The Sun.
London, England, 1859-05-20 00:00:00

EXETER.

It was perfectly right and proper, it was only in the
natural order of things, that Mr. OSBORNE should
be returned for Dover, when Secretary to the Ad-
miralty under Lord PALMERSTON'S Government.
It is altogether indefensible, and heinous as the
gravest electioneering misdemeanour, that Admiral
LEEKE should be returned for Dover when naval
Lord of the Admiralty under the Earl of DERBY'S
Administration.

Such are the opinions bluntly expressed by the
unreasoning thick and thin partisan advocates of
what is becoming more and more every day a most
irrational Opposition.

• Calne, we all know, derives its inspiration, as to
the choice of a representative, from Bowood. If

we look to the inexorable and sententious DOD in his
pithy little volume, entitled " Electoral Facts," and
turn there to what is said in regard to Caine, " a
small decaying borough on the river Marian," in
Wiltshire, we find there low down on the second
column of page 42 this remarkable little fragment
of information :

"INFLUENCE.—The Marquis of LANSDOWNE is
Lord of the Manor, and has possessed paramount
power here since 1762."
So that for ninety-seven years past, at Caine, the
influence of Lord LANSDOWNE has been notoriously
paramount. There, as M.P. for Caine, under that
benignant influence, sat the famous lawyer DUN-
NING from • the year of grace 1768 before
being' raised to the peerage by the name, style,
and title of Baron ASIIBURTON. There, as M.P.
for Caine from 1774 till 1790, sat the celebrated
Col. BARRE, the Right Hon. ISAAC BARRE, who
shares with his former colleague, Lawyer DUNNING
aforesaid, the glory of having been the veritable
invisible author of' " Junius." Colonel BARRE,
M.P. for Caine, being as indubitably JUNIUS, ac-
cording to the late antiquary JOHN BRITTON—as,
according to others, that inscrutable writer was
discoverable variously in the persons of EDMUND
BURKE, of LACHLAN MACLEAN, of Earl TEMPLE,
of Sir PHILIP FRANCIS, and of THOMAS, lamen-
tably known in the history of the peerage as the
wicked Lord LYTTLETON. Besides these, during
the century which has now very nearly elapsed
since the "small decaying borough of Caine" came
under the patronage of Bowood—there sat for it
from 1796 till 1816—a good round score of years—
a delightful forensic wit, to *wit, JOSEPH JEKYLL,
of punning celebrity. There, for four years,
by his courtesy title of Lord HENRY PETTY,
sat the present Marquis of LANSDOWNE—as
afterwards from 1832 (when he came of age) until
1836 (when he died so prematurely) sat Lord
KERRY, the heir to the marquisate. And as, yet
later, Lord LANSDOWNE'S second son, the Earl
of SHELBURNE, was returned as M.P. for Caine at
four successive general elections—namely, those of
'37, '4l, '47, and '52. There also, during eighteen
years, sat as M.P. for Caine the Right Hon. JAMES
ABERCROMBIE, Speaker of the House of Commons,
until raised to the House of Lords as Baron DUN-
FERMLINE. There,moreover, under the same benig-
nant influence of the house of LANsDOWNE, sat,
from 1830 until the close of 1832, a more eminent
man than any yet particularised as M.P. for Caine
—Mr,, now Lord MACAULAY, Critic, Poet, Orator,
Historian, Essayist. More recently, under the
patronage of the Lord of the Manor of Caine, the
heroic defeniler of Kars, General Sir W. FENWICK
WILLIAMS, sat for Caine during the two or three
last sessions, as its representative in the Commons
House of Parliament. And now—who is it that
Lord LANSDOWNE has chosen for Caine as
its representative ? A DUNNING ? A BARRE ?
A JEKYLL ? An ABERCROMBIE ? A MACAULAY ?
Is it another Earl of KERRY —or is it
an Earl of SHELBURNE ? No—but as an illustrious
sequel to all these, it is the Right Hon. ROBERT
LowE, the ignominously rejected ex-M.P. for the
borough of Kidderminster. There seems latterly
to be a fatality about Mr. LOWE and his elections.
You may, if you please, call it simply a coincidence,
but even as a coincidence it is something in its
way very remarkable. It is remarkable that while
Mr. LOWE should have ibeen so beloved by the
electors of Kidderminster that he very nearly had
I his head broken down there at the previous general
election—at this last general election he all but
came in for the same treatment at the hands of the
Caine constituency. Scarcely was time late election
at Caine co.npleted, as a matter of course, by the
return of the Bowood nominee, when there was a
riot, expressive, of course, of the extreme delight of
the electors of Caine at the choice made for them
of their new representative. The electors, eager to
express their enthusiasm for their newly-chosen
M.P. through the very forcible agency of a stray
brickbat or two, sought everywhere for Mr. LOWE—
in vain, however, for Mr. LOWE had already taken his
departure. Deprived of the looked-for opportunity,
the electors of Caine indulged themselves in their
disappointment with an agreeable little riot upon
the approved model suggested to them by the
course previously pursued under a like provocation
by the ardent constituency of Kidderminster. And
now, after these ninety-seven years of uninterrupted
Bowood influence down at Caine—after this last
flagrant electioneering incident down at that
" small decaying borough of Calne"—where the
return of Mr. LOWE, under the patronage of Lord
LANSDOWNE, was celebrated by a riot on the part
of the constituency—now, after all this—time Times
has the extraordinarily cool effrontery to express the
utmost degree of virtuous indignation at the bare
idea of anything so gross, so flagrant, so wholly
unjustifiable and unprecedented as the mere pos-
sibility of Mr. WOP.TLEY being returned as M.P.
for Stamford under the influence of BRoWNLOW
CECIL, Marquess and Earl of EXETER ! Now, what
says PoD, in his " Electoral /lads," about the
influence at Stamford ? Why, at the bottom of the
first column of page 293, we find it notified that
the influence there, at the borough of Stamford, is
" chiefly possessed by the Marquis of EXETER."
Observe—" chiefly possessed," not altogether !
While, we have already seen that the influence
exercised by the Marquis of LANSDOWNE at Caine
is said not to be chief, not to be considerable, but
to be absolutely (in the late Mr. Dog's own phrase)