The Sun.
London, England, 1866-11-01 00:00:00

NEW ZEALAND.

The London agent of the New Zealand Govern-
ment (Mr. John Morrison) has received the follow-
ing telegram from the Secretary to the Colonial
Governraent

" GALLE, Oct. 19.

" The Ne v Zealand Legislature is still in ses-
sion. Mr. Stafford has reconstructed the Ministry.

" The stamp duties were carried by a large
majority.
"The yield of gold and the revenue are increas-

ing.
" Country tranquil.
" The 14th, 50th, ana 57th Regiments are lean.

ing.
" The Governor is going on a tour into the in
terior."

FRANCE.

BOURSE, Oct. 31, Two o'clock.—For the first hour
the market was firm at yesterday's closing prices,
but during the last quarter of an hour, since the
operation of the reponse des primes is over, quota-
tions have shown symptoms of giving way. Threes,
for the account, have experienced a fractional de-
cline, at 68f. 871 c. Italian Fives have lost 5c.,
at 56f. 40c. Credit Mobilier Shares 2f. 50c.,
at 62-3 f. 75c. Credit Foncier and Comp-
toir cl'Escompte are unvaried. Business in

lowing securities the reponse de 'primes (option)
has thus been fixed : French Threes 68f. 92ic.
Italian Fives 56f. 45c. ; Credit Mobilier 625 f. ;
Lombard 421 fr. 25c. The following deports are
noticed on securities carried over for the next Ac-
count : on French Threes 3c., Italian Fives 4c.,
Credit Mobilier Shares 80c., and Comptoir
d'Escompte lf.

Three o'clock.—The market has :closed as fol-

lows :

4i per Cents 96 90
Do. end month —
3 per Cents. 6B 90
Do. end month 6B 85
Credit Mobilier 621 25
Do. end month 621 25
Credit Foncier —
Do. end month 1375 --

Bank Shares 3590
Italian Loan 56 30
Do. end month 56 30
Mexican Loan —
Do. Bonds —
Spanish Threes
Home Debt —
Deferred

RAIL'

'AYS.

For Account.
Orleans
Northern 1175
Lyons and Mediterranean 926 25
Southern 5BO
Western —
Eastern
Sardinian
Austrian
Lombard
North of Spain lO5
Saragossa l4O
Ditto to Barcelona..
Boman

- -
383 75
420 _

THINKING TWICE !—ln reference to the necessity
for an erratum in regard to the first line in our first
leading article yesterday, a corresponent facetiously sug-
gests that it would be well, perhaps, if Mr. Bright would
take a leaf out of our book by always thinking twice before
speaking !

MR. BRETT, M.P., at HELSTON.—Speaking at a
dinner at Helston, the other day, Mr. Brett, the
Conservative member for that borough said the state of the
country at the present time gave great cause for anxiety.
Mr. Bright had, with much indiscretion and great intem-
perance been carrying on a mischievous agitation, which
had been especially successful in those centres of trades
unions where large bodies of men were in the habit of fol-
lowing their loaders. Meetings had been held at which,
urged by the vehemence of Mr. Bright, resolutions had been
passed and demands made which, if granted, would not be
reform, but revolution. By that he meant that it would not
be in principle an extension or improvement of the Consti-
tution, but it would be an alteration or a substitution of,an
entirely different Constitution. Ho admitted the Consti-
tution required enhiging, and thought moderate mon of all
parties might agree upon a solution of the difficulty. It
had never been an essential part of the Constitution that
all members should be elected by an equal body of con-
stituents. No two countries were of the same size ; no
three towns or boroughs were of the same size ; therefore,
there had always been small and large constituencies.
It had never been an essential part of the Constitution
that all the inhabitants in any locality should take part in
an election, but, on the contrary, it had been an essential
feature that they should not take part. There had from
the beginning been a property qualification, and that of
necessity excluded a large number of citizens. It had never
been an essential part of the constitution that all large
places should have a voice in the election of members, nor
that the same franchise should exist in every constituency.
It was not so now. The franchise in counties was not the
same as in boroughs, and although in all boroughs the right
of voting was nominally the same, yet a £lO house in 'lel-
ston was not the same qualification as a £lO house in Lon-
don, Liverpool, and Manchester; and the voters for Uni-
versities were not qualified with respect to property at all.
Now, taking these matters into consideration, he asked,
could they not devise a reform bill to which the moderate
men of all parties could agree ? Moderate men asked that
the franchise should be extended, and that a considerable
number of the working classes should be admitted to it ;
but that, in his opinion, might be done without altering
any of the essential principles of the Constitution to which
ho had alluded. But if the great leader of the Whig party,
Mr. Gladstone, would join with Mr. Bright in his revo-
lutionary demands, it would be the duty of every Con-
servative—and ho hoped they would be joined._ by the
great body of the moderate Whigs----to oppose any such
measure with all the strength in their power. He hoped,
however, that the coming session would not be wholly
occupied in the discussion of Parliamentary reform, be-
cause there were many other questions requiring imme-
diate and serious attention, and he thought we had at pre-
sent a Government composed of men determined to work
hard and with sincerity. He hoped to see brought forward
a comprehensive measure on the subject of education, as
well as on the question of Poor-law relief, and he was sure
the Ministry would do everything to increase the efficiency
of the army and navy at the smallest possible expense.

LITERATURE.

" Barry Cornwall's" Memoirs of " Elia."
Charles Lamb. A Memoir. By Bryan Procter.
One Volume. Pp. 252. Moxon and Co.
For this charming volume the lovers of the de-
lightful " Elia" have reason to be grateful to
" Barry Cornwall." At the very outset of our
remarks, indeed, we, for one, would here frankly
acknowledge ourselves to be so. We accept Mr.
Procter's recollections of his dear old friend with
more than pleasure, with livelier feelings even than
those of admiration, we accept them with a sense of
gratitude. They are jotted down, as their author
himself tells us, in his seventy-seventh year
thirty-two years after the death of Charles Lamb—
one good half-century after the occaeion upon
which Elia and Barry Cornwall were first brought
together, after they first began their affectionate
and thenceforth memorable friendship. Written
though these pages are, however, long after the
termination by death of that very notable friend-
ship, it is surprising to observe how vividly the
survivor's retrospective survey brings forth to
the view of this later generation the whole
career, and character, and genius, and idiocyn-
cracy of the man ho himself, so long ago and so
thoroughly appreciated. It is a likeness drawn from
memory--and that, moreover, as we have said, after
the lapse of two-and-thirty years—and it is one that
has been drawn thus more accurately from memory
than the vast majority of likenesses are when taken
from the life, from a deliberate succession of actual
sittings. Already, it is true, Charles Lamb has
been sketched after a similar fashion, sometimes
almost to the very life, by a series of tenderly ap-
preciative delineators of his most whimsical, yet
thoroughly delightful and thoroughly loveable in -
dividuality. William Hazlitt, alone, in effect, three
several times sketched him, doing so, moreover,
n ..e uLI 111
his " Spirit of the Age," afterwards in his " Table
Talk," and finally in his " Plain Speaker." Leigh
Hunt again pencilled him, so to speak, in a sort of
vignette and quite casually, as it were, in the course
of his " Autobiography." John Forster, too, with a
few bold but delicate strokes of the pen, as one might
say drew him in profile after the fashion of Retsch's
Outlines—and that, too, very shortly indeed, after
Elia's demise—in the pages of the New Monthly
Magazine. Sir Thomas Talfourd, again, long after-
wards painted his portraiture with singular vivid-
ness of colouring in a book that was termed (hap-
pily for us by what is now rendered a flagrant
misnomer) " Final Memorials" about him that
radiant limning of Charles Lamb, by Talfourd, for the
first time revealing to us, as by a startling application
of the brilliant effects of chiaroscuro, those hitherto
concealed lights and shadows, those brighter Eights
and blacker shadows which, unsuspected by the
world at largo, had all that while been dignifying
the history, the eminently tragic and pathe tic his-
tory, of this long-beloved and most delectable
humorist. And now as the very last and as the very
best of all these commemorative tributes to Charles
Lamb, to Elia, to that wisest, and wittiest, and
raciest of all our wise, witty, and racy essayists—
there come to us, crowning and perfecting the
whole delightful series of such portraitures of him
as we have but just now enumerated—these; in
very truth and deed, Final Memorials of Charles
Lamb--m emorials jotted down in his green old age
but with a clear, a firm, and a loving hand, by
Elia's true and trusty friend of two-and-thirty years
ago, Bryan Waller Procter, otherwise Barry Corn-
wall. The book, in every point of view, is worthy
at once of the author and of his subject. It must
realize its writer's purpose—or we are very much
mistaken—even in his own estimation of it. A re-
sult, by the way, which is but very rarely indeed
arrived at—more especially when, as in the present
instance, the author's judgment has by long culture
been rendered refined and sensitive in regard to
blemishes and shortcomings, even to the length of
fastidiousness. Not without emotion in fact could
he even have prepared himself for the task—
judging from his. own acknowledgments. In merely
reading over once more (as a refreshing prelimi-
nary, we presume, to his Retrospect) —in merely
reading over once more those old familiar Essays,
meaning the Essays of Elia, he tells us—" Some
of them affect me with a grave pleasure, amounting
t-- in T spew to invnort into them the very feel-
ing with winch no wrote tnem ; ms moose aria move-
ments are transfigured, and communicated to me by
the poor art of the printer. His voice, so sincere
and earnest, rings in my ear again. He was no
Feignwell: apart from his joke, never was a man so
real, and free from pretence. No one, as I believe,
will ever taste the flavour of certain writers as he
has done. He was the last true lover of Anti-

quity." Together, moreover, with Charles Lamb's
,own dear old delightful face— sweet-mouthed,
large-browed, bright-eyed Elia, with his stam-
mering talk and " immaterial legs," as Tom Hood
called them, Elia in rusty black, like, a lay-
ecclesiastic, as Sir Boyle Roche might have it, and
hugging under his arm, if not kissing it, some
rusty old black-letter folio—together, we say, with
Charles Lamb's well-remembered features, form,
voice, gait, manner, tout ensemble—how many others
of his associates must have thronged back upon
Barry Cornwall's remembrance' As affording us a
succinct commemoration of some among the pick of
those past and gone familiars, let us take a certain
anonymous T. W.'s recollections of the " set," jotted
down by him very recently at Brussels and, of
course still more recently; published in the columns
of Notes and Queries. Writing of Charles
Lamb and his Contemporaries, as he still
recalls them bodily, as it were, not as will be seen
conversationally to his recollection, "J. W." says
in Notes and Queries—" Of the discourse of these
dii majores I have no recollection now ; but the
faces of some of them I can still partially recall.
Hazlitt's, for instance, keen and aggressive, with
eyes that flashed out epigram. Tom Hood's, a
Methodist parson's face : not a ripple breaking
the lines of it, though every word he dropped was a
pun, and every pun roused a roar of laughter.
Leigh Hunt's,parcel genial, parcel democratic, with
as much rabid politics on his lips as honey from
Mount Hybla. Miss Kelly's, plain, but engaging.

(The most unprofessional of actresses, and unspoiled

of women : the bloom of the child on her cheek, un-
defaced by the rouge, to speak in a metaphor.) She
was one of the most dearly welcome of Lamb's
guests. Wordsworth's, farmerish and respectable,
but with something of the great poet occasionally
breaking out, and glorifying forehead and eyes.
Then there was Martin Burney, ugliest of men,
hugest of eaters, honestest of friends. I see him
closeted with Mary Lamb, reading the Gospel of St.
John for the first time. And Sheridan Knowles,
burly and jovial, striding into Lamb's breakfast
room one spring morning—a great bunch of May
blossom in his hand. And George Darley, scholar
and poet—slow of speech and gentle of strain : Miss
Kelly's constant shadow in her walks amongst the
Enfield woodlands." Reverting, however, to the

more copious recollections that are here set forth of
these and others in the goodly book recently penned
and issued from the press for the delight of this later
generation (the first instalment of posterity to Elia)

we would adduce here at once without further
parley evidence distinct and conclusive that,
charmed as we acknowledge ourselves to have
been with the work as a whole, we have not viewed
it by any means through a species of infatuation, re-
maining obtuse even to those minor flaws and
petty deficiences which are in truth inevitable
in all remotely retrospective recollections of this
character. To this end we would here parti-
cularize two instances in which it appears to us that
Mr. Procter would do well, before allowing the
work to go into another edition, by subjecting the
text as it at present stands to some slight revision
or emendation. In the first of these instances he is
evidently in some confusion (quite unconsciously to
himself) as to the paternity of a very simple phrase—
to wit, that of browsing upon certain portions of
literature. At page 23, in the first instance, ho dis-
tinctly attributes the authorship of the phrase to
Charles Lamb—remarking, " He and his sister were
(to use his own words) tumbled into a spacious
closet of good old English reading, and browsed at
will on that fair and wholesome pasturage." Never-
theless, at page 50 Barry Cornwall—eschewing
all italics indicative of quotation puts forth