The Sun.
London, England, 1870-03-21 00:00:00

THE SLAVE TRADE TREATY.

The New York Times gives the following account of the
International Courts established by treaty between the
United States and Great Britain in 1862 for the suppres-
sion of the African slave trade :—" This treaty permitted
war vessels of either country to visit merchant vessels of
the other upon reasonable suspicions of being engaged in
this illicit traffic. Yet the right of search was restricted
to authorised vessels of war, the search applying
only to merchant vessels, and not vessels of war. This
privilege was confined to a region of ocean within 200
miles from the coast of Africa, and to the southward of
the 32nd parallel of north latitude, and within 30 leagues
from the coast of the island of Cuba. In order to
accomplish the purposes of the treaty three mixed
courts were authorized, composed of an equal num-
ber of officers from each nation. The sites of these
courts were fixed at Sierra Leone, the Cape of Good
Ilepe and at New York. The treaty was made' for
ten years, or could be abrogated upon a year's notice.
The courts were to consist of a judge and arbitrator, with
several minor officers. Since the extinction of slavery in
the United States this question has for several years
become obsolete. It has lately come to the attention of
the Government that a local trade is still kept up, and
largely under the American colours. It has been asserted
here that instead of attending to their business these
judges have been taking it easy. The disposition now
is either to suppress the trade entirely or to abolish the
treaty."

QUEEN VIOTORIA AND THE UNITED

STATES.

- -
Fhe following pleasant story is told by a correspondent
or the Boston Telegraph :—" Several years since an Ame-
rican lady of rare good sense and Christian attainment
went to Germany to seek health. On her way home she
went to England. Her position at home, her educa-
tion and refinement of manner, entitled her to
be presented to the English Sovereign. To gra-
tify her friends, she went to St. James's, little
thinking much pleasure was in store for her. As the
Queen approached the lady she was attracted by her
quiet and possessed manner, and by the expression of
universal charity of thought and deed which carne like a
benediction from the face of my friend to all those who
approached her. A few royal words of welcome were
said, the Queen passed on, and Mrs. thought her
part in the pageant was done. A little after the gentle-
man in waiting' brought a request from the Queen to the
lady that she would visit her at Windsor. The day and
hour having been named, a carriage was sent to bring
her. The Queen and Prince Albert received her alone in
the library. Her Majesty told her shs had long
wished for such an opportunity, and had ven-
tured to ask this interview that she might learn from
an American lady more particularly concerning the inner
home life of a country so nearly allied to England, and
claiming and fondly clinging to its old traditions and
histories, and speaking the same language. She asked
of the social relations as they manifest themselves in the
different grades of society ; of the observance of public
worship ; of the standing and influence exerted
by the clergy in private life ; of the estima-
tion in which we hold our learned literary and
scientific men ; of the religious training and education
given by the mothers of the land to their children ;
how much they were intrusted by a certain class of
mothers to the care of servants ; what was the interest
people of the so-called higher classes evinced toward the
servants in their employ, and of the education and train-
ing received by them, of the intellectual education
received and deemed essential, and ofthe occomplishments
usually attained by the young daughters of the
better classes ; of the mingling of the various grades,
and by what rules society generally was governed. These
and many other similar questions were asked and
answered when the hour had passed, yet all the information
the queen and her husband, Prince Albert, wished had
not been given. A second interview was appointed, and
Mrs. -- went again to the Castle. At its close the Queen
said, `Madam, my country and your country are of one
blood. We are bound together by traditions, by the past,
and by like hopes and aspirations. God grant there be
no unkindness between us ; (then, turning to her husband
she added,) and there will never be so long as we can avert
it." These interviews, sought by the Queen to learn from
a true woman of the home life of a people so connected
with her own land, tells us of a good woman, of a true
Christian, whose interest goes out to benefit, if possible,
all who speak the language of her realm. I thought
often in those dark days, when distrust and wrong came
between these two great nations, of that sad and widowed
soul—of the good Queen, and of the hour when (parting
from Mrs. —) she took her hand, then laying the
other upon the arm of her husband, her supporter, her
strength in her many trials and cares, said again
" There shall be no distrust between my country and your
country if we can avert it." Only one of that trio now
lives. Prince Albert and the American lady have both
PASM way.

Ti SCOTCH POOll LAW COHALITTEE.—The
London correspondent of the Elgin Courant gives an
account of the doings among his countrymen in a com-
mittee-room of the House of Commons. He says :
" Having a spare' half-hour, I turned into the Scotch
Poor-Law committee-room, and there I saw, in the place
where the witnesses stand, a fine burly old gentleman, with
the leastest suspicion of a red nose, a white neckcloth I
and a finely-developed Aberdeenshire accent.
thought I knew the voice : when or where did I hear
it last? Then there dawned on me a recollection of a
cocked hat and knee-breeches, and a notably liberal
address from the Moderator's chair in a General Assembly
of a bygone year. Lo ! the "strong man" of the Aber-
deen Synod—he of Bourtie, no less—was saying his say
about bothies, about the couthie old custom of the
brod,' and delivering himself of sundry eccen-
tric dogmas on the causes of your flagrant
blot in the North—the prevalence of illegitimacy.
Dr. Bisset evidently did not believe in the Poor-law
Board. When he said illerretimacy was mainly the fruit
of dissent, a canny and strictly logical Aberdeen awa' re-
perter looked up at him slily, and said in a whisper some-
thing at which the doctor looked queer, and at which the
committee sniggered consumedly."

'he works for the Universal Exhibition to be held
dyons in IS7I have been this week commenced. The
ding is to be erected in the park of the Tke-d'Or, nea:.
Rhone.

The Civilian is informed that the accounts of the
Irish Church will be submitted to the controller and
auditor-general for examination, and it is proposed that
one thousand guineas shall be applied to defray the ex•
pm,se of the audit. - - ,

LITERATURE.

Rosicrusians. By Hargrave Jennings. One Vol-
Illustrated. J. C. Rotten.
Curious as many of Mr. Hotten's works have been,
the volume now under notice is, among thou all,
perhaps the most remarkable. It is certainly the
most r, markable in the evident sincerity with which
the writer of it puts forth his lucubrations. `l,t°
work purports to describe the Bites and Mysteries
of the Rosicrusians. It dilates in incidental chap-
ters, moreover, on the ancient Fire Worshippers and
Serpent Worshippers. Besides this it offers expla-
nations of the mystic Symbols represented in the
monuments and talismans of the Primeval Philoso-
phers. The author of this very singular compilation,
we have already had occasion to speak of, in these
columns, in reference to an earlier volume of his en
'The Indian Religions, or Results of the Mysterious
Buddhism." Recondite studies of this character ap-
pear to possess for him a peculiar fascination. He
has certainly devoted an enormous amount of labour
to the task of putting on record these present memo-
rials of his in regard to the Rose-Cross, or otherwise
of the Rosicrusiaus. And the work, now that he hill 3
completed it, has quite as certainly been issued from
the press in as attractive a form as Mr. Hargrave
Jennings himself, we should imagine, could reason-
ably have desired. The very binding of the volume
is emblazoned with the symbol of the Rosy Cross-
Gold, and blue, and scarlet are the blazonries
on the outer lining of this strangely elaborated
History of the Rosicrusians. The letterpress,
which extends over 339 pages—the volume
being subdivided into thirty-two dhapters—is
illustrated, says the title-page, with nearly three
hundred engravings. These engravings, however, it
should be added, are mostly very minute and simply-
designed woodcuts, many of them being repeated
in a manner that has proved to us, as we have turned
over the pages, not only very surprising, but very
bewildering also. Three queries, propounded in 1630
by Gassendus, the writer of this book echoes in one
of the mottoes inscribed upon his title- page—" Cur,
inter alia nomina, appeletur Fratres? cur Crucis ?
cur Reim-Crucis ?" And these inquiries he undertakes
to answer. .A ppropriat;ely t nough, Mr. Jennings set 3
forth upon his work of elucidation by recounting, in
the first instance, that astounding narrative referred
to on Thursday, the 13th of May, 1712, iu the 379th
number of Addison and Steele's, " Spectator "--
the account of " Rosicrusius's Sepulchre," as told
by Dr. Plot, the antiquary and archrealogist,
in his (shall we say veracious?) History of Stafford-
shire. According to that amazing narrative, a yokel
or countryman was at the close of a certain summer's
day (so " certain" that there is no record whatever
of the date) digging a trench in a field in a valley
(where the field, where e; en the valley no one
knows) when with the point of his pickaxe, he hip
upon--this discovery ! Never was such a find ! It
was better than "striking ile"—for an archmalogist I
The s% hole incident reads like a reminiscence of
" Aladdin and the Wonderful 'Lamp." Dr. Piot
relates it as having occurred on an English evening.
But, reading the tale as he has told it, it is far more
like an Arabian Night's Entertainment. Just
exactly as in Aladdin, there is the dis-
covery of an immense stone with an iron
ring in ir.. So ponderous is the stone that it is
with considerable difficulty, and after much contriv-
ance, that the bumpkin (this wonderful bumpkin !) is
able to lift it up on one side as upon a hinge. Again,
exactly as in Aladdin, there is laid bare to view,
under this stone, a winding staircase descending into
the ve:y bowels of the earth. Going down—just
like Aladdin—the countryman comes, after an
astonishingly protracted descent, to a mysterious
region, where he finds burning—a Wonderful Lamp.
What occurs, thereupon, the reader will find re-
counted very impress:vely indeed by Mr. 11. Jen-
nings in the second chapter of this ela' orate memo-
rial of his upon the Rosicrusians. Unluckily the
reference to Rosicru:ius's Sepuleltze, already men-
tioned as occurring iu No. 379 of " he Spectator,''
has affixed to it the initial letter, or Roman numeral
X, which was one among the signatures of the un-
happy Essayist, and Suicide, and reputed Forger,
Eustace Budgell. What was Pope's couplet on him
iu the immortal "Dunciad ?"
" Let Budgell charge all Grub street on a quill,
And write whate'er he please—except my will !"
Whate'er he please ?—this essay, signed X, for ex-
ample, in No. 379 of " The Spectator 1" However
—as a very imposing, and certainly a very pic-
turesque exordium to his volume, Mr. Jennings has
adopted Eustace Budgell's, otherwise Dr. Plot's,
otherwise the Staffordshire countryman's ex-
traordinary narrative of the discovery in the seven-
teenth century of the Sepulchre, and the ever-burning
lamp of Rosicruiius. Having startled his reader
into attention,by recounting this marvellous tale anew,
hepursues his mystical theme through all its astonish-
ing involutions with painstaking and laborious re-
search. To all enamoured of this class of subjects,
we may assuredly commend the book as having for
them a weird and enthralling attraction.. The La-
barum, the badge of -the Templar, the mark of the
Triune, the hinge-point of the wheel of Ezechiel, the
Vesica Piscis, the talisman of the Jaina Kings, the
famous Beauseant or Temple banner, the combined
X P standard of Constantine, the Egyptian Scarabeus
the trigonometrical effect of the Great Pyramid,
the Persian talisman, the double ]ithoi, the gnostic
amulet, the hook of Saturn, the Collar of Esses, the
orb or mound, the winged disc, the monogram of the
Saviour—these and a. multitude of other mystical
devices are sown broadcast all through the letter-
press description. By the painstaking production
of this singular book, Mr. Hargrave Jennings
has done good service to those who are in search of
very out-of-the-way information in regard to
the world-famous brotherhood of the Rosicrusians.
He has, in a word, added yet another to that vast
cairn of erudition ,first systematised by the late Isaac
Disraeli, under the name style, and title of the
Curiosities of Literature.

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