The Sun.
London, England, 1856-03-14 00:00:00

Civil Lords attempted to prove, they committed
a very serious offence in concurring in his
nomination. They were bound to select the
best man for the arduous and important
duty, and in place of so doing, they yielded to
popular clamour—(that is their own version of
the case)—in choosing a person perfectly unsuit-
able. Sir CHARLES NAPIER has sustained great
injury; but we fear that he has by no means
helped his own reputation as a naval commander
by the course he has thought proper to adopt.
Ho has injured Sir JAMES GRAHAM and Admiral
BERKELEY, but not served himself by his motion.

Besides being, to our mind, incomparably
and beyond all manner of doubt, the greatest
humorist England has ever produced
CHARLES DICKENS has proved himself to be,
again and again, during the last twenty
years, one of the most distinguished, practi-
cal, brave-hearted, out-spoken, and, let us
add to all this, one of the most eminently succes-
ful of our Great Social Reformers. Our accuracy
in this assertion is attested in shining characters
upon one after another of his remarkable, and,
happily by this time, somewhat numerous serial
narratives. He has overturned, we don't know
how many monster-abuses—bringing them down
unerringly with the shafts of his matchless ridi-
cule. He has tumbled them over as effectually
as ever was tumbled over in the days of
the fairies, the famous Humpty Dumpty of
the nursery-song. Regarded in the light of these
very notable triumphs of his as a social reformer,
the mere enumeration of his fietions may be con-
sidered as, in some way, tantamount to a catalogue
of victories over the Dragons and Chimaeras of
Every-DayLife—Social Errors, Social Evils, Social
Abuses, Social Cruelties, Social Prejudices, and so
forth. Without ever writing expressly and pre-
pense, " for a purpose "—he has, nevertheless,
always so contrived simultaneously "to point a
moral and adorn a tale," that with each one
of his extraordinary works of imagination
some noble object, some generous aim, some
beneficent intention may at once on the instant be
declared to be inextricably associated. It is thus
from the " Pickwick Papers," in which he took
occasion, in 1836, to insist upon the cruelty of
protracted imprisonment for debt, as illustrated
by his powerful delineation of the interior of the
Fleet Prison, down to his current serial of " Little
Dorrit," in which, in this present year of grace
1856, he is enforcing, if possible yet more
earnestly, the same humane argument by his por-
traiture of the inner life of the now almost forgotten
Marshalsea. Everybody remembers too, perfectly
well, how effectually he destroyed the vil
lanous Yorkshire Schools at one blow by his me-
morable account in "Nicholas Nickleby " of the
rascally SQUEERS, and of that horrid and squalid den
of crueltytheacadernyof Do-the-boys-Hall. Neither
is it forgotten how exquisitely, with what a master-
hand, with what an adroit scalpel, he laid bare thr
abominations of the Poor-Law System in hi:
homely, but eminently tragic and poetic, romance
of " Oliver Twist." Have we not still a vivid
recollection, moreover, of the scornful and blight-
ing satire upon sectarian bigotry involved in his
historical tale of " Barnaby Rudge"—as well as
of the cumulative sarcasms upon the vice_ of
gambling, making up the dark background of the
wondrously beautiful picture of the " Old Curio-
sity Shop ?" Besides this—were there not more
than merely casual hints thrown out, through
"Martin Chuzzlewit," of the sore need felt, for
years upon years, for Hospital Improvement: long
before the gentle hand of FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
had smoothed the soldier's pillow at Scutari, or
pointed nearer home to the gradual dawn of many
a benign innovation ? SAIREY GA3ll' and hei
" frequend pardner" BETSY PRIG, seem to us tc
hiccup a reply—rather audibly—in the affirma
tive ! And "David Copperfield"—wasnot that the
deadliest arrow ever driven home to the heart's
core of the evil system of the Ecclesiastical
Courts, the Ghoul-like functionaries of which had
been battening almost time out of mind upon
generation after generation of victims in the
snug recesses of Doctor's Commons, and within
the congenial precincts of St. Paul's Churchyard ?
And " Dombey and Son"—was not that, among
other things, the vehicle for a scornful laugh at
mercenary marriages? And " Bleak House"—it,
too, in its turn, was it not the last and deadliest
blow administered to the legal Moloch of Great
Britain—the Court of Chancery ? From first to last
it has been the same with CHARLES DICKENS.
The most delightful of our great English Humor-
ists—he is, at the same time, one of the most
illustrious and triumphant of our great Social
Reformers. The latter, by the force of his great
heart—the former, by that of his great genius.
Recently his overwhelming ridicule has been dis-
tributed with a certain degree of impartiality—
with the same unsparing energy, and the saw(
unstinted prodigality—to three now (thanks to
him) tolerably notorious abuses, those visible,
strangely enough, in three of our well-known
public charities : abuses, that is to say, conse-
quent upon their monstrous mismanagement.
The " Literary Fund " for one—for another, the
" Charter House "—the third in this singular
group being GOD'S Gift, or " Dulwich College."
Speaking of the preposterous mismanagement of
the Literary Fund on Wednesday, Mr. DICKENS
drolly avowed that he felt in its regard for all
the world as though he were a Rip VAN WINKLE
who had gone to sleep the Wrong way,
and had suddenly 'woke up in the midst
of all the boggle, darkness, and confusion
of three or four hundred years ago ! Comment-
ing upon the odious misappropriation of the funds
of the Charter House, in the course of a series of
pungent articles in " Household Words," he has
prepared the. way, we do believe, for the ultimate
amelioration of the pains and sorrows of those
poor Cistercian Brothers in whose behalf the death
of one Colonel THOMAS NEWCOMB has for ever and
ever enlisted our dearest sympathies. Recount-
ing only yesterday the history of the very exe-
crable mal-administration of the affairs of
Dulwich College, Mr. DICKENS, in a speech of
admirable ability, pronounced in manly terms
the noblest and most touching panegyric upon
the memory of EDWARD ALLEYNE, the munificent
founder of "God's Gift," otherwise known as Dul-
wich College. And, in so doing, illustrated
anew the social rights, the reasonable claims, and
for that matter be it added, even the moral
dignity of the theatrical profession generally.
This latter incident occurring, let us remark,
upon the occasion of a most interesting meeting
convened in the Adelphi, by that ALLEYNE of our
own day, at once as manager, as actor, and
as gentleman, Mr. BENJAMIN WEBSTER, whose
day-dream it has been now for more than a quar-
ter of a century that "GOD'S Gift" should become a
"Godsend" to those who were obviouslyin tended to
be benefitted by the noble-hearted founder of tbe,
charity—in other words, that the enormous funds
of Dulwich College should no longer be in one
sense most shamefully, and in another most shame-
lessly, misappropriated. That day-dream we have
every confidence is just now upon the very eve of
being most happily realised : and when our hope
in its regard shall have actually been fulfilled—
let it not then be forgotten that among the most