed hi their streets a
strange mortuary masquerade. It was during the trium-
phant occupation of Paris by the English after Agincourt,
and in honour—strange honour—of the coronation of the
boy Henry VI. as King of France in Notre Dame, that
the Earl of Bedford and the Bishop of Winchester
organised a grand " Danse Macabre," or Dance
of Death, in the Ile St. Louis, The pageant—
a curiously favourite one in the Middle Ages—
had an immense success with the mercurial Parisians.
Alas ! poor people ; it must have been with far different
feelings that their descendants witnessed, not the sham,
but the real " Dame Macabre " in 1870, It has been
danced out—to the extinction of the last flambeau, to the
exhaustion of the last dancer : and Heaven 'rant that
Paris may never see such a t, cr :ale masquerade, such a
black Carnival, again !

THE BALLOT BILL.
The Standard says :—within the first fortnight of
the
the
meeting of Parliament, before the definite sense of
of
country has been taken upon the two vital questions
the day—the conduct of England in regard to theaggres-
sions
and usurpations of Prussia and ofin arousing
Russia—we find
that the only subjects which have succeededour are such purely
the Government to any sort of
Sister'sfactio factious partisanaßndillandthe Ballot. measures asvio• the
WhileD the people
eceased Wife's
lidfehnfrpoomrtathnetigrureulsteiors;
and still waiting;
three
agitationof greatest Powers of
rulers—
while laliitl: ftolirreseoomf e
thesigmn oosft delicate an
_E relatingu rope, respectively ttihvee l.oyr
crisis
a solution, the chief ctreeemsoefienAefers. Golfadtshtoosneewapealpetahray
to be how to appease
members of his connection who have broken the marriage
law, and how to provide secret voting for the electors of
As for that venerable and timeTworn Radical
the Ballot, which has been resuscitated from
out of the lumber-room of Liberal properties, the first
question which will ()emir to the public is why a measure
for secret voting should be brought forward at all. The
cry for the Ballot, whatever it might have been once, is a
dead cry. It is but the ghost of a principle—
a fossil remain from a past political age. The,
attempt to whip the Ballot into something
like life has been an utter failure. As for
the working classes, their feelings are ten times
more exercised on the question of the Princess Louise's
dowry than about secret voting. To say of the Ballot
that it is an old Liberal cry, that it dates from the time
of primitive Radicalism, is to use no argument in its favour,
but rather to condemn it. It would not have been sa old a.
cry if there had been anything in it. To suppose that any
body of people can, in these days, get up un enthusiasm in
favour of the privilege of dropping their votes secretly into a
box, and that their chief concern is whether their votes
shall be on cardboard or on paper, marked with invisible
ink or protected by a counterfoil, is surely a ridiculous
delusion, even for the Liberal party to hold. The ques-
tion, we trust, will be duly considered before the second
reading,
_so that, even if the Government are able, by
means of their majority, to carry the bill, the Conserva-
tive party may be preserved from the blunder of having
helped their opponents to realise the oldest and most
cherished of Radical notions.