The Sun.
London, England, 1870-05-07 00:00:00

TOWN TALK.

(From the Western Mail of this Morning.)
LONDON, Friday Evening.
The opportuneness of that deadly conspiracy
against the "charmed life" of the Emperor Napoleon
accounts for—almost justifies—the utter incredulity
with which its first announcement was received by
Messieurs the Parisians. ft was an unbelief so
absolute, however, as to amount of itself t 9 an out-
rage against the Government. There is, neverthe-
less, no mistaking by this time the genuinenesi or
authenticity of the revelation. The hour and the
man were there, but, happily, they did not exactly
" hit it off " together. The hour was known, and the
man was caught. Upon the wretched would-be assassin
was found a loaded but undischarged revolver. At
one of his haunts a magnificent haul was made of
deadly missiles, and projectiles,- and detonators—
bombshells fashioned like muffins or teacakes, and a
certain comparatively harmless apology for nitro-
glycerine. Discovered by times, as it was (thanks,
upon the first hint of it, one rejoices to know, to the
Loud )n detectives), the revealed conspiracy comes
in aid superbly of the plebiscitum. ith Wwhat
result Europe will have learnt, far and wide, within
a very few hours after you have completed to-mor-
row's publication, namely, by the thrilling of its
nervous system—no longer diplomacy, but the
electric telegraph.
Although too late for any detailed mention in my
last week's letter, I attended the private view at the
Royal Academy. This annual feast of the eyes oc-
cupied me some hours on Friday afternoon—inter-
rupted, as the private view always is, by those en-
counters among friends, whose aggregate name, on
that day of days, is Legion. Celebrities of all kinds
" there do congregate." Dukes and archbishops
" are as plentiful " as the reasons of Jack Falstaff.
Painters and critics are there for awhile, as the phrase
is, upon the same platform. The throng at intervals
is so intense that the notion of its being a view at
all, much less a private view, comes at last to be the
very wildest of absurdities. Regarded as a whole,
the collection this year is one of average merit. The
academicians have greatly distinguished themselves.
An outsider has, here and there, surpassed himself ;
Mr. Marks, of this, being a very signal illustration.
His picture of "St. Francis preaching to the Birds"
is beyond any work hp has ever yet produced. It
ought to secure to him, at the very first opportunity,
his enrolment as an associate. It is a masterpiece,
at one and the same moment, of the tenderest sensi-
bility and of the quaintest humour, in its pathetic,
grave, and grotesque whimsicality, being almost, one
might say, in the same breath, a provocative of tears
and laughter.
Since the last year's exhibition three of the R.A.'s
have disappeared ; two of them men of mark ; one
as a battle-scene painter (Jones), the other as a
landscape painter (CrLswick), the third—dead within
a week before the opening —in many respects the
greatest of the whole forty academicians. Daniel
Maclise died after a four -days' illness. Apparently
with twenty good years before him, he succumbed
thus abruptly to heart disease. His seemingly prema-
ture death was accelerated by the fact that his enor-
mous amount of brain-work was in no degree coun-
terbalanced by what ought always to be cared for as
the counterpoise to intellectual labour—bodily exer-
cise. Toiling incessantly at his easel, he never, or
hardly ever, dreamt of taking, what ought to have
been the daily rule with him, a constitutional. The
great novelist, who paid so exquisite a tribute to
Maclise's memory at the Academy dinner on Satur-
day, acts more wisely in this particular than his de-
parted friend ever had the care to do—Charles
Dickens, still with the light elastic tread of youth,
doing habitually his ten or twelve miles a day
walking, town or country, wet or dry, at all times
and seasons.

It is melancholy to think of, that Daniel Maclise
was allowed to be laid in the grave quietly, almost
obscurely, at the close of last week, without his
honoured remains being followed to that neglected
grave by any one of his brother academicians. The
President was not there, the secretary was not there,
the treasurer was not there, the librarian was ab-
sent ; they were all away—attending to the arrange-
ments of the banquet. Why, in France the banquet
would have been postponed—the whole thirty-nine
would have been there as chief mourners ; the Minis-
ters of State would have been present, the Sove-
reign would have been officially represented by one
of the court dignitaties, soldiers would have lined the
%hole way from the great artist's house to the place
of sepulture. certainly, here again Sterne was right
—they do manage these things better in France than
amongst ourselves. Even as it was on Saturday,
literature was alone represented at the grave of
Daniel Maclise by Hepworth Dixon and J. C. Jeaf-
freson, the novelist and the traveller.
Maclise's last picture is interesting, of course ; but
it is unsatisfactory. In the drawing it is admirable,
but in the colouring sombre and lugubrious. Others
of the academicians shine forth this year resplen-
dently—Poole, with a very glory of colour, in illus-
tration of Boccaccio's Decameron—Herbert, with
two superb classical landscapes—Landseer, with a
wonderful portrait of Voitigeur, and a still more
wonderful group of monkeys—Millais, with the sweet,
haunting face of Raleigh in his boyhood—E. M.
Ward, with his limning to the very life of the
ruffianly and infuriated Jeffreys, of infamous reputa-
tion—Frith, with his Sir Roger de Coverley and the
Perverse Widow—Hook, with his delicious, blue,
briny Brimming and Doggerbank —Horsley, with the
Banker's Private Room, the finest of all his interiors
—Cope, O'Neil, Elmore, Calderon, Faed, each with
works of art worthy of their reputations.
Among the lady contributors Mrs. E. M. Ward
stands forth conspicuously—fairly surpasses herself
—with her charming historical picture of the inter-
view between the divorced Empress Josephine and
the little prattling King of Rome in the presence of
Napoleon the Great, Emperor and King, Conqueror
and Lawgiver.
Among the foreign contributors the place of
honotir is at once assumed, by right, by M. Gerome—
ecce signum !—his marvellous representation of "The
Death of Marshal Ney, Duke of Elchingen and
Prince of Moskowa."
Among the general outsiders, Marcus Stone takes
a distinct step in his historical picture of Henry
VIII. and Anne Boleyn, observed in their coquetries
by Queen Katharine of Arragon—Charles Goldie
far surpassing his " Saint Augustine" of last year by
his new and, as yet, his ablest work of art, " The
Trial of St. Perpetua"—J. B. Burgess, the young
paiuttr who startled London art-critics a few seasons
back with his " Spanish Bullfight" audience, contri-
buting, in 1870, to the Academy collection another
fine Spanish scene, taken from an incident in the last
year's insurrection.
" Lothair's" brilliant glitter of
,wit and persiflage
has fairly dazzled the reviewers into admiration.
Such a chorus of praise on a new book has not for a
long while past been audible. The critics seem to
have been awed into eulogium by Mr. Phesubs'
charming impertinence when he speaks of them super-
ciliously thus ---" The critics—you know who they
are—the men who have failed in literature and art."
A thought unconsciously borrowed, or lam very
much mistaken, from one of the earlier novels of
Edward Bulwer, now Lord Lytton.
Dickens's new number (2) of " Edwin Drood" is
chiefly remarkable for the passionate scenes in which
the hero of the tale and a young Anglo-Oriental,
named Neville Landless, are the interlocutors.
The Pall Mall's cessation as a morning paper, on
Saturday, took one by surprise, but its announce-
ment of its immediate return to its original form as
an evening paper delighted the West-enders, draw-

ing even a hilarious hooray from Mr. Punch in Fleet
street.
While the prose of Mr. Disraeli's last effusion lil
been eulogised by tile press with a sort of chorro
unanimity. Mr. Rosetti's poetical lines have ce.
tainly fallen in pleasant places —whether here
Fraser, where they have been most lovingly bs9(lie
'l
they,
by Shirley, or here in the Fortnightly, where t'irl
have been lauded with a kind of rapture by j)
Swinburne.
t1)13
There is a siular attraction in this Die-n di
number of the Fortnightly, in the shape of a ghastly
translation, by the late murdered Edward gerbe in
of the appalling Greek poem of the ValliPire'bi
memory of the massacre of Gardiki, in 1812' fir
order of Ali Pacha, of Joamina, through the r; .
less agency of Thanasi Vayi, otherwise A.thanaslw
Vayas.
It now appears that to the pen of Mr. u 3-1,10
Hoey, once editor of the Irish Nation, is attributawhe
the remarkable article in the last number of ti
Dublin Review, entitled interrogatively, 46 Is Irel°l/
Irreconcilable ?"
Cornelius O'Dowd is as lively and whitusie3l
ever in the May number of Blackwood. Scalceute
could the copy have left his hands at Trieste en °tile
for Edinburgh when its author, Charles Lever' of
ever gay and ever exhilarating Harry Lorrequer e 0
old, Cornelius O'Dowd of nowadays, must haveb,eo3
stricken to the heart by a home affliction, which 'or
been only too long impending over him in his ehartit,
ing villa in the environs of that most picturesque °op
port of Austria on the north-west shores ei
Adriatic. His wife, nom for two years bed rider
under a mortal disease, has, at length, sunk and
the wasting malady.
„r rti°
Charles Reade is drawing rapidly now to-all
the close of the most realistically sensational 01 r,
his startling romances of every-day " Pat Pitiej
self in its Place," in the Co. rnhill. When coWPle
iog
are we, then, to have in lieu of it, the fortheuni
novel by George Meredith ?
soil
Miss Braddon begins her new story rather he
voce in Belgravia. When she has warmed Wed
plot, we shall doubtless have our interest awakeno
in regard to Rupert's Quest—a quest probablitor,
search of the mksing father and enormous
tunes of his betrothed. George Eliot's 800 liPret
of poetry in Macmillan, I am disposed to conjeettlue
will find but few readers. Not so in that 001,
magazine Anthony Trollope's easy but vigorous e°, t,
mencement of his new serial tale of " Sir Harry I°o
spur, of Humblethwaite." It seems curious tile
popular novelist like Anthony Trollope should furto
thus the interests of a rival magazine to Ids °,ll
shilling monthly of D.t. Paul's, to which he has btf
contributing for some time past in the share 43
gratuitous supplement, thrown in, a duplicate is-od
of a story otherwise published quite separately,
independently. Another curious incident, ag3ivj
worthy of note in regard to two other widely P°l-Itie
novelists, both of whom have recently gone in firc)r 'o
o
addressing of a larger and lower audience. 1":„0
Collins catering for Cassell's Magazine, and Ilarr;,
Ainsworth for the largely-circulated family Pubil
tiou called Bow Bells, for the which the last-u' of
tioned is now preparing a romance of the daY3
Charles the Second.

SHOCKING vv
MURDER OF ONE BOY 13

ANOTHER.

sb't
A boy named Alex. Macdonald, aged 15, was Ai,
last night by another boy in Easter-road, Edinburgo
Macdonald was an apprentice to a gasfitter,
returning from his work. He had got opposite iii;
house where he stood talking to a youth, wile°
murderer came up, and putting a pistol behilla,
left ear shot him, and he died a few minutes o:f7he
wards. The murderer is 16 or 17 years of age,
son of a Polish shoemaker at Leith.