The Sun.
London, England, 1833-04-01 00:00:00

" OFFICIAL.

" Sir,—l have the honour to inform your Excellency that
the Commander of the 3d division let me know yesterday that
about six in the morning a vessel without colours attempted to
force the entrance of the Douro, but was obliged by the bat.
teries to anchor in the bay of the Cantareira, where it after-
wards sunk, as well as some boats of the rebels which lay in the
same bay ; and that at eleven o'clock a brig (which is known to
be English) made the same attempt and met with a similar fate.
The General adds, that the crews fled to the right bank
and that at the time of his writing the brig was on fire.
" Head-quarters, March 18.

" To the Viscount Santarem, Conde de St. Lourenco."—
Lisbon Gazettes, from the 18th to March, both inclusive.

MAGAZINE DAY.

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

Apparently a new pen has been at work on
the " Politician" this month ; which is a more
showy, flighty, and discursive paper than usual.
The writer sets out with a metaphor, and
closes with a paradox. He commences like
a Sheil and ends like a Hazlitt. He infers
that the present House of Commons is likely
to be " more favourable to an impassioned mode
of oratory" than was the past, because it is more
full of dry, practical men of business. That is
to say, that Mr. Fielden, the cotton-manufacturer,
the Coryphreus of mechanical details, bids fair to
relish the eloquent and animated generalities of a
Sheil or a Macaulay with far more gusto than Mr.
Croker, the wit, the scholar, and (almost) the
poet, because the leading bent of his mind is
diametrically adVerse to such impassioned gene-
ralities,—in fact, because he understands nothing
at all about the matter. This is an ingenious,

but it is not an original paradox. It is a pla-
giarism from the old adage of onzne ignotzznz
pro tnagnifico. We hazard, we think, no very

outree assertion when we state our belief that the
days of lettered eloquence in St. Stephen's are
past. Facts have displaced, or are fast displac-
ing, ideas; the play of fancy has succumbed to
the sobrieties of mere unlettered common sense.
Zerubbabel has been gathered to his fathers, and
Jehoiakim reigns in his stead. Conceive a
Burke in the present House of Commons ! On
the " Politician's" theory he would be listened
to with enthusiasm, precisely because he would
be unintelligible. Yet it was precisely for this
very reason that he was the " dinner-bell" of
Schedules A and B ; and in a reformed House,
like the present, would be more than a dinner-

bell, he would be a cholera—a riot act to dis-

perse the mob in an instant. " The Bill of
Belial" is an amphibious species of essay, half
allegorical, half literal. The first half is an ela-
borate failure, as heavy as the national debt, the

latter is characterised by just and notable think-

ing. The Diplomatic Service" is a curious
and valuable exposjof a corrupt, worn-out system.
" The Genius of Moliere” is a delightful
.criticism, heartfelt, and necessarily, therefore,
'well-expressed. To us, Moliere (which was a
fictitious one by the by, and almost renders an
alias classical) is a name—a spell of enchant-
ment. We could read about him for ever. He
is one of those on whom a criticism is always
acceptable. " The Autobiography of an Ugly
Man" is neither witty nor serious—neither good
nor bad " neither fish, flesh, nor good
red herring." The best idea we can give of it
is, that it is a shoot from the prolific stock of
the " respectables." " Men and Books" is a
pleasing idea pleasingly worked out. It is a
subject that will improve as it goes on. The

gossip about book-stalls is in the truest and
kindliest spirit, and-will come home to the hearts
of all authors of a poetrcal turn of pocket.
" Sketches in Paris" are dull by prescriptive
right. We never yet knew a Parisian sketch
that was not (as Dogberry would say) " most
tolerable and not to be endured." The " Veiled
Picture" is a pretty tale, raised solely by force
of style from the dull Isle of Ely flats of com-
mon-place. There is an intellectual voluptuous-
ness in the following description which reads
like a sort of prose paraphrase of Coleridge's
" Genevieve." But it is not nature. Burns
and Shakspeare do not paint in this style

" With a trembling hand he drew aside the curtain,
and I never beheld any thing so lovely as the being before

me ; the atmosphere seemed to grow bright, as if a burst
of suniaine had flashed upon. the room. Heloise was
designed as rising from a couch, on which she
had been reclining, while her lover, kneeling at her feet,
had, in the passion ite eloquence of verse, declared the
eagerness of his love. Her hair was light, and of a glossy
hue, parted off her fair and open forehead, and rested in
luxuriant tresses upon her dazzling throat and swelling
breast ; her eyes were of that deep rich blue that seem
born of Heaven, from their resemblance to the fair clouds
which veil it from our sight, and were filled with that
deep and earnest expression of womanly tenderness that
subdues the heart on which it falls. Beauty seemed to
breathe in the swelling outline of her form, and passion
appeared to dwell in the melting fondness of her looks.
Her dress was in the picturesque costume of the twelfth
century, allowing the graceful shape of the limbs to be
seen beneath its folds. The room was decorated with
tapestry, on which were delineated subjects from scriptural
history, and the rich light which fell upon the eloquent
features of Heloise came Intllowed through a window of
painted glass, whereon a virgin and child were drawn in
clear and fade:ess colours."

BLACKTV 0 OD' S MA GA LLV.E. RT I.
If this number contained no other article than
that on the " Factory System," it would deserve

all the praise we can possibly bestow on it. A
more eloquent, feeling, and convincing treatise
we never yet read. It is a noble apostrophe to
charity, which he who fails to feel the full force
of; " neither would he be persuaded though one
rose from the dead." We request those among
our readers who may chance to cast their eyes
over these slight, cursory notices, to peruse the
following passage with attention, and when they
have done so, to make it the subject of a half-
hour's exclusive, and (if their feelings will per.-
mit) temperate consideration :

" To be billy-rollered or strapped, after perhaps having
been bucketed for falling asleep, is bad to endure ; still it
seems to be the insensate matter that gives the pain—wood
or leather. A blow from the fist is hateful ; yet the hand
being in common use, the degradation is not in such cases
utter. The boy wipes his bloody nose, and he forgives
the fist of the overlooker. But a font—a large, stinking,
splay-foot—flung suddenly out "with a fung," ere a boy
has time by crouching to elude or supplicate, savage as it
is, is yet more insulting, and sends to the core of the
heart the shame of slavery, that can he extinguished but
by undying hatred and deadly revenge. We wonder
there are no murders. But what if the kicked be—a girl !
We do not mean a little gill, eight or ten years old, for
that is not the precise kind of brutality we are thinking
of in a kicking to such a one as she ; the worst of a kick
in her case is, that it may kill her on the spot, or make
her a cripple for life. We mean a girl who, approaching
to puberty, and in those heated regions they too soon
read) it, has something of the pride of sex, perhaps of
beauty ; and in presence of her sweetheart, she herself
being chaste and not immodest, and many such there are
even in factories, feels her whole being degraded beneath
that of a brute beast, in her person suddenly assailed by
such shameful outrage from the hoof of a fiend grinning
the while like a satyr. Mr. Sadler—exhibiting some
black, heavy, leathern thongs, one of them fixed in a sort
of handle, the smack of which, when struck upon the
table, resounded through the House—exclaimed, Sir, I
should wish to propose an additional clause in this Bill,
enacting, that the overseer who dares to lay the lash en
the almost naked body of the child, shall be sentenced to
the tre id-mill for a month; and it would be right if the
master, who knowingly tolerates the infliction of this
cru•lty on abused infincy, this insult on parental feeling,
this disgrace on the national character, should hear him
company, though he roll to the House of Correction in his
chariot.' A month in the treadmill ! Why, many a
.dishonest fellow gets that and more for but picking a
bumpkin's fob of his watch, or the pocket of his great-
coat of a purse at• the door of the theatre. The man who
kicks a girl must not be suffered to pollute the steps of a
treadmill, or to violate the feelings of vagrants. He must
be flogged privately and publicly, his raw back denied
plaister, his head shaved, and his carcase clothed in some
ingeniously ignominious dress, of a substance suited to be
spit upon, and a board adjusted to his posteriors, that his
life may not be sacrificed by the continual kicking legalized
by the legislative wisdom of the State, nor yet the feet of
its inflictors soiled by contact with the ' shameful parts of
his constitution.'

"If there be truth in the account we have thus far given
of the factory system, what must be the morality—we
mean the immorality of the boys and girls ! Mr. Drake,
a worthy manufacturer, says, As fir as I have observed
with regard to morals in the mills, there is every thing
about them that is disgusting to every one conscious of
correct morality. Their language is very indecent ; and
both sexes take great liberties with each other in the
mills, without being at all ashamed of their conduct.'
Another' witness says, They are immoral in all their
c induct. Going to the factories is like going to a school,
but it is to learn everything that is bad.' Mr. Benjamin
Bradshaw, a witness of great intelligence, and a pious
man, a preacher among the Methodists, says, They are,
generally speaking, ignorant and wicked, proverbially so ;
to hear them in the factory, and to see their conduct,
would move any body with commiseration that bad any
thing like a feeling of concern for the morals of his fellow.
creatures; they are, in general, bail to an extreme.'—But
here the details are far more painful than of the cases of
cruelty, and some of them truly horrible. Many factories
are the worst of brothels. Yet has MacCulloch many
times publicly avowed his belief, that females so employed
are more virtuous than those who lead a rural life ! He,
and others like him, shutting their leaden eyes on all other
facts familiarly known to all the rest of the world, or
stupidly staring at them with dogged determination to
misrepresent all they see, have founded their misbelief on
the comparative number of illegitimate children. The
simplest persons examined before the Committee know too
well the cause of that effect. True it is, that that ef-
fect defective comes by cause.'—' I have yet to learn,' says
one witness of a different stamp, ' that the promiscuous in-
tercourse of the sexes is favourable to an increase of popu-
lation.'—Fathers wept before the Committee, thinking of
their own daughters. The contagion of vice in the
heated and huddled factory is dreadful, and the disease is
rank among very childhood."

Had Milton been living in these days, he would
have had no need to draw on hisimagination for a
Pandemonium; he would have found one ready-
made to his hands in a Cotton Factory. The
very devils themselves are but tyros in the art of
torture compared with some of the overseers in
these mills. " Tom Cringle's Log" is, as usual,
a fine, bold, broad bit of painting, the colours of
which seem as if they were laid on by the rough
paw of a sea-bear. The writer is no flincher.
There is not an atom of squeamishness in his
descriptions. He is a man who (if his physical
hear any proportion to his intellectual robust-
ness) might round Cape Horn in a storm, and
bolt bacon all the while. " The Revolution
in Greece" is good, but the subject is hackneyed
—worn to a thread-paper. " Characters of
Intellect" is a continuation of Professor Wilson's
finely-apprehended criticisms on Mrs.Jamieson's
notices of Shakspeare's Women. It is one of
those essays which, as Johnson said of Don
Quixotte, we are sorry to come to the end of.

PART 11.

This extra number possesses many good ar-
ticles, but none of transcendent merit. The
first, " On Ireland," is sufficiently explained by
its title, " The Coercive Measures, Church
Spoliation ; The Grand Jury System." Of
course a Blackwood, or high Tory view, is
taken of these several propositions. The writer
glares on them with the fierce, dark, " evil eye"
of Ebony, as if his very look could wither. If he
be gifted with " second sight," perhaps, on
applying the gift, he may find cause to see dif-
ferently. The " Lay Figure" is a well-told
story, of more than average interest and novelty.
It is a hot-spiced bit of diabolism. " Female
characters in Scripture" are graceful, but mono-
tonous, like everything that Mrs. Hemans writes.
With the single exception of Wordsworth, this
lady is the greatest mannerist of the day. She
is at the head of (what, for want of some
better term, we may call) the " diffuse school
of poetry." Some writers tell by concentration,
Mrs. Hemans by amplification. She succeeds
by virtue of luxuriant verbiage. It is rather
the foliage than the fruit that we admire in her
writings. She cannot, like Shakspeare, convey
an image in a word—pack up an Iliad in a nut-
shell. Her ideas must have elbow-room. Mrs.
Norton and Lady E. S. Wortley are followers
in the same school. " Edmund Burke, Part 2,"
is scarcely equal to the first part. It is concluded,
we presume—as there is no announcement of
,tobe
tin
continued"—yet, strange to tell, whilst
running riot
praise of Burke's eloquence,
patriotism, and that extraordinary prescience
which all allowed he possessed, the writer makes
nu mention of his speeches on Economical Re-
form, and the Nabob of Arcot's debts—his

Letter to the Duke of Bedford (the finest and
most varied specimen of eloquence in the lan-
guage)—or his Reflections on the French Re-
volution. How is this ? We can only account
for it, on the supposition that the writer is get-
ing sick of his subject. " Motherwell's Poems"
is a generous vindication of ►he genius of a most
promising young versifier, whose Runic odes are
worthy to be sung by a Scald in the halls
of Oden, to the vigorous accompaniment of
Thor's hammer. " Devonshire and Cornwall
Illustrated," is by the Professor of Professors—
John Wilson. It is sprightly, eloquent, criti-
cal, and descriptive. The passing notice of Car-
rington's Dartmoor is aptly introduced, and as
speaking of one poet naturally leads to an allu-
sion to another, the Professor takes an oppor-
tunity of bestowing a word of praise on Mr.
Webb's lately published volume. Altogether
the article is a lively bit of gossip. But why
does the writer say " Old Nick, we offer to bet
a pound, is like old Kit, a Benedick ?" Is not
the circumstance of his being always drawn with
a flourishing pair of horns on his head, conclu-
sive evidence that Old Nick is a married man ?
We have no space for extract..