The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-14 00:00:00

LONDON, 7UESDAY, JUNE 14, 1870.

It is, we are grateful to hope, all but decided
that the remains of CHARLES DICKENS will be
interred in 'Westminster Abbey. Now that the
intention is seriously entertained, we seem to
realize more forcibly than ever what mat ter

of lasting regret there will be in any
other arrangement. Nowhere else than
in our English %Valhalla should repose the
dust of one of the most thoroughly national
and indigenous of our writers. Nowhere else than
in the midst of this vast world of London, that his
genius more than that of any other author who ever
lived has served to illustrate, ought the grave of
DICKENS to be raised by his lamenting survivors.
Here, and here only, could his tomb be built the
most appropriately. All London, all England, will
be grateful if the decision arrived at :by the great
author's afflicted family, in concession to the wish
most naturallyexpressed on the part of the people, be
that, here, in the capital, in their very midst, the
body of one• so beloved and honoured should alone
be interred. That most reasonable wish we have
the consolation of remembering that we were the first
to articulate -in these columns—in The Sun of Satur-
day morning. In accordance with that sugges-
tion we shall earnestly hope to the last
that the illustrious illustrator of the genius of
the English people in this nineteenth century will find
his place of rest where alone it could be fittingly
selected—under the roof beams of Westminster
Abbey-- in the midst of the noblest names, among
which there is not one nobler, there is certainly not
one more dearly cherished than his own, constituting
the glory of our national literature.

Mr. DISRAELI'S tenacious hold upon the Conserva-
tive party as its leader is something remarkable,
As complacently as any unconquerable champion in
the ring, he " comes up smiling " after the very
sharpest encounter. Blackwood's slashing, crashing.
smashing, review nevertheless notwithstanding. De.-
spite the broken allegiance long since of the old Tory
Quarterly. In spite of the vituperations, wanting
only in finish, directed against hint by the Marquis of
SALISBURY. Indifferent to the verbal brickbats
hurled against him by the impassioned hand of
Mr. G. SMITH of Ithaca—in the United States.
Serenely unconscious of the derision excited all round
him by his last literary exploit—the publication of "a
fashionable novel all about dukes and duchesses and
such very cream of the cream of the milk of human
kindness as the LOTHAIRS and the Lady CORI-
SANDES of Mayfair and Belgravia—Mr. DISRAELI,
who we are told, every alternate day, is virtually no
longer in possession of the merest shadow of the
shade of his authority, heretofore weilded as the
acknowledged and recognised Leader of the
Conservative Opposition, Mr. DISRAELI, that
dethroned political potentate, actually no further back
than on Saturday last convenes a meeting of
the leading members of the late Cabinet at his pri-
vate residence! There to take into consideration the
course which it will be advisable for the Conserva-
tive party to pursue in reference to the Education
Bill of her Majesty's Government ! So that, after all,
it is not Mr. GATHORNB HARDY that the Opposition
in the House of Commons is to look to for guidance
but still, as hitherto during these more than twenty
years last past, the right hon. gentleman the
member for Buckinghamshire. Mr. DISRAELI
is, in all this, only yet once more
illustrating anew the spring and vitality of h's in-
expugnable reputation. The amount of scorn, irony,
derision he has outlived already it would be difficult
to calculate. No man in his time has been better
abused—not evenhis old enemy, DANIEL O'CONNELL,
the Irish Liberator. In this particular his career
has, throughout, been curiously consistent. His first
spaech in the House of Commons closed, as we all
know, in the midst of derisive roars of laughter. He
was cold-shouldered by the great Sir ROBERT PEEL
—for the which cold-shouldering he contrived
to avenge himself very soon afterwards by showering
upon the devoted head. of the Minister who had
failedto appreciate him the most scathing sarcasms and
the most poignant ridicule. Mr. DISRAELI'S Life has
been written once or twice before now with an elabo-
ration of malignity certainly designed to scare him
prematurely from the political arena, in which
biographers, like Mr. .MACKNIGHT, endeavoured by
every means in their power to display him as the
merest flashy parliamentary adventurer. Assailed by
high and low, now by a Mr. EARLE, now by a
Marquis of SALISBURY—

" Check'd like a bondman ; all his faults observed
Set in a note-book, learn'd, and conn'd by rote ; "

treated again and again by the principal organs of the
very party he has been leading—as more than a year
ago in the Quarterly, as less than a fortnight ago in
Blackwood—this imperturbable, invulnerable, arrow-
blunting, poison-proof, scorn-assimilating, no-leader,
and yet, all the while, to every intent and purpose,
active leader of the Conservatives, has contrived to
hold his own with an almost sublime assurance that
has sornehoW led captive at his heels the popular
admiration. Upon the ridicule that would
have destroyed other men, he has somehow thriven.
Time and again, we have been told that his days as a