The Sun.
London, England, 1870-04-23 00:00:00

TOWN TALK.

(From the Western Mail of this Morning.)
LONDON, Friday Evening.

It will be remembered that, immediately before the
commencement of the Easter holidays, Bernal
Osborne's last, instead of awakening laughter, for
once startled the House of Commons into unusual
seriousness. Nor could it very well be wondered at,
seeing that it was about the gravest joke ever in-
dulged in by the humorous member for Waterford,
the gravity of it consisting in its truth—many a
true word being spoken in jest, according to .the
proverb, and this being one of them. It was more
of a prediction even than it was a goak, to use for
once poor Artemus Ward's grotesque orthography.
And it was this—that never at the close of any
session will there have been witnessed so ruthless a
massacre of the innocents than at the close of the
present one, immediately before the prorogation.
The sting of this is its exceeding probability. So
much has been commenced ; so little has been in any
way advanced towards completion. We are only just
nibbling at the first clauses of the Land Bill in com-
mittee ; the educational measure has made no 'head-
way at all, the opposition to it all the while increas-
ing and multiplying, insomuch that people begin to
talk of Mr. Forster's triumph being postponed for
another year. There can be little doubt, in
any case, I take it, of this— tspecially after
the way in which Mr. Gladstone tried it on as early
in the session as two or three weeks before the com-
mencement of the Easter. xecess—that the Leader of
the House at the head of his " Tyrant Majority " will
first of all see how much can be accomplished by
working double tides, i.e., by morning as well as
evening sittings, and that he will next, and as a
dernier resort, strive to find out how far the arrear,
may be cleared off by lengthening out the session
' beyond the beginning of the epoch sacred to the
shooting of grouse, it may be even beyond the be-
ginning of that: dedicated to the sacrifice of par-
tridges. One of these inflictions is almost too
much to be borne by ordinary mortals, or, at any
rate (though it is pretty much the same thing), by
ordinary M.P.'s with anything like equanimity ; but
impose all of them together, and you would almost
justify a vendetta.
Last week, I instanced, as one of the most astound-
ing rumours from abroad, the statement put forth by
one of the least flighty and most matter-of-fact jour-
nals of Paris, that the übiquitous and. Protean
Rouher was to be installed as Viceroy in the posi-
tion of Governor of Algeria. Since then, accord-
ing to another Parisian publicist of yet more
daring imagination, a still more startling change
has come o'er the spirit of the dream of
the great ex-Minister of State—seeing that
(if we are to believe this Sir Oracle) France has
in store for her, as the out-come of the plehiscitum of
the Bth proximo, that most astonishing of all political
monstrosities—an/011ivier-Rouher Cabinet. Talk of
extremes meeting ! There, indeed, would be for once
the visible rendezvous. It would be more than the
marriage of May and December—more than the poetic
phantasy of Winter in the lap of Spring. For rather
than anything of
,this, it would be the realisation,
for once, politically, of the well-known chemical ex-
periment of the laboratory, in the dexterous manipu-
lation of which one discovers a lump of ice in a red-
hot crucible.

Another rumour of these last few days, and for
which I am indebted .to your namesake of Dublin, is
to the effect yet once more (I wonder how often
the very same rumour has been afloat, and has been
believed in !) that the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland
is at length about to he resigned in earnest by the
Earl Spencer, whose successor in the vice-regal
chair will be the present Secretary for Ireland, Mr.
Chichester Fortescue, Mr. then no longer, the hus-
band of the Counttss of Waldegrave, being himself
then raise 1 to the level of the peerage of the United
Kingdom.
Two European notabilities of widely contrasting
characters appear just now to be profoundly saddened
by circumstances. Signor Mazziui, judging him by
his last utterances, appears to be more than ever
down-hearted—acknowledges, in fact, that he
de pairs of his cwn generation. Count Bismarck,
on the other hand, has just been stricken down
by jaundice.
A carious coincidence I wonder if anybody has
ever yet bit upon besides myself, in reference to Pro-
fessor Wilson and "Boz" having very possibly and
very happily derived some of their most whimsio.l
names from—where do you think ? Pepy's Diary !
['here, in that diary, among all diaries (just as Elia
may be spoken of as that essayist among all essayists),
you may find, if you care to look for it, the very nom
de plume of the great professor, under date 30th
December, 1667 (only, be it observed, with the
added dignity of knighthood), in the person of one
Sir Christopher North. Under date 26th Nov.,
1666, you will light upon Sir Robert Sawyer, a
knightly ancestor,may one suppose, of the knight of
the pestle and mortar in "Pickwick." Under date
7th October, 1667, you will come to Willett, body-
ervant of Mistress Pepys, and also, one likes to con-
jecture at the same time, progenitor of that wonder-
fully obtuse old fat-head, John Willett, landlord of
the Maypole, in " Barnaby Budge." Finally,
under date 28th Dec., 1664, you may note the
alter ego, by six or seven generations, of John Jasper,
the opium-eating lay precentor in the choir of the
old cathedral at Cloisterham, already familiar on
both sides of the Atlantic to the multitudinous
readers of the " Mystery of Edwin Drood." As mark-
ing merely a coincidence, the facts here alluded to
are interesting so far in themselves, for inasmuch as
they are thus doubly associated with the names so
familiar in our national literature.

A very remarkable picture is now on view in the
neighbourhood of once fashionable Bond-street.
" Behind the Scenes" is the title of it, a title in every
way sufficiently suggestive. The artist is that grace-
ful, prolific, and conspicuously original illustrator of
Tomahawk and Britannia, Mr. Matt Morgan.
" Behind the Scenes," 'tis a trite old theme after
all, and one that bas seldom had a more pathetic
illustration than it obtained only the other day a little
to the north of London, in the premature death of
the young wife of one of our most brilliantly- succtss-
tul humourists, both ou the stage and In the comic
periodicals; his great home sorrowing coming thus to
Mr. F. C. Burnand in the very midst of the gayest,
the wildest, and the most whimsical of his well-
known " Happy Thoughts," in Punch.
On Saturday next, that is a week after the Satur-
day on which this letter will appear in your columns,
there will be sold by public auction, in the mart of
Messrs. Christie, Manson, and Co., in King-street,
St. James's, by three of the clock in the afternoon, a
picture, small enough, no doubt, in value, as a work
of art, but, in another way, priceless, by reason of
the grand old traditions attaching to it, and of its
many noble and (for lettered Englishmen) historical
and classical associations. It is the famous Felton
portrait, or, as it is more generally called, the Droe-
thout portrait of Shakespeare. It is said to be the
only portrait for which Shakespeare ever sat ; the
painter to whom he gave these sittings being his
friend and fellow play-actor, Richa►d Burbage. 'the
painting is on a panel of wood, on the back of
which are inscribed the names, the date, and the
initials :

" Gu: Shakespeare-1597.—R. B."

Remembering, as who does not, the resounding verse
in which Rare Ben Jonson celebrated, with the ten-
derest feeling and the most unaffected enthusiasm,
what he regarded as the marvellous veriti,uilitude of
this particular portraiture, when the amateur pain-
ter's art (meaning that of Burbage).had been yet fur-
ther distorted by the more rigid lines of the harder
art of the engraver, DrQethout, one cannot but feel