The Sun.
London, England, 1859-08-30 00:00:00

NAPOLEON (FiTz-JERomE). The matter appears
to be very complicated. The knot is a difficult one
to untie ; we must only hope that it will not have
to beundone in the summary fashion of ALEPANDER•
" The Nord of Brussels states that an opinion
exists among the best informed persons at Turin
that King VICTOR EMMANUEL will accept the
principle of the sovereignty of the Duchies
when it shall be offered officially. It is
not believed that the question of the Duchies
will he discussed or regulated at Zurich in
its present state. If the restoration of their
Sovereigns had been accepted by the people the ar-
rangement of the differences existing between the
Dukes and their subjects might be submitted to the
Conference, inasmuch as in that case the question
would not affect the international law of Europe ;
but the moment the violation of treaties is the mat-
ter to be considered an European congress alone is
competent. The Nord adds that the idea of a
European congress is making progress, and that
M. DE BALABINE has communicated a note to the
Austrian Government, in which the Emperor of
RUSSIA insists strongly on the necessity of assem-
bling a congress."

According to MILTON it was with a sound of
dulcet harmonies that the Palace of Pandemonium
rose like an exhalation. How very different, in-
deed, it has been with that grand bran new Gothic
palace of ours down at Westminster. It has grown
up among the noxious exhalations of the river be-
side it, in the midst of one incessant jangle of dis-
cord. Everyone who has had anything at all to do
with its construction has been at loggerheads with
somebody else in the same predicament. And these
unceasing discords have been droned on, and on,

and on, from the very commencement even until
now, "to the tune of"—from £3,000,000 to
£4,000,000 ! The wrangling has revolved all this
while, as might have been conjectured, about the

devoted head of the architect. His head, indeed,
was, in a manner so to speak, the natural and

rightful centre. From the brain of Sir CHARLES
BARRY, in reality, the whole confusion originally
emanated—what though that confusion has by

others than Sir CHARLES BARRY been considerably
worse confounded. The principal internal decora-

tor, the late gifted A. W. PUGIN, was oily re-
moved from the certainty of being more or less

dragged into this apparently inevitable and seem
ingly interminable system of squabbling by his pre-
mature demise—PuGlN's lamented death occurring
in the very noonday of his great powers both
as an architect and an archeologist. Dr. REID,
on the contrary, to whose skill the ventilation of
the whole building had been confided at one time,
became at length involved in such a tornado of
accusations and reprehensions, that after himself
blowing up a good many people, he had his own
" shining light" suddenly extinguished. He raised
a breeze that was certainly not by any means anti-
cipated—a breeze that grew at last to an angry
hurricane of sounds in both Houses of Parliament.
To that storm he had to succumb. He yielded at
last to the force of an anticlimax, as whimsical in
its way as though iEOLUS had had his bladders
pricked, and had been thereupon constrained to re-
tire into private life. The ventilator, and his
scheme of ventilation, were both of them, in Par-
liamentary slang, so thoroughly ventilated them-
selves in debate, in the Lords and Commons, that the
whole scheme at last was blown avy in very dis-
gust. The very atmosphere of the legislative
palace being thus both infected and disturbed, the
material out of which it was built was next, almost
as a matter of course, discovered to be another
fruitful source of irritated and irritating discussion.
It was found to be perishing before the structure
was actually yet completed. That particular de-
scription of stone had been chosen as the most
durable, as well as the most easily worked in the
way of elaborate Gothic ornamentation. Yet the
pile is not yet finished, when lo ! the solid stone is
crumbling away under the merest atmospheric in-
fluences ! The entire design, you observe, was being
carried out with such an extreme of over-caution that
it was proving to be altogether too clever by half :
and vaulting ambition was again overleaping it-
self. Applications of a w ishy- washy kind had in some
way or another to be applied to the decaying sur-
face with a view to its artificial hardening—and so
at last we began to hear no more of that. Then the
bells took up the wrangle and the jangle in their
turn—led off by the biggest of them all, Old Big
Ben. The clatter, there, was only stopped by
Big Ben making a little too much of himself-
-when, as by a necessary consequence, and as any
one might have conjectured would prove to be the
case, Old Big Ben was found to be " cracked." He
had to be broken up. and fairly went to pot in the
melting furnace. Then came his alter ego, the pre-
sent sonorous occupant of that noble clock-tower and
belfry, the fitting campanile of our ancient city of
Westminster. Scarcely had the grand bourdon
raised his voice, a voice that might have
penetrated the deafness and gladdened the
brain of QUASIMODO, when first one ca-
viller and then another began to grumble at it—
one condemning it as funereal, another declaring its
tone to be in some way impeded, though all the
rest of London loves the sound of it now as most
harmonious; and though that sound travels always
through the night air as far as Kensington, and
when the wind sets fair, can be heard even " most
musical, most melancholy," ten miles off, upon the
hill at Richmond. Now, appropriately enough, in
the midst of all the hubbub of the Strike, rises
suddenly an uproar about the Clock, and the Clock
Tower, and the Dial, and the hands. Mr. E. B.
DENISON has half-a.dozen letters to write, and so
has Sir C. BARRY. There is a good deal to be said
upon one side and another, about the late Mr.
DENT and the present Mr. DENT. Mr. DENISON,
writing throughout this controversy about the clock
in a mood half angry, half comical—producing an
effect when combined, wholly coarse and incon-
gruous. According to Mr. DENISON, nobody at all
is in fault but—that universal scapegoat—Sir C.
BARRY ! Now, really, without affecting to be for
an instant Sir C. BARRY'S advocate or defender,
we cannot but protest, in mere fair play, against
this reiterated, tedious, tiresome, merely cuckoo-cry
of complaint and reproach against Sir C. BARRY. It
has latterly become too much the fashion to assail
and depreciate him. Everybody seems to have
a stone to throw at him in passing. We believe
him to be in many respects blameworthy. His
original estimates, for example, were monstrously
miscalculated. But to malign him perpetually,
i to treat him with this storm of abuse and nothing
but abuse, we do regard as a course not one jot

less monstrously miscalculated. When Mr.
DENismg and his frivolous little spiteful letters
against Sir CHARLES BARRY are forgotten, Sir
CHARLES BARRY'S architectural masterpiece will
survive centuries hence as a monumental attestation
of his genius—survive even though it might be in
the picturesque ruins that will lend an additional
charm of effect to the masses of debris sketched
from the broken arch of London-bridge by Lori
MACAULAY'S New Zealander.

We published a table yesterday, entitled " Irish
Agricultural Statistics," compiled very carefully
and with great judgment by WILLIAM DONNELLY,