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

PRICE 1 d
STAMPED 2d.

TO W N TALL

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

A pair of white gloves was never more completely out of
the reach of one of our Judges than it was out of the reach
of Chief Justice Bovill this session at the Criminal Court.
The catalogue of the accused was something appalling.
The Recorder must have shuddered on unfolding it—feel-
ing himself, as he did so, as though there had devolved
upon him the duties far rather of a recording demon than
of a recording Angel. Instead of white gloves for the
Judges, a larger nosegay than ever for the comforting of
the nostrils of each—a more plentiful supply of sweet
herbs to strew before the accused—as a preservative
against the gaol fever ! " There's rue for you," he might
have said to any of those arraigned at the bar, "and there's
some for me; you may wear your rue with a difference !"
Or—after he had gone through his abhorrent list, echoing
rather the Wotde of Lear than of Ophelia—

. . . . there's hell, there's darkness,
There is the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench,
Consumption. Fie, fie, lie! r6h 1 pah
Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary,
To sweeten my ima illation.

It is the most appalling catalogue of crime that has ever,
perhaps, come together under consideration at the Old
Bailey—murder red-thanded, murder most foul, base, and
unnatural, forgery, perjury, and abominations too
horrible and revolting in their character to particularize
anywhere but in open oourt in the formal arraignment of
the accused. Wonderful to tell, however, the list was
within a hair's-breath, as one may say, of having added
to it another atrocity of portentous magnitude—meaning
the wholesale butchery of the poor, honest blacksmith's
family at Denham, near Uxbridge ; that ghastly massacre
having-been perpetrated only just outside the limits that
would have brought it within the jurisdiction of the Central
Criminal Court of Middlesex. The Uxbridge tragedy, as
it is called, seems to me in its surroundings as though the
characters, and incidents, and localities, described in
" Great Expectatitms " had somehow got horribly jumbled
up together—as though Igagwitch and Orlick were one
and the same person, by whose homicidal hand Joe Gar-
gery had been struck down at his forge, and, together with
Joe Gargery, a whole family of little ones like Pip, with
their aunt, the mother, and the grandmother. As it is,
the sessional labours just commencing at the Central
Criminal Court present to view a double murder, so ter-
rible of its kind as to resemble nothing less ghastly than
one of the most morbid imaginings of the diseased fancy
of Edgar Allan Poe, meaning the story, entitled, " Thou
art the man !" in which the lid of the box is burst open by
the doubled-up corpse of the victim, just as the lid of that
dreadful green box in the kitchen of poor old 4r. Heulin's
house was raised by the murdered remains of his unfortu-
nate housekeeper: Londoners, during this next week or
two, will have certainly the wherewithal now only to sup
on horrors, but to breakfast and dine upon them as well,
if they are so ghoul-minded in'ithe devouring of their news-

Papers.
Immediately before the re-assembling of the two Houses
at the close of the Whitsuntide holidays, attention is dis-
tracted from the onslaught made by Blackwood on the
ex-Premier, through that cut-and-thrust critique upon
" Lothair "—which is attributed by some to Mr. Paget,
and by others to Colonel Hamley—by the deliciously
ridiculous, and yet outrageously insolent, missive
addressed to the member for Bucks by Mr. Smith, of
England and America—Mr. Goldwin Smith, that is to
say, formerly of Oxford, and now of Ithaca, in the United
States. The laugh against him all through town now is,
that he has himself fitted the cap on his own head, or,
rather, it should be said at once and henceforth, the cap
and bells. Never, it may be safely averred, has a clever
man (in his way) made a more ludicrous, or, at the same
time, a more brutal blunder. The " wild man" of Mr.
Disraeli certainly makes a charming pendant to the " noble
savage" of Mr. Osborne. Under the companion pictures,
the trite Horatian motto, Par nobile fratrum, might for
once be inscribed appropriately.
nalbe La Lv eVti .h. 0.441 ;,E pa
both bankrupt, Lord Arthur Clinton is now " wanted" in
one or two directions, under a warrant from Bow-street, on
the charge of bilking a cabman of twenty shillings ; under
a warrant from the Central Criminal Court for certain (to
speak of them in the mildest possible terms) disreputable
associations.
Men of letters and politicians are alike eagerly on the
watch just at this later ttirning-point in the parliamentary
session for the publication at last of their long-promised
biography of Lord Palmerston, by his friend and colleague
in the subtle art (or science, shall I call it ?) of diplomacy,
Sir Henry Buiwer. If the work should not be issued from
the press until of ter the double close of the session and of
the season, it will, most assuredly, be a matter of very
general regret and disappointment. As a reminder that
the period of the year when London will be flitting hither
and thither on the holiday excursions of those who have
either summer or autumnal leisure, a luxury hardly known
to the unhappy journalist, there come into my hands two
very different, but two very charming works ; one a thin
octavo, by Edward Spender, the other a couple of portly
volumes, by Walter Thornbury ; the former entitled
" Fjord, Isle and Tor," being descriptive of the Land's
End, the Channel Islands, and Norway ; the latter, that is
Walter Thornbury's book, re-christened now " A. Journey
Round England," being, in point of fact, the long since
tolerably well-known "As the Crow Flies " series of
papers appearing from week to week in the double-
columned pages of All the Year Round. Why the title
should ever have been altered I cannot conjecture.
There are two illustrated publications, strictly new and
intensely true, upon the very verge of their appearance—
" London," pencilled by Gustave Dor6, and penned by
Blanchard Jerrold—England in the Nineteenth Century,
edited, conducted, or however else you may please to term
it, by G. A. S.— light and daylight, otherwise by George
Augustus Sala. Do any of your readers down at Cardiff
and its surroundings, who happened some twenty years
ago—namely, in the month of May, 1851—to be in Lon-
don, with all the rest of the world from the ends of the
earth, to witness the then novel wonders of the first great
International Exhibition, Prince Albert's, Sir Joseph
Paxton's, England's, Europe's, the two hemispheres'—do
any of you readers, I wonder, chance to bear in their
recollection, as vividly as I do myself, a certain wonderful,
Whimsical, fantastic, multitudinous caricature, or rather
wandering wilderness of caricatures, pencilled with a most
facile hand on the walls bordering the grand staircase,
winding its way up the centre of the late Countess of
Blessington's some time residence of Gore House at Ken-
sington, then, in 1851, a sort of mammoth restaurant, the
chef of which was the sublime Alexis Soyer ? If they do
recall to mind that-drawing in bizarre outlines of all the
celebrities or notorieties of the day and of the night, they
will bear in their recollection the first displayof that since pro-
lific genius for droll conceits, George Augustus Sala, artist,
man of letters, contributor to the periodicals, newspaper
correspondent, polyglot-sensational-last-leader- writer in the
Daily Telegraph, who is now going to tell the later half of
the nineteenth century ail about itself, in so far as relates
to this our England. A goodly staff is understood to
have already gathered about Mr. Sala, who himself has
shown that he can wield the pen of a ready writer allur-
ingly enough ever since he openedupon the world through
his'very first article in Household Words—opened upon it
how, or with what ? With " The Key of the Street,"—
the capital title of that brilliant first article of Sala's,
which may be turned to by those who list, and which is
worth turning to, I promise you, in No. 76, at p. 565 of
the third volume of our dear lamented Charles Dickens's
Household Words. " The Key of the Street," in point of
fact, is in some sort the seed-germ of Sala's larger, but
kindred, work, called " Twice Round the Clock." It
showed, at any rate, by going once round the clock
through the darker hours, if not what was the time of day,
at any rate what was the time of night among the sleep-
ing, boosing, thieving, reeling, roystering, miserable,
I watched or watching world of Londoners. Sala's obser-
vant glance now will turn from London to England from
the twelve or the twenty-four hours to the century.
Have you realised the result of the decision arrived at
the other day by the Queen in Council at Balmoral ?
According to the significance of the announcement of it,
as since then officially published in the Gazette, there is an
end thenceforth for ever to what has been known, and
sought, and bestowed hitherto under the name, style, and
title of ministerial patronage. Everything—that is all the
good things—big and little, in the civil service (barring
the judgeships) can be obtained by the mob of aspirant,
only and solely through the ordeal of open competitions
Snug berths, cushions plumped out with bank notes.
small allotments on Tom Tiddler's ground, sacred to that
pleasant pastime described by Mr. Alfred Mantalini
"picking up the demnition gold and silver"—all these
luscious tidbits, the ortolans of official life—the truffles of
political existence, are, by this one sweep of the pen, by
one sign manual f the sovereign, dissipated into thin air,
and are henceforth as the mere golden day-dreams of the
place-hunter's excited and ecstatic imagination,