The Sun.
London, England, 1858-10-23 00:00:00

A LITERARY CELEBRITYS REASONS
FOR NOT ATTENDING TUE SOCIAL SCIENCE
CONFERENCE.

(From tie Calcdonian Mercury)

A literary celebrity having been invited to this
Conference, he has sent an extraordinary reply to
Lord John Russell, the President-elect, of which
the following is a part :
Good, my Lord,—l have to hand, conform to
postmark, "Woburn Abbey," your letter inviting
me to take part in the so-called " Social Confer-
ence," to come off in Birmingham, or some other
place of like mind, some time in October next
ensuing.
Last, if not least, of Bedford's race, let us rea-
son together. Why, in name of all the rationali-
ties, or the non-rationalities fir that matter, do you
ask me ? Have I in any we ever shown myself
a word-deliverer ? Some poor thoughts of mine have
been committed to the pressgang, to be by them set in
pica, large or small as seemeth them good. [Thanks
be to the Serenities, I am not now paid by the line,
page or sheet—leaving that sort of thing to the
doomed of Grub-street.] But because I indite
somewhat with the pen of a ready writer, that is
when in the spirit—for I deny the postulate of
Samuel Johnson (born at Lichfield), that any mere
man cam doggedly make himself shed ink to purpose
—because I can at times do battle with the pillion,
does it follow that I can screech to knife-grinders
and razor-sellers at Birmingham during any month
of this vear of grace that Cant may select from
the Kalendar ? I hate Brummagem and its
wares. Gods! the years of agony and blood and
pimples that this same Brummagem has cost me
and the aggregates of humanity, with its 'so-called
sharp razors ! Was it not there, or at Sheffield, or
somewhere else, that an unstrung ruffian put forth
something called a razor -strop, which (as he phrased
it), was to convert the toilet of early morn from a
terror into a pleasure ? Did I not try that Diamond
Abomination, and shed much innocent blood thereby,
and have I not, Nebuchadnezzar-like, been ever
since obligated to let my facial hirsuitities remain
unkempt andunsborn. Assist me Dr. Slop, Balaam,
and the Athanasian creed, to curse that man.

The bane of this crazy paralytic century is talk,
gibberish, audible vocabulisation. Thought is
silent, inexpressible. Can ye gather dew-drops,
and plant them like oysters' tears on my lady's
boddice ? Can ye photograph, calotype, or stereo-
copise the rainbow ? Will any of your infernal
machines of art lay hold of or detain for a single
unit of time a poor struggling tiny sunbeam ?
Hamlet to the players of Denmark all over. Men
who cannot play the fiddle—[that game is about
up, since the translation of Nathaniel Gow and
the Italian Paginini—let M'Culloch note the fall
of rosin !]—such men will play on—and will
insist on it too. Ye can with the bodily eye
mark the dew distilled from the womb of morning;
even the daily writers in the daily papers can
lift up their dim optics and see the tri-coloured
arch that bridges over Zodiacs and Continents ; yea
a red-tape worm, crawling among Downing-street's
darkest slime, might lift its microscopic head and
behold some of those golden solar emanations that
shade the cerulean of Heaven. Pismires may see
these things--see them, I say. But can you see
thought, eternal, immortal, invisible ? I trove not.
Holy men of old did not gabber. Old Isaac went
forth at eventide. Did he gather his reapers
into his barn and lecture them on political
economy or any other blasphemy ? Did he not
rather put his hands into his pockets—or whatever
other substitutes oracular post-diluvians had for
garment receptacles—Hebrew Moses and Son settle
that point if you can; and so disposing of his digits
Abraham's son (by the free woman) communed with
his heart, and was still ? But great thoughts have
been written, say you. Granted, but not the
greatest. Could any collocation of words, from a
to z of English alphabetisation, give forth the soul
imaginings of Oliver, my Oliver, my peculiar
Oliver ? King David sang sweetly ; compare
" Babel's. Streams" with Chevy Chase, or that busi-
ness about King Henry of Navarre by that Thomas
the Rhymer, whom Palmerston has made a baron
of—and note the difference, I pray you; it may
do good to your soul, if you any have. Well,
then, the Shepherd Monarch saw visions, and
he struck his harp—but could catgut, titillated
by human thumb, give forth any response
adequate to the heaving of a prophetic eye,
that saw the chariots of Israel and the horsemen
thereof ? And when the plaintive chords of that
harp of sweetest melody soothed the soul into holi-
ness and peace, and called forth longings for the
dove-wings that flee away and be at rest, far off
from a foetid universe, could Hebrew vowels and con -
sonants embody these angelic harmonies? They
couldn't, and here endeth the first lesson.
I divine your answer. You will say this man
dealeth in generalities. He is subjective ; we are
objective. He is of the universal, dreamy—we of
the specific, practical. S. T. C. tried that passage
of arms with the present writer, but it was a cock
that would not fight—with him, at least, and cer-
tainly not with you. Have at you. I have attained
to the general through large, varied, and kalci-
discopic acquaintanceship with the particular—l
have had terrible conflicts with human fallacies—

have smoked through and through them—and if
any man doubts this verity he is worse than an
infidel—an Act of Parliament regenerator, to wit.

I will toss you off articulate) ,even as an attor-
ney's or tailor's bill, all good- logical reasons for
denying every creed that is not in me. I will do it.
Let your articles of indictment be writ. Be they as
long as Brougham's speech in defence of that Queen
of unhappy memory, whom Lambeth wedded to that
royal notability with swallow tails and bad odour;
or be they as dull as any protocol from the hands of
Treasury Wilson, from whom whilom, while an un-
pretending vender of hats in Hawick, I purchased for
twelve and a-half pieces of silver, that "go-to-meet-
ing roof" with which I attended the philosophy class,
—falsely, so called—of Thomas Brown, said Thomas
knowing nothing of Goethe or other divine cele-
brities ; verily, these were " Tom Brown's School-
Days," and no mistake. The thought oppresseth
me that youths, having Heaven's image, receive for
their golden fees nought but sunless grass from
Dalgetty's and other Scotch cloisters, and eke hay
and stubble, rubbish, and untempered mortar at
Oxford and Cambridge, to say nothing of the peat-
bog syllabub shovelled forth from Peel's godless
seminaries in Erin's Isle.

Now then. It is not theory. Ye gave utterances
from Brummagen last year. Voices came from
amongst the smoke, and sounds, not those of the
hammer or of James "Watt's cylinders, were belched
forth from this same factory of mental conglomera-
tion. I may not go over names, they are legion,
or topics, they exhaust the last edition of Noah
-Webster, whose memory rot for its brutish word-
hunting instinct. May every new word that he
coined sink him deep in his own Hiawathan
swamps !
Look at your volumed, list of subjects, as you
vain:gloriously call your index. Here are some
specimen bricks, culled as they catch the careless
eye of the beholder.—" Chickoried coffee, Scotch
bankrripts, penny banks, baths, washing-houses,
coffins, crime, drainage, river smells, early shop-
locking, woman occupation, short imprisonment,
alcohol, longevity, paupers, prostitution, prison
sauces, the gallows, army cloacinas, railway
murders, sermons, strikes, smallpox, &c., &c.,
&c." Could Babel itself rival such an incongru-
ous mixture. Soap and stink—fever and M2M-
mon—magdalens and the whipping-post, all re-
joicing together in one horrid pestiferous seething
cauldron ? Is society ever to make head way
through an alembic of such abominations? Any man
of indifferent honesty would sooner follow the pen.
sioners through the drains of the Grcat Metropolis
(I quote James the Grant), rather than march
through Brummagem with such a crew and such
colours as you hoist. Good Jack Falstaff's fencibles
were nothing to it by a chalk of broadest guage.
Who speaks ? Henry Lord Brougham, member
of something in France. He halls spoken all
his life-long days, but to what purpose ? The
thing at the bar is understandable—there,
like women of the baser sort, men, or those
calling themselves so, hold out their palms
ready, when duly greased, to speak a lie.
John Doe or Richard Roe, it mattereth not,
first come, first served. And that the way that the
chariot of justice is wheeled through the mud. But.
Henry hath his pension—his betters not at all well
off in that self-same matter. In Heaven's name
then let him be quiet. Or if he will do aught. let
him get him some other cow-loving Althorp with
whom he may hold sweet counsel, and let them
note the mathematics of bees, the growth of cab-
bages, or the marchings and counter-marehings of
rats—it is at least no sin to observe nature's doings;
the interpretation thereof belongeth to the pro-
phets, and he is too old for that school.
Then there's yourself. You speak of law. Why?
The horse-hair bombazeen business is not your line.
The intrigues of Cabinets were a better vocation
for you to delectate upon. Lord John, you have
seen somewhere about threescore years and ten,
and for good half a century have you dwelt in
those tents of sin called place and opposition.
Aged Whigling, what have you been doing,
what have you done for the suffering human
kind? Home Clerk, Foreign Clerk, Helmsman,
Fugleman, everything by turns, but what reeks
it ? I pay taxes as before, and tithe of every
kind. Ducal Bedford flourishes, but the yeoman
lacketh his crust, and more than ever is baled off by
ship-loads to Tasmania and other distant climes for
the bread that perisheth. Millions live among bad
smells, old bones and corruption, and are variously
whipped, transported, hanged, as after their fashion
they try to help themselves to-what is going. Why