The Sun.
London, England, 1861-11-04 00:00:00

MR. SEWARD TO LORD LYONS.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE, Washington, Oct. 14, 1861.
My Lord,—l have the honour to acknowledge your lord-
ship's note of the present date.
In t hat paper you inform me that the British Government
is much concerned to find that two British subjects, Mr.
Patrick and Mr. Rahming, have been brought under arbi-
trary arrest, and that although her Majesty's Ministers have
been advised by you of the release of Mr. Patrick, yet they
cannot but regard the matter as requiring the very serious
consideration of this Government.

You further inform me that her Majesty's Governmen
perceive that when British subjects, as well as American
citizens, are arrested, tney are transferred to a military pri-
son, and that the military authorities refuse to pay obedi-
ence to a writ of habeas corpus.
You add that her Majesty's Government conceive that this
practice is directly opposed to the maxim of the constitution
of the United States, that no person shall be deprived of life,
liberty, or prcperty without due process of law. You then
observe that her Majesty's Government are nevertheless
willing to make every aliowance for the hard necessities of
a time of internal trouble, and they would not have been
surprised if the ordinary securities of personal liberty had
been temporarily suspended, nor would they have complained
if British subjects, falling under suspioion, had suffered from
the consequences of that suspension. But that it does not
appear that Congress has sanctioned in this respect any de-
parture from the due course of law, and it is in those cir.
cumstances that the law officers of the Crown have advised
her Majesty's Government that the arrests of British sub-
jects are illegal.
You remark, further, that, so far as appears to her
Majesty's Government, the Secretary of State for the United
States examines upon the reports of spies, and assumes the
power of depriving British subjects of their liberty, or
liberating them by his own will and pleasure ; and you in-
-1 form 'Le that her Majesty's Government cannot but regard
this despotic and arbitrary power as inconsistent with the
constitution of the United States, as at variance with the
treaties of amity subsisting between the two nations, as
tending to prevent the resort of British subjects to the
United States for purposes of trade and industry. You
conclude with informing me that upon these grounds her
Majesty's Government have felt bound to instruct you to
remonstrate against such irregular proceedings, and to say
that, in their opinion, the authority of Congress is neces-
sary in order to justify the arbitrary arrest and imprison-
ment of British subjects.
The facts in regard to the two persons named in your
note are as follows :

Communications from the regular police of the country
to the Executive at Washington showed that disloyal Or-
sons in the State of Alabama were conducting treasonable
correspondence with Confederates, British subjects and
Ameriean citizens in Europe, aimed at the overthrow of
the Federal Union by armed forces actually in the field
and besieging the capital of the United States. A portion
of this correspondenee, which was intercepted, was ad-
dressed to the firm of Smith and Patrick, brokers, long
established and doing business in the city of New York. It
appeared that this firm had a branch at Mobile, that the
partner, Smith, is a disloyal citizen of the United States,
and that he was in Europe when the treasonable popers
were sent from Mobile, addressed through the house of
Smith and Patrick, in New York. On receiving this infor-
mation, Wm. Patrick was arrested rnd committed into mili-
tary custody at Fort Lafayette by an order of the Secretary
of War of the United States, addressed to the police of the
city of New York. These proceedings took place on the 28th
Aug. last.
Representations were thereupon made to the Secretary of
State by friends of Mr. Patrick, to the effect that notwith-
standing his associations he was personally loyal to this
Government, and that he was ignorant of the treasonable
nature of the corraspondence which was being carried on
through the mercantile house of which he was a member.
Directions were thereupon given by the Secretary of State
to a proper agent to inquire into the correctness of the facts
thus presented, and this inquiry resulted in the establish-
ment of their truth. Mr. William Patrick was thereupon
promptly released from custody by direction of the Secre-
tary of State. This release occurred on the 13th of Septem-
ber last.
On the 2d day of September the Superintendent of Police,
in the city of New York, informed the Secretary of State,
by telegraph, that ho had under arrest J. C. Lahming, who
had just arrived from Nassau, where he had attempted to

induce the owners of the schooner Arctic to take cannon to
Wilmington, in North Carolina, for the use of the rebels,
and inquired what should he do with the prisoner. J. C.
Rahming was thereupon committed into military custody
at Fort Lafayette, under a mandate from the Secretary of
State, This commitment was made on the 2d of September.
On the 17th of that month this prisoner, after due inquiry,
was released from custody, on his executing a bond in the
penalty of 2,500 dais., with a condition that he should there-
after bear true allegiance to the United States, and do no
act hostile or injurious to them while remaining under their
protection.
I have to regret that, after so long an official intercourse
between the Governments of the United States and
Great
Britain, it should be necessary now to inform her Majesty's
ministers that all executive proceedings, whether
unless
Secretary of 'Par or of the Secretary of Sta e, are,the
President or revoked by the President, proceedings of
President of the United States.
Certainly it is not necessary to announce to the British
Government now that an insurrection, attended by civil and
even social war, was existing in the United States when the
proceedings which I have thus related took place. But it
does seem necessary to state, for the information of the Go-
vernment, that Congress is by the Constitution invested
' with no executive power or responsibility whatever, and, on
the contrary, that the president of the United States is, by
the Constitution and laws, invested with the whole execu-
tive power of the government, and charged with the supreme
direction of all municipal or ministerial civil agents, as well
as of the whole land and naval forces of the Union, and that,
invested with those ample powers, he is charged by the
Constitution and laws with the absolute duty of suppressing
insurrection as well as of preventing and repelling invasion;
and that for these purposes he constitutionally exercises the
right of suspending the writ of habeas corpus, whenever
and whereiPQM all,d in, whatseeyer extent the public safety,

endangered by treason or invasion in arms, in his judgme:

requires.

The proceedings of which the British Government com-
plain were taken upon information conveyed to the Presi-
dent by the legal police authorities of the country, and they
were not instituted until after he had suspended the grea
writ of freedom, in just the extent that, in view of thet
perils of the State, ho deemed necessary. For the exercise
of that discretion he, as well as his chief advisers, among
whom are the Secretary of War and Secretary of State, is
responsible by law before the highest judicial tribunal of
the Republic, and amenable also to the judgment of his
countrymen and the enlightened opinion of the civilised
world.

A candid admission contained in your letter relieves me
of any necessity for showing that the two persons named
therein were neither known nor supposed to be British sub •
jects when the proceedings occurred, and that in every case
subjects of her Majesty residing in the United States, and
under their protection, are treated during the present trou-
bles in the same manner and with no greater or less rigor
than American citizens,

The military prison which was used for the temporary
detention of the suspected parties is a fort constructed and
garrisoned for the public defence. The military officer
charged with their custody has declined to pay obedience
to the writ of habeas corpus, but the refusal was made in
obedience to an express direction of the President, in the
exercise of his functions as commander-in-chief of all the
land and naval forces of the United States. Although it
is not very important, it certainly is not entirely irrelevant
to add, that, so far as I am informed, no writ of habeas
corpus was attempted to be served, or was even issued out
or applied for in behalf of either of the persons named ;
although in a case not dissimilar the writ of habeas corpus
was not issued out in favour of another British subject, and
was disobeyed by direction of the President.
The British Government have candidly conceded, in the
remonstrances before me, that even in this country, so re-
markable for so long an enjoyment by its people of the
highest immunities of personal freedom, war, and especially
civil war, cannot be conducted exclusively in the forms and
with the dilatory remedies provided by municipal laws,
which are adequate to the preservation of public order in
time of peace. Treason always operates, if possible, by sur-
prise, and prudence and humanity therefore equally require
that violence concocted in secret shall be prevented, if prac-
ticable, by unusual and vigorous precaution. lam fully
aware of the inconveniences which result from the practice
of such precaution, embarrassing communities in social life,
and affecting, perhaps, trade and intercourse with foreign
nations. But the American people, after having tried in
every way to avert civil war, have accepted it at last as a
stern necessity. The chief interest, while it lasts, is not the
enjoyments of society, or the profits of trade, but the saving
of the national life. That life saved, all the other blessings
which attend it will speedily return, with greater assurance
of continuance than ever before. The safety of the whole
people has become, in the present emergency, She supreme
law; and so long as the danger shall exist, all classes of
society equally, the denizen and the citizen, cheerfully ac-
quiesce in the measures which that law prescribes.
The Government does not question the learning of the
legal advisers of the British Crown, or the justice of the
deference which her Majesty pays to them. Nevertheless,
the British Government will hardly expect that the President
will accept their explanations of the Constitution of the
United States, especially when the Constitution thus ex-
pounded would have upon him the sole executive responsi-
bility suppressing the existing insurrection, while it would
transfer to Congress the most material and indispensable
power to be employed for that purpose. Moreover, these
explanations find no real support in the letter, much less in
the spirit of the Constitution itself. He must be allowed,
therefore, to prefer to be governed by the view of our organic
national law which, while it will enable him to execute his
great trust with complete success, receives the sanction of the
highest authorities of our own country, and is sustained by
the general consent of the people for whom alone that Con-
stitution was established.

I avail myself of this opportunity to offer to your lordship
a renewed assurance of my very high consideration,

The Right Hon, Lord Lyons, &c.

"Wm. H. SEWARD.

LEIGH BUNT'S LAST EVENING AT

HOME.

(From the Dublin University Magazine.)

A happy circumstance brought me into brief but intimate
communication with Leigh Hunt shortly before the close
of those seventy-five years, the abundant fruits of which
have secured for him the reputation of one of the most
charming writers, whether of prose or verse, in our English
literature. Our intercourse, though narrowed in point of
time by his tranquil death, at Putney, on the 28th of
August, 1859, had already ripened, as I have said, into
nothing less than intimacy. His regard had rapidly be-
come, as indeed the ending of every letter to me cordially
intimated in so many words, that of an affectionate friend-
ship. In one of these penned as recently as the first day of
the very month of which he was fated never to see the ter-
mination, he wrote in my regard thus delightfully :—" It is
like one of the friendships of former days come back to me
in my old age, as if in reward for my fidelity to their
memory." My identity as the survivor is, lam perfectly
aware, a circumstance in itself utterly valueless, insomuch
that I care not for one instant to indicate it, although
writing here apparently so egotistically in the first person,
though, in point of fact, doing so for the mere facilitation
of my remembrance.

A communication from the dear old poet-essayist, penned
on Monday, the Bth of August—(it was the last scrap of our
correspondence I was ever to receive)—closing strangely,
it seemed at the time with a solemn benison that sounds to
me even now almost like an unconscious farewell—" All
blessings attend you, prays your affectionate friend, Leigh
Hunt ;" began with a pleasant summons to him on the fol-
lowing evening at his house, in what he had characteristi-
cally designated in a previous note, " the not very attractive
suburbanity" of Hammersmith. " To-morrow (Tuesday),
by all means," he now wrote ; adding whimsically, as will
be seen forthwith, "and the (that ?) evening will suit me
better than any other, for a very curious extempora-
neous reason, as you shall hear." The reason
proving that after that evening, had I called, I
should have found he had then taken his depar-
ture, bent upon a temporary removal in search of health to
the opposite bank of the Thames, sojourning there as the
cherished guest of the valued friend under whose shelter-
ing roof-beams he so soon afterwards expired.
On Tuesday evening, then, the 9th of August, 1859, I am
with Leigh Hunt for the last time in our earthly meeting.
It is (unknown to himself), his own last evening in his last
home residence, one that having been subsequently deserted
by his family, may now, without any breach of delicacy be

indicated for the satisfaction of those curious as to the last
abode of the author of " The Town," as the little villa, No.
7, Cornwall-road, Hammersmith.
As I enter the inner sitting-room, I find my host seated

in his easy-chair, in his accustomed corner, musing sadly
in solitude. Although to the very close of his life he re-
tained undimmed the most vivid appreciation alike of the
beautiful and the whimsical—and I know not which, if
either, of these two seemingly incongruous faoulties held
in his nature any thing like a distinct predominance-7-I
could not but note especially his eager solicitude upon
every opportunity to discuss the more solemn themes of
time and eternity, above all of the dread and holy mysteries
of the hereafter. A few evenings previously, when left alone
together, we had talked on thus late into the night; and
now, again his thoughts reverted evidently with an awful
joy to the same " high argument." It is manifest enough
to me now, that these were but the instinctive flutterings
of his spirit, as it felt the jarring back of the bolts of life,
towards what Young has nobly termed in his " Night
Thoughts," Death, that
" Dark lattice letting in eternal day."
Leigh Hunt, though now nearly one lustre beyond the
allotted age of man, evidenced the same insatiable appetite
as of yore for all the sugar .plums of life, "lumps of
flowers," and snatches of melody. A primrose was yet to

him ever something more than a primrose, even though it

had been the ono whose delicate stalk was held between the
lips of the vulgar ruffian, Blastus, in Douglas Jerrold's
story of " St. Giles and St. James." Yet, strange to say,
Leigh Hunt—like Wordsworth himself, who thus first phi
losophised poetically over the infinite suggestiveness of
beauty latent in the primrose—Leigh Hunt, like William
Wordsworth; was nevertheless totally deficient, as he
assured me, in the sense of smell, detecting no perfume
whatever, even from petals the most odoriferous. He, whose
verses are actually fragrant with flowers I Instance
this, his delicious apostrophe to the vernal month,. that
month of love and verdure, of cowslip and daffodil, that
delectable season,
of which Shakspeare's Touchstone war-
bles

" In spring time,
The only pretty ring time,
When the little birds sing
Hey ding-a-ding-ding,
Sweet lovers love the spring."

Instance this floral fragrance peculiar to Leigh Hunt's
poetic effusions, the metrical apostrophe to the youngling
is With that mel-
like a breath
lmiliounotuhs ofc
ot hu ep
ltewt, e ltvhee, tcho en
cal apostrophewehni de
hi n
wafted from the hedge-rows :

May, thou merry month complete •
May, thy very name is sweet 1"
His imaginative sense of perfume, however, must have
borne some analogy to the faintly adumbrated sense of
colour prevailing among the colour-blind, among those who,
wandering through a garden, recognise only by a difference
of outline the distinction between the roses and the green
leaves clothing the bu®h upon which they are blooming ;
who Call there discover even no diversity of hue, later in the
season, between the autumnal verdure and the scarlet
berries.

It.was a distinguishing peculiarity with Leigh Hunt, that
in regard to whatever of the beautiful his fancy touched,
one might say of it, as he himself said of Paganini's affec-
tion for his violin, that "he loved it like a cheek." Nay,
if ever he had, moreover, in his colloquial criticisms, to note
some fault or blemish in the thing he loved, it was always
with the gentle apology, with the courtly extenuation of
Tasso

" Non era pallidezza, ma candore P'
So, likewise, when ho was writing, particularly is pew'
upon suythiug wlatover tko aivim FliCe "

tterowning merits of the Beautiful, it was ever with him, as
it once upon a time actually chanced with Keats, while in
the act of scrawling a letter to ono of his familiar corres-
pondents (" Life and Letters," vol. ii., p. 18), when he
suddenly broke off with, " Talking of pleasure, this mo-
ment I was writing with one hand, and with the other hold-
ing to my mouth a nectarine. Good I—how fine ! I went
down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint
melted down my throat like a large beautiful strawberry.'
Leigh Hunt, when writing, always, one might say, held in
his other hand the nectarine. •
And the fruits this poetic gourmand loved the most, were
they not the choicest glories of what he has daintily termed
the " human orchard ?" Where—it is in his charming
little poem on " Sudden Fine Weather"—he cries out de-
liciously—

" Your finest fruit to some two months may reach :
I've known a cheek of forty like a peach!"
As he wrote, likewise so he read, with a hand and an eye o f
tender appreciation. The volumes, the leaves of which he
had turned, bore upon their pages abundant evidence of this
in little pencilled ticks of applause or, objection, and the
quaintest marginal annotations, penned in his elegant
Italian caligraphy. These jotted lines and notes upon the
margin he himself compared to loving pinches upon the
cheek, that left each of them an impress like a dimple;
giving the future reader, moreover, the companionship of
this sympathetic appreciation.
One of these well-fingered books, a very wall of fruit,
with a bee-made cicatrice here and there upon the ripe
green-gages and apricots—a volume he dearly loved, and
had read through four times—he has notified it, " with in-
creasing admiratin" (it is M. Abel Remusat's translation of
the veritable Chinese Novel, " lu-kiao-1i ; or, the Two
Fair Cousins")—Leigh Hunt lent me, this last night of our
meeting, shortly before we parted, bidding me, as he did so,
preserve it tenderly for him, as one of the many million
atoms of the apple of my eye. I have it still—a posthumous
gift from him, proffered to me from his death-bed, if I cared
to keep it in his remembrance. It illustrates, by a two-fold
attraction, what has here been said about those dimpling
touches ; touches here imparted to the cheek of the Chineso
Chronicler, by Leigh Hunt's own hand, and by that of his
loved and honoured friend, Thomas Carlyle. Such fantastic
touches, some of them ! As, when a personage in the text
called " Old Touchi" is spoken of incidentally. Whereupon,
quoth Leigh Hunt in the margin, "Head of the genus zrri-
tabile !" Again, where mention is made (i., 120), in con-
nection with the Imperial College, of one " Examiner Li,"
the once editor of the journal of that ilk, as the Scotch
would say, cries out, with mingled exultation and surprise,
upon the margin, "Myself I by title and name !"

More thickly, however, than the margins of his books,
the pleasant hours of his converse were sown with whimsi-
calities. He could not speak of even one of his own infir-
mities, without rendering it the theme of a joke and a pro-
vocation to laughter. The loss of his teeth, casually men-
tioned by him, caused him to exult at having made that ad-
ditional advance towards being etherialised.

Who does not remember his sudden bursts of fun, even at
moments when he was most thoroughly in earnest I' In-
stance this, where, in his discursive metrical thoughts " On
Reading Pomfret's Choice," while insisting upon the ex-
quisite cruelty involved in that seemingly all-pleasant pas-
time of angling, he unexpectedly puts the argument (an
argument he has just before been enforcing, almost with
tears in his eyes), thus fantastically to the more infatuated
'rotaries of Izaak Walton's craft :

" Fancy a preacher at this sort of work,
Not with his trout and gudgeon, but his clerk.
The clerk leaps gaping at a tempting bit,
And, hah 1 an ear-ache with a knife in it 1"

'Twas the delightfullest, oddest, whimsicallest verse, well
imaginable at times, that of our dear Leigh Hunt ; and at
other times so trembling through and through with the ten-.
derest thrills of sensibility. Now warbling, as "A Lover
of Music to his Pianoforte," as he well might, he who could
sing so sweetly himself to a few careless touches upon the
keys of that instrument :
" Mirth flies to thee, and Love's unrest,
And Memory dear,
And sorrow with his tightened breast,
Comes for a lear."

Now carolling with the boisterous elvish glee of a Robin
Goodfellow, in honour of the übiquity of that Protean
glory of the Winter season—Christmas :
"Now he's town gone out of town,
And now a feast in civic gown,
And now the pantomime and clown
With a crack upon the crown,
And all sorts of tumbles down."

The very quintessence of this Puck-like naughtiness of
the old poet's muse being distilled, by the way, into the
aromatic ink with which he penned his Chorus of Fairies
Robbing an Orchard—singing, shamefully, with an inter-
jected smack of the lips—
" Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
Stolen kisses much completer,
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen be your apples,"

And, as if even this were not enough, murmuring yet
further, sotto voce, with an audible chuckle, and a relish that
almost makes one long to go clambering over the moon-
lit wall alter the golden pippins—
" When to bed the world are bobbing,
Then's the time for orchard robbing
Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
Were it not for stealing, stealing."

Ever on the alert for a drollery, whether he were sitting
pen in hand, at his desk in solitude, or talking inter-
mittently, in the familiar intercourse of friend-
ship, he was so, none the less, upon the occasion
of our final meeting, of his final tarrying in that
latest of his many suburban London residences—the one
already particularized as thus rendered in a manner classic
ground, in the Cornwall-road at Hammersmith. And I
well remember, in the very midst of the sadness of this his
last evening in the dear home which he was never to see
again, and of the eternal parting from which he seemed
to have a mournful premonitory consciousness, I well
remember the zestful enjoyment with which an accidental
circumstance recalled to recollection his solemn recantation
in the Examiner ! His solemn recantation—that is, shortly
after his release from his two years' imprisonment in Horse-
monger-lane Gaol—of everything he had previously written
in that journal against his Royal Highness the then Prince
Regent—a recantation, ending, after a long catalogue of
similar declarations, he was this, and he was that, and he
was the other, and—he was thin!
Throughout the evening, at intervals, but more heavily
and continuously towards the close of it, the rain fell dole-
fully, with a subdued monotone in the sound that harmo-
nised!only too well with the evident sadness filling the old
poet's imagination. In one of the momentary pauses of the
conversation amongst us all, pauses that gradually, as the
twilight darkened over the rooms, became, from mere sym-
pathy, not unfrequent—Leigh Hunt having just remarked
that he had got a bundle of his books together, to take with
him as "a bit of home"—there came, modulated by the dis-
tance, through the rain and the silence, the sound of an
itinerant's organ down the road, playing (of allmal-d-propos
airs in the wide world I) Sir Henry Bishop's plaintive na-
tional melody—as much a national melody, in its way, as
even " Rule Britannia"—the national melody of the Eng-
lish domestic affections, " Home, sweet Home."
Almost immediately afterwards the wheels came and went
that bore Leigh Hunt from his home to his death-place.
Like an old soldier upon his last march, he had wrapped his
cloak about him and gone forth, with his heart-strings torn
and bleeding, I believe, from that apparently trivial separa-
tion from those he loved : from his dear daughters and his
little grandchildren.
Standing by the garden gate, in the rain, I hear his cor-
dial voice still ringing back to me, as he drives away, almost
cheerily calling me by name, in accents of farewell.
As I write these last sentences, there lies before me, in aid
of my remembrance, the only truthful effigy of those vene-
rable and thoughtful features : the large black eyes, still
lustrous to the last ; the long white hair, the reverse of
gray, being silver, with an occasional thread or two of the
original black intermingled. As I close this memorial of
" Leigh Hunt's Last Evening at Home," my hand is
laid upon a lock of his white hair.