The Sun.
London, England, 1868-05-29 00:00:00

Tit E SUN, LONDON, FE I DAY EVENING, NAY 29, 186 S.

brought about by Mr. BAXTER'S famous resolution.
Mr. DISRAELI said that they would take seven of
the doomed burghs, and spare those of the largest
population above them. This is a wise arrange-
ment, on the whole, and lessens the disappointment
of interfering with the English Bill. Peebles and
Selkirk were joined together, not, however, without
some protest being made by Mr. MONCREIFF,, who
used the extraordinary argument that, if they began
this fashion, they might not easily stop short. This
is sure, however, to be said upon the adoption of
every new scheme, and we: are not surprised
that the Committee refused to sanction it. On the
whole, therefore, we think that the House has done
its best in this matter of the Scotch Reform Bill,
and the progress made yesterday will be more fully
appreciated when the Committee resumes its labours
after the Whitsuntide recess is over. It is very
probable that some points might have been more
wisely decided, and that some mistakes have been
made, but judging the work collectively it hardly
seems that it can be improved upon. Whatever of
shortcomings may exist must be laid to the charge
of those hon. members who, from various motives,
have persisted in interposing delays on the subject.
Mr. GLADSTONE, to do him justice, came to the
rescue yesterday, and said that they would run the
risk of reopening the English scheme of representa-
tion if they persisted in criticising everything too
closely. This was very wise counsel, and it was
fortunate that the House accepted it. It is indeed
high time that progress should be made, and it will,
after all, be in some sort a satisfaction to learn
that the Session has not been entirely wasted, and
that the ' House of Commons will endeavour to
realise the errors of their past, and retrace their
wandering steps.

The discussion on the Poor Relief Bill in the
House of Lords shows how difficult it is to legislate
on matters of minor detail. For instance, on prin-
ciple, it seems only right and just that every inmate
of a workhouse should have permission to go outside
to attend religious worship, but Lord REDESDALE
pointed out that this permission would require con-
sideration, as it was to be feared persons might
avail themselves of it to get off from the workhouse
altogether, and leave their children behind
them a burden .on the parish. Many privileges
are necessarily withheld from those who
would be grateful for them for fear of their being
abused by the worthless idlers who wish for nothing
better than to live at the public expense. This
difficulty shows the great necessity of a classifica-

tion of the inmates of all large unions, a necessity
which is being very slowly recognized. The whole-
sale manner in which the residents in a workhouse,
especially in the country, are too often herded to-
gether is equally opposed to the health, comfort, and
morality of the inhabitants. The young are very
apt to become contaminated by the constant asso-
ciation of older and hardened characteis,
vagrants, or drunkards, or, perhaps, worse. This
is, especially, the case in the female departments,
as those who have interested themselves in the
young girls and women brought up in workhouses
too well know. Those best acquainted with them
say that there is a manifest change in their manner
and conduct within a few days of their removal
from the school to the adult ward, and in the same
way the companionship and conversation of the
disreputable and worthless classes are irksome and
painful to those of a better stamp whom natural
infirmity or inevitable misfortune have driven to
the workhouse. If a better classification could be
carried out, and those persons of good character and
orderly conduct, who had themselves been rate-
payas, :or otherwise proved their industry and
willingness when able to support themselves, could
be kept apart from the numerous class, whose own
vicious habits and laziness have. pauperised them,
much good would be done. It would be possible
to .grant the first-class many privileges properly
withheld from the others, and the unions would be
more easily managed. Among the many improve-
ments now being carried out in workhouses, we
should like to see a change in this particular in-
eluded ; and we hope, while the matter is still under
discussion in Parliament, the necessity of a better
system of classification among the inmates of large
and populous unions will not be overlooked.

The political excitement in the United States,
which may be expected to reach its height in the
months of June and July, is to affect, it would
seem, the interests of others as well as American
citizens and voters. The great Fenian leader, Pre-
sident O'NEILL, intends to seize that favourable
opportunity to revenge the wrongs of Ireland upon
Canada. A circular, forwarded by that worthy to
the Fenian centres, shows that the rhodomontade
of the head centres is not exhausted, nor their
desire for mischief and plunder diminished by the
flight of time, the failure of their enterprises, or the
general condemnation of mankind. O'NEILL's
feelings have been deeply hurt, and with reason.
Malicious and self-constituted agents 'have
been busying themselves in promulgating- the
ith
statement that the Fenian leader Vie-. " too
virtuous " to revenge the death of e mar-
tyrs of Manchester. This very needless fear
Mr. O'NEILL effectually disposes of.in his circular.
His brothers are told to " believe itlYet." He is
ready to shed rivers of blood—a pleasant intima-
tion—for the Canadians, and he is firmly convinced
that rivers of blood will have to flow before Ireland
can take her place among the nations of the earth.
His virtue only extends so far as to refuse to sane-
-1 tion " the dagger of the assassin ;" but assassina-
tion on a wholesale scale he has no objection to,
even although to ordinary minds the connection
between Canada and Ireland is not very cleal::'
Revenge sure and certain is at hand for the mur-
ders of the Manchester martyrs and the cruel.
treatment of the Irish patriots pinin3 in British
dungons. How about the Clerkenwell martyrs
pining in hopeless infirmity ? All is to be done in
" fair and honourable fight," we are told, so that if
O'NEILL's programme is carried out we shall be
introduced to a new phase of Fenian warfare.
This wise and valiant leader thinks it necessary to
caution his followers against political tricksters who
want to join their organisation for their own selfish
purposes, and who have done much mischief in the
past. All Fenians must obey the Fenian Constitu-
tion, to be defined, we presume, by O'NEILL him-
self. All who form independent circles are not
Fenians. What a prospect for the Emerald Isle
when her liberation is effected and the rivers of
blood have flowed in her cause that there should be
divisions in the camp of her leaders. Who shall
decide when head centres disagree ? We hope
that some external authority will be found who will
(lilt a stop to al! this mischievous nonsense before it
causes any more loss of life and limb.

We are requested to contradict a statement to
the effect that his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales lies
consented to dine with the corporation of the Trinity
House on Trinity M)nday, Juno 8. No invitation has
yet been issued to his Royal Highness,tho banquet having
been deferred to a City subsequent to Trinity Monday,
when it is hoped that his Royal Highness the Duke of
Edinburgh, the Master, will have arrived, and be enabled
to preside.

The prices of Horniman's Teas are greatly reduced; their
well-known superiority has attracted a host of spurious
imitations; therefore notice all Genuine Packets are signed,
" gorniman c 0.," London. 00 Confectioners are Agents
inLc,ndon and 2,200 Chemists in the Country.

LITERATURE.

Bailey's Foetus.

Festus : A Poem. By Philip James Bailey. Seventh
Edition. One Vol., pp. 602. Bell and Daldy.
Universal Hymn. By the Author of " Festus."
One Vol., pp. 51. Bell and Daldy.

Our wonder is—not that this is the seventh edition
of " Festus," but that it is not the seventeenth.
Since the work was first published in 1839, when
its author was in the twenty-third year of his age,
it has been growing, and expanding, and spreading
forth its leaves and rising perpetually to greater
altitudes, like a noble tree in the fields of lite-
rature. -Upon its greater adornment, upon its
ampler range, upon its securer perpetuation, the
poet, of whose brain and heart it is the emanation,
has from the first lavished all the resources of his
genius. Like many a great original writer before
him, Philip James Bailey has in his time been the
target for those fleering sarcasms by which the
shallower intellects of the commonplace vindicate
their own lack altogether of anything like origi-
nality. There is that famous whimsicality, for
example, flung by him at the Devil, in the very
abandon of youthful genius—
" You look as if you lived on buttered thunder."
Why, for years the mere mention of the poet's name
brought forth the remembrance of that one phrase,
and wakened fresh peals of seemingly inextinguish-
able laughter. In the appreciation of that one
carefully-selected passage no attention whatever
was paid to an equally fantastic simile occurring
earlier in the poem—

"As though an earthquake smacked its mumbling lips
O'er some thick-peopled city."
Yet, while the " groundlings," in-another sense than
that in which Hamlet uses the word in his Address to
the Players, were making merry over a single selected
sentence, over one solitary phrase—which at the best
or at the worst was simply flung forth by the
young poet, as what it is and what it alone
affects to be, the wildest and wilfullest of whimsicali-
ties—they appeared to have no thought whatever of
the fact that the greatest creative geniuses of the past
had indulged in precisely the same extravagances
of metaphor or of diction. Instances by the half
dozen might be adduced in proof of this from
" Hamlet" and from " Faust," two of the most mar-
yellow productions of the human intellect—to say
nothing of the other effusions of Shakspere and
of Goethe. " Aha ! old Truepenny," or again
that allusion to " the fellow in the eellarage'
(phrases addressed or applied to the ghost
of his royal father -by the appalled and heart-
stricken Prince of Denmark), are cases, as we take
it, absolutely in point. It is the privilege of genius
alone—not of talent simply but of genius, that is,
of an intellect inspired by the true afflatus, the
poetic cestrunz, divine and undeniable—to indulge
in eccentricities like these, whimsicalities setting
at defiance all the laws of art, all the established
rules and regulations, so to speak, of the rhetorical
proprieties. Folly, it is true, may ape these eccen-
tricities, but genius alone can override them, can
by its all-mastering splendour not only insure their
toleration as mere freaks and oddities (atom-blurs
like the faculti on the solar disc), but reduce them
to almost inappreciable insignificance. Through
the admiration awakened by right of a prerogative
of that supreme order, the rare and casual phan-
tasies in which the author of " Festus" here and
there indulged, hie violations of good taste have
been more than merely condoned. They have come
to be accepted and recognised as integral parts of
one elaborate and wonderful whale. They are the
streaks in the onyx, the bee-bites on the nectarine,
the moles—

" Cinque-spotted like the crimson drops
I' the bottom of a cowslip "

is-

on the neck or bosom of beauty. Regarding it as a
work of art, as a product of unquestionable genius,
and that moreover a genius of an intensely and
essentially original character, we accept it in its abso-
lute entirety, in its full and comprehensive Integrity.
We take it, in otherwords, exactly as it is —precisely
as it comes to us from the artist-hand by which
it has been fabricated. For, 'as a work of art, it is
no mere cold and impassive form of marble carved
into linear beauty for the world's admiration. If it
might be likened to anything sculpturesque, it
would be alone to that statue of Pyrnalion's into
which the artist himself breathed the very breath
of life. Remembering the youth of the poet of
"Festus," when the book first made its appear-
ance, and remembering at the same time the
splendour and audacity of the imaginative flight
upon which he then adventured, who can wonder
that occasionally the beat of his strong pinion
flagged and faltered, who can marvel that in
spite of casual flaws and blemishes (all of them
when put together intrinsically of utter insignifi-
cance), who can marvel, we say, that the work,
upon its first coming forth, was welcomed by the
more discerning with mingled admiration and asto-
nishment ! That the first Earl of Ellesmere, himself
a fastidious and accomplished judge of poetic excel-
lence, exclaimed with enthusiasm, " I can scarcely
conceive any degree of poetic excellence which this
author, starting with so much richness of imagina-
tion and force of expression, may not be expected to
attain." That Bulwer, speaking at once out of his
large heart and from amidst his own lofty aspira-
tions and imaginings, pronounced the book " a
most remarkable and magnificent production."
That a poet, not of the schools, but of the
people, like Ebenezer Elliot, the Corn-Law
Rhymer, exclaimed almost defiantly in regard to
it—" It contains poetry enough to set ill; fifty
poets !" Who can wonder, again, among those who
know anything at all of "Festus," that a highly edu-
cated man of letters like Dr. Westland Marston,
while commending its imagery as " sometimes bold
and towering as the mountains, at others soft,
subtle, and delicate as the mists tliat veil their sum-
mits," hesitated;-net. to assert emphatically that
" there are few books in viiich what is so profound
in its essence is rendereiso familiar in its exposi-
tion." Eve **cat of its first ;appearance
..
the wort, Yi speikefounded to a whole. It
was no 'there 1" grnent :70i .instalment—it was
_Pie
young egOaty-dream in' itk Qopapleteness. t . Since
then—upon the original foundationa of thii 'poem
which ire Truilt‘ up from the first with 'a reverent
hand.likea very Temple of adoration -to God, he
has been raising, time by time, now, here, now there,
a loftier superstructure, elaborating, now this por-
tie9 of it, now that—devoting the main energies of
his life to the perfecting, so far as might be pos-
sible, of this as the opus magnum of his heart and of
his intellect. Until at last it has comp to assume to
itself some of the proportions and characteristics of
one of those "poems in stone," our grand old Gothic
Cathedrals. And of the artificer of this cathedral-
poem of " Festus," it may, indeed, be said without
any extravagance that he has lavished all the resources
of his genius, with an unstinting hand, alike upon all
portions of its most intricate and
comprehensive
fabrie'l From the crypts under the pavement, to
the trefoils of the parapet—up even to the topmost
pinnacle of the loftiest turret, clanged about by the
whirling wings of the claw ! Standing without—clos-
ing the book after a perusal of it--organ tones float to
us from it out ()tour remembrance. Standing within
—opening anew' these pages--we are there ia
the midst of all the glory showered down in gor-
geous dyes from the stained glass windows, we are
there among all those pictured and sculptured forms
of beauty:--we are there with the sanctuary be-
fore us,, and the altar, and the tabernacle—we
breathe the fragrance of the adorning flowers, we
smell the perfume of the incense from the swing-
ing 'thuribles, we hear the choral chant of the
ohoristere, the reedy notes and chords, the
variable stops and pedals of the great organ
with a sense upon us, all the while, of the pendulum
throbbing every second in the clock tower, of the
chimes pealing quarter by quarter in the belfry,
of the grand bourdon tolling hour after hour from
its own central turret, of the stony imps and devils
leering and mowing each from its coign of van-
tage, a gurgoyle. We know of no apter symbol,
through which to indicate the scope, and aim,
and significance of " Festus" as a poem, than that
of one of those grand old Cathedrals. The word
expressed by it all is —God. The very first scene
(which is Heaven) has for its interlocutors God and
the Cherubim and Seraphim. The first line articu-

lated by the latter, as also the refrain throughout,

" God! God ! God !"
Hear Festus himself descanting upon the glory and
unutterable bliss of the Creator, as symbolised in
that true Music of the Sphere; when—
" Heaven's harps
And orbs join in : the whole boing harmony—
Distinct yet blended—blending all in one
Long an delicious tremble like a chord."
The poet adding—
". But to Thee, God, all being is a harp,
Whereon Thou makest mightiest melody."
Or listen to him again when he recounts, through
the burning lips of Lucifer the process of crea.

tion :
" God worketh slowly ; and a thousand years
He takes to lift His hand off. Layer on layer
He made earth, fashioned it, and hardened it
Into the great, bright, useful thing it is ;
Its seas, life-crowded, and soul-hallowed lands
Ho girded with the girdle of the suu
That set its bosom glowing like love's own
Breathless embrace, clos3-clinging as for life ;
Veined it with gold and dusted it with gems,
Lined it with fire, and round its heart-fire bowed
R)ck-ribs unbreakable ; until at last
Earth took her shining station as a star,
In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds."
How, in effect, is Universal Beauty apostrophized
by the poet of Festus, speaking through the voice of
Helen, one of his heroines ? Why, as thus—

"Thou apply of God's eye!"
And, again, remembering that HeaTen is the home
of God, how sublimely he says at one time (again
through the lips of Lucifer)—
"The Universe is but the Gate of Heaven."
And again—

"01, ! everything
To me seems good, and lovely, and immortal ;
The whole is beautiful ; and I can see
No wrong in man, nor nature, nought not meant ;
As from His hands it comes who fashions all,
All Holy as His word. The world is but
A revelation. He breathes Himself upon us
Before our birth, as o'er the formless void
He moved at first, and we are all inspired
With His Spirit. All things are God or of God,
For the whole world is in the mind of God,
What a thought is in ours. Why boast we then
Of aught ? All that is good belongs to God ;
And good and GJd are all things or shall be."
Another while in the same spirit, he says or rather
sings—

" One solitary or foreseeing thought
Passed like a planet's transit o'er the sun
Across the brow, of God."
Somewhere, if we remember rightly, he speaks even
of the azure heavens above us, as—
" The blue eye of God." s
It is the alpha and the omega, the beginniet and
the end : it is the absolute whole of his medita-
tions—the adoration of God. And, being so, how
he lifts his reader's heart up, with a true sursum
corda, by this ennobling incentive-
-" Let each man know himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God ;"
bidding him, thereupon, act and live accordingly.
The thought, here, out of which that incentive
springs being identical with the one he elsewhere so
exquisitely expresses thus—
" The world is a great poem, and the worlds
The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts."
So heartening is his philosophy, that from the known
he argues the unknown, asserting boldly—
" Faith is a higher faculty than reason."
According to the same admirable reasoning set
forth in Blanco White's superb sonnet, the sonnet
ending_
"If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life—"
Bailey observes in his very proem—
" We know in day-time, there are stars about us,
Just as at night, and name them what and where
By sight of science ; so by faith wo know,
Although we may not see them till our night,
That spirits are about us, and believe,
That to a spirit's eye, all Heaven may be
As full of angels as a beam of light
Of motes."
No metaphor is too daring for him in the enun-
ciation of bis thronging thoughts. " Destruction
ani salvation," he says,
" are the hands
Upon the face of time. When both unite,
The day of death dawns."
As for annihilation, he recoils from the mere con-
jecture of it, crying aloud—
" Hell is more bearable than nothingness."
Occasionally, when he seems to soar the highest, he
drops into a colloquialism that has a bathos iu its
very extravagance, as where he says—
" Sometimes we feel the wish across the mind
Rush like a comet, tearing up the sky,
That we should join with God and give the woad
The slip."
At other moments his delicacy of illustration
dwindles into mere prettiness, as where he speaks of
heaven towards evening—
,- Just when the stars falter forth, ono by one,
Like the first words of lova from a maiden's lips."
For the most part, however, the tenderness of his
lovelier similes in no way derogates from the pre-
vailing dignity of his verse ; in illustration of which,
as we turn the leaves, we light upon the subjoined—
Tears, feeling's bright embodied form, are not
More pare than dewdrops, Nature's tears which she
Sheds in her own breast for the fair which die.
The sun insists on gladness ; bait at night
When he is gone, poor Nature loves to weep."
The merest hint of a metaphor sometimes evidences
under his hands an extraordinary and overflowing
abundance of imaginative powert When Festus,
for instance, is asked by Clara, Cau'st see the
world," he replies—
"Just—a huge shadowy shape ;
It looks a disembodied orb—the ghost
Of some great sphere which God hath stricken dead ;
Or like a worl I which God hath thought—not made."
How daintily in his lighter moments he can em-
bellish a thought with music of verse, and grace of
illustration, let Helen answer when Festus casts
aside for coolness the wreath she has twined about
his temples .""
I thought 'twas a thorn which was tearing thy brow,
And if it were only a rose-thorn was tearing, -
Why, whether of gold or of roses, as now,
A crown if it hurts us is hardly worth wearing."
Frequently the whole force of his most powerful
utterances will be found to be in their exceeding
simplicity. Instance this—
" Peace hath more might than war. High brows are calm.
Great thoughts are still as stars ; and truths, like Suns,
Stir not; though many systems tend round them.
Mind's step is still as Death; and all great things
Which cannot be controlled, whose end is good."
Of again, in austerer shape, the following :
" And there arose
Out of the earth a giant thing, all earth ;
His eye was earthy, and his arm was earthy :
He had no heart. He but said, lam Decay,
And, as he spoke, he crumbled into earth,
And there was nothing of him."
So all-embracing are his sympathies, he even goes
so far as to assert that—
"— evil is
Good in another way we are not skilled in."
It is here, in " Festus," that is set forth that most
exquisite of all symbols of the Holy Trinity, the
combination of the three primitive colours - into
which the beam of white light is resolvable : the
poet here showing that—
"— as the three primal rays make one
Sole beam of Light, so the throe Persons make
One God."
Reverting for a moment to what we have already
asserted as to the theme, the purport, the inspiration
of the whole poem being God, the poet's words are
worthy of transcription where lie exclaims in an
impassioned apostrophe—
" Thou knowest, God, that to the full worship
All things aro worship full; and Thy great name
In all its awful brevity bath nought
Unholy breeding in it, but doth bless
Rather the tongue that utters it ; for me
I ask no higher office than to fling
My spirit at Thy feet, and cry Thy name,
God ! through eternity."
Everywhere, above, below, around him, in the
minutest atom no less than in the immeasurable
universe he beholds the attestation of the divinity.
He sees the recognition of God in the very twink-
ling of the stars in the heavens, when he points to—
" Yon countless orbs, aye fixing each on Him
Its flaming eye, which winks and blenches oft
Beneath His glance."
• With one other extract only shall we here indulge
ourselves. And it is one that, for the force and
passion of it, may be not inaptly quoted as one
of the most startling integral portions of an extra-
ordinary whole. It is from the scene in Hell, where
the Fiends sing in chorus
" Fill the bowl ! it burns but blackly,
• Fill it up with living fire :

Drunkard! hadst thou sipped as slackly
As thou pourest—pour it higher !
Then thou hadst ne'er with me been bound
In Hell to dwell ;
But lot the burning toast go round—
Drunkard!—to Hell!

Fill ! it drinks but cold and leadly ;
Fill it up with bubbling fire.
Drink ! 'tis nothing half so deadly
As thy soul, when living, Liar !
Or thou hadst ne'er with me been bound
In Hell to dwell;
But let the burning health go round—
Liar !—to Hell!

Fill ! it boils but sick and sadly ;
Fill ! some more immortal fire ;
Murderer! drain it quickly, madly,
As the stab thou gav'st thy sire !
Or thou hadst near with me been bound
In Hell to dwell ;
But let the burning health go round—
Murderer !—to Hell !"

As clearly demonstrative of the fact that the suc-
cessive editions which have already appeared of
"Festus" have been no mere reprints, have been
subjected to more than simple revision and emen-
datiou at the author's hands, we would direct atten-
tion to the fact that the latest, now in our hands—
we believe, by the way, that there is a still later
one in immediate preparation, • if it has not even
already made its appearance—we would direct at-
tention to the fact that the seventh edition of
" Festus," now under our consideration, has been
increased by nearly one hundred pages, by at any
rate at the very least sixty-seven pages, not
one word of which appeared in any of
its six predecessors. And, as affording
conclusive testimony at once that this in-
crease has been no mere dilution of the origi-
nal " nectar of the gods " here put to our lips,
we would instance one entire.scene—a scene, in the
poetic excellence of it, absolutely on a par with the
happiest of those already familiar to the reader—a
scene occurring at pp. 414-428, in which Festus
and Lucifer are the interlocutors upon the Earth at
Midnight. " Festus" in truth is an absorbent—
not only of 'the care, and time, and life, and ge-
nius of its author, but bodily of the whole substance
of any other among his really successful literary
productions. In proof of which it may be men-
tioned that the poem of 4, The Angel World,"
publiihed originally ani separately in 1850 he has
since then incorporated with his larger and more am-
bitious masterpiece of "Festus." And so 110 w, again,
it will be eventually, we believe, in a great measure, in
regard to the very latest of ,his poetic effusions; the
" Universal Hymn," in will* like Shadrach, Me-
shach, and Abednego, he himself chanting the
praises of God in the midst of the fiery fur-
nace of the world, makes the mountains and
the valleys, the seas and the streams, the lightaing
and the thunder, the zephyr and the whirlwind, the
volcano and the earthquake, the dews and the hoar
frosts, the spring flowers and the primeval
forests, harvest and vintage, day and night,
heat and cold, cycles and seasons, the
heavens and the earth, vocal with one Univer-
sal- Hymn or Song of Adoration. Instead of
actually incorporating this.with " Festus" later on,
however (though from its intrinsic excellence the
Hymn would be quite worthy of such incorporation),
the author would do well, we think, by rather append-
ing it to the larger and nobler poem, in the same
manner in which Thomson has appended his hymn,
beginning
" These as they change, Almighty Father, those
Are but the varied God "-
as an appropriate climax to his quadruple poem of

" The Seasons." And " Festus" could merge into
no more fitting climax than the " Universal Hymn"
the author of "Festus" has, here, most happily pro-
duced. It breathes throughout the same glowing
and adoring spirit, bearing a resemblance (in its
relation to the effect of " Festus") to one of those
antiphonal voluntaries that we pause to listen to as
it peals forth from the organ within, before we pass
out into the world again from under the porch of a
Cathedral.

LATEST INTELL MENGE.

(REUTER'S TELEGRAMS.)

AUSTRIA.

VIENNA, May 29.

It is understood that at the Cabinet Council held
yesterday, at which the Emperor presided, it was
resolved to abandon the Property Tax project, but
to accede to the proposal of the minority of the
Budget Committee for a tax of 20 per cent. on all
coupons. The proposal of the majority of the
committee to reduce the interest on all State Secu-
rities by 25 per cent. was declared impossible for
the Government to ask his Majesty to sanction.
Count Stackelberg, the Russian Ambassador,, had
a private audience of the Emperor yesterday, to
present his letters of recall. His Excellency has
left this capital for Paris.

SAXONY.

DRESDEN, May 28 (Evening).

In to-day's final sitting of the Upper and Lower
Houses a fresh vote was taken upon the bill relative
to the abolition of capital punishment. In the
Upper House the previous question was again re-
jected by 20 votes against 16.
In the Lower House 40 members voted for, and
24 against, the previous question. But as the ma-
jority which had voted for the previous question
(and therefore against the bill) did not comprise
the necessary number of two-thirds, the President
of the Chamber declared capital punishment to be
abolished.

THE BRAZILS.
(Via Lisbon)
BUENOS AYRES, April 26.

Exchange on London 50. Wet salted ox hides,
40 to 43. Number slaughtered, 62,000. Total
sales, 290,500. Shipments, 144,562. No stock
dry hides.- American, 43 for 21. Total sales,
69,000. Shipments, 166,083. Stock, 30,000.
Wool, 48 to 82. Tallow, 15. Lumber, 88 to 40.
Sugar, 18k. Flour, 10.

OUTWARD BOMBAY MAIL.
GIBRALTAR, May 29.

The Syria from Southampton, 23d inst., arrived
yesterday at 10 a.m., and left at 3 p.m. for Alex-
andria ; all well. Experienced unsettled weather.

CALCUTTA, May 9, via Trieste.

The appointment of Mr. Seton Karr as Foreign
Secretary has caused great dissatisfaction, and ad-
verse comments on the subject have appeared in the

Onnot ••1%- cum

HER MAJESTY.

BALMORAL CASTLE, May 26.

The Queen drove out in the morning, accom-
panied by Princess Louise ; and her Majesty drove
out again in the afternoon, with the Dtlchess of
Athole and Miss Macgregor in attendance.

The Prince of Wales drove out yesterday, ac-.
companied by the Crown Prince of Denmark.
Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales also
drove out, in the afternoon, accompanied by the
Crown Prince of Denmark.