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

THAMES.

MURDEROUS ASSAULT ON A POLICE CONSTABLE...—
William Warner, a labourer, was brought
before M r
Woolrych, charged with assaulting and wounding
Police-
constable Hine, 184 H, who appeared in Court with sur-
gical plaisters on his head, and in a weakly condition from
loss of blood.
Last night there was a serious disturbance among a num-
ber of drunken ruffians in Church-street, St. George-in-the-
East, and the Police-constable Hine endeavoured to
suppress it, and was very roughly used. He was kicked
and knocked down, and his hat fell off. He got up, and
was pursuing one of his assailants into a house,
in which the prisoner was a lodger, When he
was again knocked down by a tremendous blow
on the head, which was inflicted with a poker. He
bled profusely, and was conveyed to the station house com-
pletely disabled. The surgeon of the division forbade the
constable going on duty again this morning, but the case
took a favourable turn, and he attended to give evidence,
and swore positively that the prisoner was the man who
struck him with the poker. A policeman, 116 H, who as-
sisted in quelling the riot, was also ill-used.
The prisoner complained of the terrible punishment be
received from the police.

Mr. Woolrych said the defendant engaged in a row, and
in a most reckless manner struck at the policeman. He
sentenced the prisoner to one month's imprisonment.
ASSAIMT ON A TRADESMAN.—CorneIius Driscoll, a
respectable-looki :; man, was brought before Mr. Wool-
rych charged with assaulting George Bandy, a builder of
High -s,reet, Shadwell.

The complainant began by stating that the prisoner com-
mitted a most gross, fearful, and savage assault upon him
and then proceeded to state that he had dealt with the pri-
soner for colours, and there was an account between them.
He believe he owed the prisoner about DI On Saturday
evening he was paying his men, and the prisoner demanded
payment of debt owing to him. Ho requested the defend-
ant to seek his legal remedy which any respectable man
ought to do in a disputed account. The prisoner then struck
him on the jaw with his fist, and dislodged one of his teeth.
He believed that the prisoner had a sharp instrument in his
hand when he struck him, for he bled copiously after he re-
ceived the blow. The complainant then produced the shirt
he was wearing at time he was assaulted. It was covered
with blood which flowed from a cut lip.
Tho prisoner said Mr. Boddy abused him most grossly
when he asked for his debt, and called him an Irish
vagabond.

Mr. IVoolrych asked the complainant if he applied the
offensive term Irish vagabond to the complainant, and he
said he might have done so.

Mr. IVoolrych fined the prisoner 155., which he paid.

LEIGH Ii UNT'S LAST EVENING 'AT

HOME.

(Front 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 cii cumstance 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
Ine 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 yon 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 faculties held
in his nature any thing like a distinct predominance—l
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 aloae
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 tor ail the sugarplums 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 one 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 1 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
month of the twelve, the apostrophe ending with that mel-
lifluous couplet, the conclusion of which is like a breath
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 bush upon which they aro blooming ;
who can 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
soma 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 I"

So, likewise, when he was writing, particularly in verse,
upon anything whatever possessing the divine grace and
crowning 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 one 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 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 I"
As he wrote, likewise so he read, with a hand and an eye of
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
an impress like a dimple ;
the companionship of
cheek, that left
eeraecandoerf,
moreover,them
giving the
this sympathetic appreciatiop.
One of these well-fingered books, a very wall of fruit,
has notified
tr
with a bee-made cicatrice here and there upon, the riper
green-gages and apricots—a volume he dearly loved, and
at
hadread
athduirolurgathinf,o,u(ritiaM. Abel Rm
times—he as
aars it,an "withs
translation in-
creasing
othe veritable Chinese Novel, " lu-kiao-li ; or, the Tw)
night Fair Cousins")—Leigh Hunt lent me, this last • ht of our
meeting, shortly before we parted,
bidding
me, as he did so,
preserve it tenderly for him, as one of the many million
a
firas 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 Chinese
Chronicler, by Leigh Hunt's own hand, and by that of his
loved and honoured friend, Thomas Carlyle. Such fantastic
touches, some of them I 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 irri-
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 1"
More thickly, however, than the margins of his books,
the pleasant hours of his converse were sown with whynsi:
calities, ilmould not speak of even ono of ids own

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 Y 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 fantasticaliy to the more infatuated
votaries 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 f 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 tear."

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 Tory 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 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 sittings
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 all mal• d-propos
airs in the wide world 1) 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 n look of his white hair.

RAILWAY INTELLIGEA CE.

TRAFFIC RETURNS FOR THE WEEK.

Miles Opened. Receipts.
Railways. ~______..._, ~..____....:--.....
1861. 1860. 1861. 1860.
______•-•
Ballymena and Port Rush.. - - X X
- -
Belfast and N. Counties.... 136 136 1,939 1,063
Belfast and Comity Down.. 49 39% 655 603
Birkd., Lane., & Ches. June. - - - -
Blyth and Tyne 2O 20 1,943 1,822
Bristol and Exeter 106% 125 6,078 6,170
Caledonian
Cockermouth & Workington 84 8 - -
Cork and Bandon 2O 20 351 331
Cork, Blackrock, & Passage 6% 6% 193 210
Cork and Youghal .. 26 23 225 201
Cornwall 53% 53% 1,201 1,110
Deeside l7 17 308 232
Dublin & Belfast Junction 63 63 1,645 1,572
Dublin and Drogheda 63 63 1,897 1,800
Dub. & Wicklow (in.Kingst ) 48% 401 1,838 1,967
Dundalk and Enniskillen
Dundee and Arbroath 17% 17% 670 661
Dundee, Perth, & Aber. Jun 3l 31 1,019 1,041
East Anglian 67% 67% 1,145 1,013
E.Counties,Nrfk.,&E.Union 499 499 28,204 27,441
Edinburgh and Glasgow
Edinburgh, Perth,& Dundee 78 78 3,864 3,650
Forth & Clyde Junction
Furness
Glasgow & South-Western 183! 1831 8,308 8,081
Great Northern 330 330 30,907 28,544
Great North of Scotland
rit.Southn. & Westn.(lrind ) 329 229 8,916 8,411
Great Western 761% 757% 48,222 46,604
Inverness & Aberdeen June 55 55 1,039 879
Irish South-Eastern 25 25 266 279
Lancashire & Yorkshire 395% 395% 34,965 36,409
Leominster and Kington
Limerick and Ennis... 244 24% 203 210
Limerick and Foynes 2 26% 137 167
Llanelly 4 46 580 469
London & North-Western
London and Blackwall 6% S 1,471 1,571
London & South-Western
Lond. Brighton, &S. Coast 241% 2234 18,442 18,715
London, Chatham, & Dover 72 29f 1,955 554
Lond., Tilbury, & Southend 42 40 1,361 1,185
6lan.,Sheffield, & Lincolnsh 291 291% 15,498 15,290
Manch. S.Jun.& Altrinchami 9 9 1,103 1,106
Maryport and Carlisle
Midland (incl. N.-Western) 614% 6141 40,563 40,050
Midland Gt.Westn. of Irind. 192% 17 J.
-- 7. 5,245 4,361
Monkland 56 56 1,567 1,583
Monmouthsh. Rail. & Canal 44 44 2,724 2,509
Newcastle and Carlisle 7B 78 3,416 3,531
North British (incl. Selkirk
and Galashiels)
North Devon 35 3.5 594 522
N-Eastern(Bedale&Leybrn) 789 764 38,891 41,114
North London , 9 9 2,394 2,528
North Staffordshire 246 246 7,649 8,141
Oswestry and Newton .30 16 578 295
Rhymney 19% 19% 810 727
St. Helen's Canal & Railway 52 52 1,883 1,994
Scottish Central 54 53% 3,076 3,507
Scottish North-Eastern ll5 115 4,159 3,922
Shrewsbury & Birmingham - - - -
Shrewsbury and Chester - -
Shrewsbury & Hereford
291 291 51 51 2,121 1,870987
Shropshire Union 895
South Devon
South-Eastern 306 308 21,193 22,869
South Wales l7lf 1f 7,403 7,411
_
S. Yorkshire and River Dun 118 118 -
ngt 8,905 7,792
Stockton and Darlington
Taff Vale 5l 54 5,015 5,172
51 1,937 1,923
Ulster 6l
19 19 770 721
Ulverstone and Lancaster .
10 10 158 134
Vale of Clwyd 35 35 1,968 1,603
Vale of Neath
31
Waterford and 'Kilkenny ;.l
77 33G 340
Waterford and Limerick .• • 77 1,619 1,708
- -
4,183 4,932
- -
vvvvw7hussattavbfCrteoniirndexipawiooeniitli.o.r.ar:sz.DE.r..grmi
R. .titi
3_2_
,771 L.:73%
Whitehaven Junction l2 12 393 369
AntwerpWh it eh a vaennd&
Rotterdam,Ju n .
35
BBFeuotaonwa Eastern
Lake
pa kCOLONIAL.
Junction
laHuron
ct. .
8162811
1667131
428:747075484
428,
0,63946377
Austrian 52 1,309 1,039
ion_ 261 26i 307 346
Detroit and Milwaukie 18.5 185 4,669 5,234
Dutch Rhenish lOB% 108% 4,376 3,673
Eastorn of France 1032 1006 60,612 55,996
East Indian - -
Grand Trunk of Canada 970 970 16,997 16,626
Great Indian Peninsula 350% 297% 2,597 3,185
Great Luxembourg l2B 128 3,756 2,784
Great Western of Canada 345 345 12,352 11,101
Lyons and Geneva 142 142 6,181 6,494
Madrid, Saragossa &Alicant 301 284 14,693 15,523
Northern of Canada
Northern of France 628 614 58,257 51,728
Norwegian Trunk 44 44 1,027 1,056
Paris, Lyons, & Mediterrn 879 840 111,970 93,102
Paris and Orleans 922 922 56,672 61,115
Pernambuco 36% - 550 -1
Royal Danish 69 69 632 611
Sambre and Meuse 6B 68 1,519 I,IP
South Austrian
Southern of France
Welland.... . .. 1727571 977137
2770;675909676 530,,9
98
I. 25 25 977 1,033
West Flanders
W. and N.W. of France 742 730 51,831 44,189

OPENING OF THE NATIONAL GarlsclLTuEaußrrnel—wr
hGOiacnhl..
Saturday the National Gallery, Tnraamfaledg
has been closed some time for alterations, was reopened to
Mondays,
the public. During the recess the collection of paintings
bequeathed to the nation by the late W. Turner (125 in
whatvhee
Nbefeaniorneamloavaedllefriyo,mantdhearSeouantlanKgeendsin
Kensington
inzstr%)
great western room, which is now
~ ingthne
d esdays, and Saturdays, Thursdays ry. The National Gallery will now be
public four days in the week, viz opened to the
leenTuesdays,
set apart for students. sclaYB and Fridays being