The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-13 00:00:00

LONDON, MONDAY, JUNE 13, 1870,

1N Westminster Abbey alone ought to be entombed
the loved and honoured remains of our great
novelist, or as we have often designated him in these
columns during his lifetime the greatest of all
English humorists. We were the first to
suggest in The Sun of Saturday morning,
that in the Abbey, and there alone, should be found

the grave of CHARLES DICKENS. The Observer of
yesterday, and the Times of to-day, we are glad to
find, urging the same suggestion upon the considera-
tion of those nearest and dearest to the great
author, upon the recognition of the general public, and
upon the generous sympathy of her MAJESTY'S
Government. Whether the funeral should be public or
private must be left of course to the decision of Mr.
DICKENS'S family, but that the great national resting-
place for th e noblest representatives of the peaceful
as well as the warlike genius of England should
be the only spot selected for the grave of the most popu-
lar writer of the age there cannot be one moment's
doubt. Earnestly, therefore, we would reiterate our
suggestion of Saturday morning that CHARLES
DICKENS'S remains should be entombed nowhere
else than in the midst of the London his genius
has so resplendently illustiated—that his dust should
repose nowhere else than under the roof-beams o
the grand old Abbey at Westminster.

The position in which the political systems of
both the Italian and the Iberian peninsula stand is
distinctly transitional. Spain, if not absolutely with-
out anything like a stable Government, is certainly
without any reliable future, and without any per-
manent adjustment of its administrative organisa-
It is still looking eagerly arGund for the dis•
covery anywhere of a suitable Sovereign. It is
striving to retain the monarchical arrangement to
which Madrid has for centuries been accustomed ;
and yet, finding no where a suitable King, sees
nothing practically before it, but a hitherto untried
or untested Democracy. So, now, too, again, is it
with Portugal. King Luis, it is true, has not
been dethroned and expatriated like QUEEN
ISABELLA. But his royal office and autho-
rity have been flagrantly degraded and set
at nought. The regal ermine has been draggled
in the dust, the sceptre trodden under foot, the
crown toppled off in little better than a street row,
and replaced awry by the hand of the veteran rebel
who has just advanced to power through an insur-
rectionary movement. It is but a sorry argument,
the one advanced in vindication of Marshal
the Duke of SALDANHA, that his immediate prede-
cessor, the Duke of LOULE, was just as bad, was as
lawless, as disloyal, as revolutionary. Whether both
or either may in any way feel in the secret recesses
of their conscience—

tion.

" Forbade to wade thro' slaughter to a throne,,,

neither appears to have had the smallest scruple
in unfolding the banner of revolt and risking
any amount of bloodshed to attain the object
of the ambition of each in turn, without the
smallest regard on the one hand to the wishes
of the king, or on the other to the decision
of the Legislature. A Parliamentary Government
it can hardly be called any longer. Rather it should
be designated a series of very fugitive dictatorships.
As precariously placed as the two unequal halves of
the Iberian Peninsula are in regard to the main-
tenance of anything like constitutional authority,
not one jot less precarious is the political balance of
affairs in the Italian Peninsula, judging of the poli-
tical situation there, as we may reasonably do, from
the chronic state of revolt in which the provincial
populations are placed, the exaggerated dimensions
of the royal army, there, in a time no-
minally of peace, and remembering all the
while what are, there, sub rosd—the empty coffers
of a bankrupt exchequer. Nevertheless, the
almost whimsical result stands thus, that under
these, upon the whole, discouraging and even disas-
trous circumstances, the Governments of the two
afflicted Peninsulas, otherwise the councils respec-
tively here of Italy, there of Portugal, are squab-
bling together with as right down good will as
though their affairs mutually were in a position the
most secure and the most satisfactory. The im-
petuous old marshal who has just stormed his way

into the young King's palace at Lisbon, and has thus
seized by main force upon the Premiership is now
declining to receive the Envoy from Florence, be-
cause, forsooth, his Italian Excellency did not
appreciate at its just value, according to the