The Sun.
London, England, 1860-12-06 00:00:00

GRAND SELECTIONS

FROM
BELLINI'S NORMA AND FLOTOW'S MARTHA.
PRINCIPAL ARTISTES,
MISS RUSSELL MADAME MARIA
MISS TYRREL MISS WILKINSON •
Mr. HENRY HERBERT and Mr. BERNARD.
Conductor Mr. JONGHMAT4S.
The COMIC Department comprises Messrs. A. B. Hollings-
worth, W. T. Critchfiell, J. Blanchard, G. W. Pell, Charley
Vox. and E. Marshall, fn his transformation song, "THE
DOMESTIC DRAMA," personating five different characters.

THE WEATHER.—SuN 077104 Disc. 6, 1560. ,

THERMOMETER, IN THE SHADE.
49—highest since noon yesterday.
44—lowest this morning and during the night.
52—this day at noon.?
BAROMETER-29.30.
WIND—South-Westerly; light, with dull rainy, mild
weather.

HIGH WATER AT LONDON BRIDGE.
Tine DAY.—Morning, 7h. 13m.—Afternoon,:7h. 46m,
To-mottnow.-Morning, Bh. 20m.—Afternoon, Bh. h6m

LONDON, THURSDAY, DEC. 6, 1880.

The Hereditary Bondsmen are actually at it
again! Another Repeal Meeting was positively
holden on Tuesday in the Rotunda at Dublin--
THE O'DONOGHITE in the chair, and the audience
in a high state of what the late Mr. BRAHAM was
wont to pronounce entoozzimuzzy ! It was certainly
enough to rouse poor TOM STEELE from his grave,
and almost (one might think) enough to engrave
deeper and deeper on the granite slab upon the
tomb of DANIEL O'CONNELL the epitaph he
aspired to have inscribed over his remains :
HERE LIES
ONE WHO DIED A REPEALER !"

Who would have thought it ? A Repeal Meeting
in the December of 1860 ! The old war-whoop
ringing again in our ears—when the war-paint has
long and long ago been washed off " entirely !"
When the aboriginal Repealer, like the aboriginal
Australian in CHARLES READE'S Never
Too Late to Mend, had, one might .not
unreasonably have imagined, subsided into
the civilised and humanised and wholly
amiable and harmless form of simple-hearted
Jockey, lo ! the tawny, grimly tatooed chief of
old strides forth again in his shells and feathers
brandishing his boomerang, dancing his war-dance,
whooping •
his war-whoop, the lithe and sinewy,
the deadly and terrible V —ALINCIAETJNGA of the
Bush ! 0111 Y—in the instance of this transformed
Jackey of Ireland now once more [let us hope,
" for one night 0n1y,,, and that " by particular de-
sire," as they Say in the playbills], the Kalinga-
lunga of Repeal only that (we say) in this
instance the shillelagh brandished for a boomerang
is no more formidable a weapon than an overgrown
carrot, and the war paint, and the war-dance, and
the war-whoop are, just in two words—simply
ridiculous.

Let us just glance (with a view to s.e Whether
it is really as we have said or not) down the
reports dropping in upon us of this long medi_
fated demonstration of Repeal Redivivus ! Look_
ing down these reports quite dispassionately, one
can't help feeling that somehow it is not merely a
" Revival Meeting" of Repeaters, but, to a consider-
able extent also, a sort of genuine Donnybrook
Resurrection. All through the proceedings
there was, really so to speak, somebody
or other's coat being trailed defiantly to
and iro upon the platform. There were
" yells" and " screeching," " great cheering,"
" loud cheering," "hisses," "groans," cries of "no,
no," cries of " never," single voices howling "no
gammon," " uproarious applause," " prolonged
acclamations," and so forth, mingled with occasional
" waving of hats," and once also of "grey cloths"
(duly provided for the occasion) in- honour of the.

Chairman aforesaid, the gallant chieftain, The
O'DONOGHUE of the Glens. All this, however,
might have been taken for granted as a mere
matter of course—just as one is conscious there
must be " the Kentish Fire" at an Orange Gather-
ing—the ripping sound of " scratchbacks" audible
at intervals perpetually all through a Greenwich
Fair—and that mingled clamouring in the parterre
of a French theatre between the acts, Des Orange:,
Les Oranges, La Patric, La Patrie familiar to
the ears of every Paris playgoer. The hubbub
throughout this meeting on Tuesday, in the
Rotunda, appears in truth to have been eminently
national and characteristic ! The Charivari there
was from first to last intensely and essentially Irish
using that phrase in no invidious sense whatever,
but in the best humoured significance of the word
imaginable. It was a tumultuous demonstration
worthy of Repeal, worthy of Dublin, of the
Rotunda, of the ghostly and faded memories of the
old irritating Hall of Conciliation ! Bow charac-
teristic it all was, let two little incidents,
noted quite at random, serve to illustrate !
That incident in the first place of a
casual reference to the sympathetic people on
" t'other side of the Channel"—not of St. George's,
but of the British Channel—eliciting a rapturous
shout of " Viva la Franskay in Exquisitely remi-
niscent of the WOLFE TONE and the Shanvan-
voght ! And, in the next place, that crowning
incident of the night's demonstration—thae eminently
characteristic circumstance that the whole of the
proceedings " wound up," according to one of the
reporters, with " a savage attack upon a young
man who ventured to address the meeting after
the chairman had retired"—the demonstration, in
fact, ending, as such a demonstration ought by
right to end, namely, with a skrimmage.
It is like the last scene in the historic contest
between the miller, the collier, and the brickdust
man, commemorated by the pen of PETER PINDAR—
" Black, white, and red, in wild disorder tossed,
Till in the cloud they raised the combatants were lost."
The ultra-extravagance of this amazingly after •
timed demonstration on tie part of the Irish
Repealers cannot, however, be more instantaneously
displayed, for any one's instant appreciation, than
by the mention of the significant circumstance that,
as a Demonstration in favour of Repeal even Mr.
WILLIAM SMITH O'BRIEN has the good sense to
give it (by letter) the cold shoulder ! So that after
all there was wisdom of some sort obtained in the
widow's cabbage garden by the lath-sworded
Revolutionist! Yet, in truth, there was actually a
live M.P. or two in attendance at this meeting in the
Dublin Rotunda. The Repealers there assembled
—no doubt with the intention of making all things
square in the round room of that orbicular building
[a task about as facile to a Repealer as the squar-
ing of the circle to a crack-brained mathematician]
—the "awkward squad" of the Repealers there
assembled, including among them, besides THE
O'DONOGHUE in the chair, another M.P., FRANCIS
MAGUIRE, one Parish Priest, the Rev. Mr. MUL-
LIEN, one of " the patriots of 1848 !" JOHN MARTIN,
and with this miscellaneous concourse of ardent
sympathisers in the cause, a species of life-in-death
Repeal Omnium Gatherum! Whoever got the
demonstration up—we can't help looking upon as
a kind of political resurrectionist. After this we
shall surely have long accounts furnished to us, in
a week or two hence, from one or other of our
English agricultural districts, of a grand, bran new
Protectionist Demonstration, with the shade of
Mr. BUSTIELD FERRAND in the Chair, supported
on either hand by the portly goblins of divers
defunct Farmers, who had " died the death"—
through a plethora, mistaken by them for atrophy
—under a craven panic of the ruin deemed by them
" inevitable as the one certain result of the
downfall of Monopoly! Nor, for that matter,
we might as lief look now for a meeting next
in the Egyptian Hall, not of the Mansion House
or of Piccadilly, but at the British Museum, a
meeting of all the mummies now reposing there
in the national collection, presided over, let us
say, by the empty urn still to this day visible to
all sightseers at the British Museum, the empty urn
that once held the dust of ALEXANDER the GREAT.
Judging from the record now now given us, how-
ever, of the sayings and doings of these mummies
of a select few of the long past legions of the
Repealers, they were mummies most effectually
galvanised into a portentous semblance of vitality.
They could " Groan for the Castle Hacks"—with a
momentary oblivion of all the amenities and
amiabilities that one might have imagined would
have been necessarily suggested by the mere
thought of the amiable Earl of CARLISLE. They
could screech " No more English Famine " with a
total oblivion (very noble and impressive under the
circumstances) of the frank hand of brother-
hood held out to the seven million Celts by the
twenty-eight million Saxons when that awful
scourge descended upon a whole people by the
inscrutable will of the Omnipotent God! They
could howl forth " Three Cheers for JoHN MIT-
CHELL"—though one might have imagined that the
name of that repealer at least would by this time
have been regarded upon the opposite shores of St.
George's Channel with a mingled sense of scorn
and execration. They could by almost every word
and cry that arose from their lips render themselves
utterly ridiculous, as though each in turn at this
meeting strove to see how broadly and impotently
he could possibly grin at England through the old
horse-collar of Repeal.

Spain has lately shown some ambition to regain
a higher position among European States. She
made a war, of which the only object seemed to be
to show that she could make one. She even
paid us some money which she owed us, and which
we began to think had followed the usual course
of debts from Continental States to England. But
neither making wars nor paying debts will make
a first class nation of Spain, unless she emancipates
herself from the leading strings of her intolerant
hierarchy. There is not, we believe, such another
in Europe. In Rome itself more liberty is con-
ceded to Protestants than in Madrid, or in any
town in Spain. For a long time it was impossible
to obtain sepulture for a Protestant in Spain ; he
could not be buried with Catholic rites, or in a
Catholic cemetery, and neither a cemetery
nor service were allowed to any other
creed.

Things are a little better in this
respect now ; for since by British aid
ISABELLA was placed on the throne, a regular
cemetery near Madrid was conceded ; but still,
we believe, Protestants resident in Spain can hold
no public service ; .nothing may be seen or visible
Which shall let the multitude know that there is
any faith but the favoured onc,
and all Protes-
tant worship must be strictly private. Such
bigotry is incompatible with national greatness.
No nation in which the rights of conscience are
not protected can ever be
an
people. Repression of thought energetic,
on
the
vigoroussub ee t
which at some time of almost every man's life
forces itself on his attention, and demands the
freest scope, must have a paralysing
effect on
his energies. Indeed, it is remarkable that the
most enterprising, industrious, and thrifty popu-
lations have always shown a strong tendency to
religious discussions and religious liberty. It may

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THE SUN.