The Sun.
London, England, 1866-09-05 00:00:00

SUN, LONDUN, WEDINESoAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 5, 1866.

MIDDLESEX SESSIONS—This Day.

(Before Mr. Sergeant Dowling.)
ROBBING A SAILOR.

Emma Williams, 15 ; Catherine Haley, .19 ; and Jane
Anderson, 23, were indicted with stealing a purse contain-
ing the sum of £3 10s., the property of Abel Batson.
The prisoners, it 'appeared, met the prosecutor, who is
a sailor, in the neighbourhood of Poplar, and entered into
conversation with him. They eventually adjourned to a
public-house and began drinking, and the result was that,
after some more spirits had been consumed, the prosecutor
lost his purse, and the prisoners were charged with steal-
ing it.

The jury found all three prisoners guilty.
The learned judge sentenced Haley and Anderson to six
months' imprisonment., and Williams to imprisonment for
one month, and three years in a reformatory.
Anderon, on hearing the sentence, said the prosecutor
had given false evidence, End Williams left the dock im-
ploring mercy.

BUTTER.

(From the Saturday Review)
"Butter! butter! I think I've hoard that name before !"
Lord Dundreary.
There are occasions in our lives when most of us have
had to administer butter, and to administer it more or less
unsparingly, and the art of buttering is accordingly an art
which it is well worth the while of all of us to study.
Butter is of various kinds, and the different kinds ought
to bs kept quite distinct, and each sort requires its own
special manipulation. There is the marriage-breakfast
butter, and the after-dinner butter, and the funereal but-
ter. The first of the three does not demand any genius of
a high order. Every ono knows, when a young lady is
:narried, that some ono has got to dilate on the virtues of
the bridegroom and the beauties of the bride; and even if
both are limited, there is always a family fogy who can be
brought to drink himself over afternoon champagne into a
species of maudlin admiration of matrimony in general,
and of the young couple who are performing in
particular, and who is ready to assert, from a long
and intimate knowledge of both parties, that Au-
gustus Brown is tha one fortunate Wing who deserves
to be trusted by heaven with the happiness and destiny of
Sophonisba Smith. Funereal butter is a little more diffi-
cult to manage. The duty of erecting oratorical tomb-
stones to the departed requires tact and judgment, and is
not usually confided to a casual speaker. There is some-
thing historical about the affair, and spectators like to see
the customary honours done well, and with judgment.
There is no one, for example, who can follow a contem-
porary to the grave like Mr. Disraeli. He is the hearse-
horse of the Conservative party, and on occasions of state
deaths is trotted out by common consent, in sable trap-
pings, to- conduct the ceremonial in due form and with
proper solemnity. An after-dinner panegyric is the
hardest of the three labours. When a man is married,
sympathy is easily commanded ; and when a man dies,
every one is pleased to think that the most is to be made of
his valuable points, forno one, as Pericles tells us, is jealous
or envious of the dead. Sentiment at such times comes
in and helps the orator considerably, and few are keen to
mark the defects of the panegyrist who praises either dead
people or matrimonial turtle-doves above their exact de-
serts. But an after-dinner puff is exposed to a very diffe-
rent ordoal. It has to be read by jealous and critical eyes
next morning. Speeches look very poorly over the tea-
urn which are pronounced over the bottle, and no ono cares
to endorse about his neighbour all the lavish encomium
that has been bestowed on him overnight by sympathetic
topers. The butter spread on after-dinner toasts is there-
fore a subject on which too'riudh attention never can be
spent, and whenever wo come across a great master of the
craft, it is as well to pause, and to investigate wherein the
secret of his skill resides.

There have been two or three remarkable after-dinner
puffs during the last couple of months. There was Mr.
Disraeli's discussion at the Mansion-house, in the course o f
which he took occasion to style the King and Queen of
Belgium " amiable and accomplished" sovereigns. Every
one thought that it was rather hard on a youn g king to
call him goodnatured so publicly, and without the least
provocation. Such a commendation is not a panegyric of
a high class, and if Mr. Disraeli had been engaged in his
more congenial occupation of burying Ctesar instead of
praising him, perhaps he would not have been cruel enough
to finish off a crowned head with a cold suggestion of his
great affability and softness. We also have had Mr. Glad-
stone's after-dinner views about Mr. Cobden, and about
Lord Russell; and we have had that indefatigable gentle-
man the Lord Mayor upon Mr. Gladstone and everybody
else. Never was there such a Lord Mayor for poetry and
sentiment and butter, and he does credit to the aldermen
among whom ho was raised. But perhaps the most splen-
did instance of the post-prandial puff was Professor Kings-
ley, the other day, on ex-Governor Eyre. We are not going
to enter now on the fine moot point whether Mr. Eyre
ought to be hung, or whether he ought to have a statue—
a difficult moral problem, which only can be solved by a
sort of decent compromise. Whatever is bis just portion
—whether it be the lot of Haman or of Mordecai—one
thing is certain, that Professor Kingsley, like Jael, gave
Mr. Eyre last week his butter in a lordly dish. It is
always pleasant and delightful to have plenty of butter
going on such occasions, and few things contribute more
to the comfort and satisfaction of the evening than the
application of universal butter to every one, from the
House of Peers and the British Constitution down to
the ladies. If you wish to butter somebody successfully
start by buttering everybody. And this is what Professor
Kingsley did so admirably. He buttered his country, and
his audience, and right gloriously did he butter the House
of Peers, coupled with " the most ancient and honoured
name of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Talbot." If he had
been chaplain to a Duke—which, indeed, for anything we
know, the famous Professor may be—he could not have
spoken more nobly or more feelingly of that great body,
and of what we owe to them, and of how greatly it is to be
wished that Mr. Eyre could only be turned into one of the
order. It would seem that, for a warm, loving, Elizabethan
reverence for a peer, oae may safely depend upon a pro-
fessor of muscular piety. He fears God, he honours the
King, and ho worships the British aristocracy. He likes a
lord when he sees him, and feels no scruple at telling him
so to his face ; and whatever the faults and virtues of the
House of Lords, the House of Lords is only second—so
says the Professor—in value and sacredness to that most
sacred of all institutions, monarchy itself. If we want to
know why the House of Lords is such a grand institution,
Professor Kingsley informs us a little further on, in a pas-
sage which shows what real Eversley butter can ac-
complish. The power of the British aristocracy, he says,
consists " not merely in sticking to its ancient blood,"
but adopting into its ranks all the genius, all the
talent, all the virtue, and he was afraid a great part of the
beauty of the country." When we see a clergyman who is
looked up to by beer-drinking and turnpike-road-walking
young heroes at Cambridge conversing in this glowing
fashion about the nobility, one can only say to oneself,
" Marry this is excellent butter indeed." A common
sense and unromantic butter manufacturer would have
been alarmed at the idea of depicting the aristocracy at one
and the same time as sticking (whatever that may mean)
to its ancient blood,
and yet taking cheerily and heartily to
new blood as well. Sticking to old blood might seem to
vulgar minds inconsistent with the adoption of new. Mr.
Kingsley, however, thinks that such a feat as this can be
performed by the nobility of Great Britain, of which
ho saw bright representatives around him in the
persons of Lord Cardigan, Lord Hardwicke, and the
Farl of Shrewsbury. The House of Peers, accord-
ing to Mr. Kingsley, has got " all " the genius,
talent, and virtue of the country, and "nearly all" the
beauty ; and any one who has the pluck to utter this re-
markable sentiment in a mixed audience, with an air of
moral exaltation, is the very man to be made purveyor of
butter to the Royal Family
and to the nobility and gentry
of the greatest nation on the globe. How butter for the
House of Peers could be indirectly turned into butter for
Mr. Eyre as well remained to be seen. The connection
was not obvious, but Mr. Kingsley's unrivalled imagination
invented a coupling link between the ox-Governor of
Jamaica and the most sacred institution in the realm but
one. In twenty-five years ("if God gives him health," adds
Mr. Kingsley, in the pious tone of a man who never forgets
his D.V.'s), Governor Eyro is to be a peer himself. He is to
go where all the talent is, and three-quarters of th o beauty.
ancient he
assembly.t er lee eGivew i l bl
him notthe
twenty-fiveleast
years
aillanndtdhtwahtehe Divine blessing, and Mr. Eyro may yet be a
baronet or a duke. We can well comprehend how at such
a brilliant prophecy all Southampton warmed up into en-
thusiasm, and testified by discriminate applause that this
was the sort of after-dinner butter which their soul desired
for the ex-Governor of Jamaica, and for the noble magnates
who honoured the company by their presence.
A man who goeth about—as Hooker might have said—
to butter noblemen and gentlemen, if he is quite wise, will
not descend too completely into detail, or give too minute
reasons for his spontaneous admiration. if Mr. Kingsley
failed at all in this buttering, this perhaps was a cause of
his failure. Eulogising the pluck, the enterprise, the hardi-
hood, the temper, the endurance, the foresight, and the skill
of Mr. Eyre, as exemplified in his conduct in Australia,
"when he walked seven hundred miles round the head of
the Gulf of Carpentaria," this, he said, " proved him in
the highest degree to possess that English spirit which had
carried the Anglo-Saxon tongue round the world, and
would carry it back again." One sees how butter should
not be tempted to descend into explanations or minutia:).
Governor Eyre may be, and we are ready to believe has
been, the sort of man who walks 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours.
Satan in the hymn trembles when he sees the humblest
sinner on his knees, but Satan in reality, as stalwart be-
lievers are aware, is much more terrified in these days at
the sight of the walking Christian on his legs. The
iv vir-
tues however, so universally
acknowledgedo f
pedestrianism
beconnofetlssedly the brightest jewel
in a civil servant's crown ; and Mr. Kingsley's butter
c se r
anen t are
no sooner began to descend into this sort of mus-
cular detail than it began to fall into bathos.
He gives too literal an interpretation to the Scrip. God, which he identifies ap-
pt ua le
tly figurewith
stiff o f al
ei
is pleasant to worship with Mr. Kingsley at the shrine
either of a peer or a pedestrian; the two beings who, in
his eyes, stapd very properly at the head of all creation.
ekxinergso with
in
But butter, to bear the test of the next morning's news-
paper, should not appear to be the capricious result of a
crotchety admiration of a fellow creature's legs. Mr.
Kingsley, indeed, avers that, from -what he has heard of
Mr. Eyre at the Gulf of Carpentaria, he is willing to take
him on trust about Jamaica ; but if Mr. Kingsley bad
stuck to butter of a more general kind, ho would not have
given the enemy occasion to blaspheme ; for the Psalmist
hints, as Professor Kingsley should remember, that there
is a limit even about delighting in any man's legs.

One of the reasons why the manufacture of butter is so
thoroughly agreeable is that, in buttering others, one always
has an opportunity of slily buttering oneself. As a rule,
men approve most vociferously of those qualities which
they wish to be considered to possess. Mr. Kingsley has
written and talked so much and so romantically about the
grand spirit of chivalry, and pluck, and pod temper, and
gallantry, fair play, and when he brings up the old vir-
tues and drapes them about Governor Eyro, one feels in-
clined to fancy for a minute or 6,4 that Cloyornor Eyre is

only a lay figure taken and used by him as a peg on which
to hang ono more sermon about the characteristics which
Mr. Kingsley so ostentatiously bepraises in and out of
season. Butter of this description has a professional
savour about it which excites a passing suspicion
in the mind. It tastes of the sermon a little too much to
be perfectly pleasant. It is not the good wholesome butter
of men of the world, but a clerical butter which is meant
to do us good. Good advice taken in this sort of medium
is nothing more or less than physic in disguise. And Pro-
fessor Kingsley's panegyric of Mr. Eyre really strikes ono
as valueless for all critical purposes, so faras the conduct of
Mr. Eyre is concerned, awl as chiefly useful to.impress on
the British public the gallantry and chivalry of Professor
Kingsley. All this we are trained by Mr. Kingsley's books
to be willing, for the sake of argument, to admit already;
and to have it over again in the shape of exampprative
laudations of a gentleman whose faults have been both
patent and pernicious, and in Pindaric odes about the.
British aristocracy seems a waste of time.