The Sun.
London, England, 1868-06-23 00:00:00

EXPLANATION.

barometer corrected and reduced to 32 deg. a sea level. Thelettere
r.,
rising; f., falling ; a., steady—indicate direction of motion of the
mercury within last 14 hours. Thermometer exposed in shade.
Extreme Force with its Direction during last 24 hours. Z.—calm
Weather : b.—blue sky ; c.—clouds, detached ; f.--fog ; h.—hail ;
I.—lightning ; m,—misty, hazy ; o.—overcast, dull; r, rain; s.—snow;
t.—thunder. Rain-fall, snow or hail (melted) during last 24 hours.
Sea disturbance.

REMA RKS.
The distribution of atmospherical pressure has undergone scarcely
any change since yesterday morning. It is rather more uniform, but
continues lower in the N. than elsewhere. Temperature also remains
almost unaltered ; but the air is somewhat drier in the east. The
winds are generally south-westerly, light to moderate; but have
drawn to NV.N.W in the south of Ireland. Light rain has fallen at
most stations. This morning the weather is cloudy, with rain still
prevailing in the N.W,

The Emperor of Austria is gone to Tr tgue, ostensibly
to open a railway bridge, really to make a last attempt to
reconcile his Czech subjects to him. If they accept the
overtures offered to them the greatest possible autonomy
will be given to them consistent with the integrity of the
empire ; but hitherto they have demanded more than
this. He has, however, been very favourably received,
and replied in the Bohemian language to an address which
was presented to him in that language.

The Times publishes a letter from Alexandri ti taking
exception to the reply of Sir Stafford Northcote to the
deputation which waited upon him in reference to the tele-
graphic communication with India. The present lines vid
Constantinople and Russia, it is stated, have never worked
with any degree of regularity for any length of time,and as the
messages by both lines pass through the hands of clerks of
various nationalities, correctness in transmission is almost
out of the question. The Government are only throwing
good money after bad in vainly endeavouring to improve
the present routes rid Russia, Turkey, and the Persian
Gulf to India. The best portion of these routes, is, un-
doubtedly, the Persian Gulf cable; and the new land-
line scheme rid Prussia and Russia, which is being
laid, is open to the same objections as the pre-
sent routes as far as l3assorah. Last year the pro-
moters of the proposed Red Sea line made an offer to
the Government that, in consideration of their agreeing to
a 5 per cent, guarantee on the capital required to establish
this line, they would undertake to work the Persian Gulf
telegraph, and further to relieve the Government of the
£36,000 a year they are bound to pay the shareholders of
the original Red Sea and India Telegraph Company for a
period of from forty to fifty years, which advantageous
offer, however, the Government declined to accept. Si,
Stafford Northcote's reply, the correspondent thinks, woul,
lead the public to imagine that the faults of the present
routes to India are not numerous, whereas their name i,

LITERATURE,

The Prime Minister's Novels.

Novels and Tales. By the Right Hon. Benjamin
Disraeli, M.P. The Disraeli Edition. Five

Volumes. Frederick Warne and Company.

A brilliant Novelist having become Prime Minis-
ter of England, small wonder that his publisher
should issue from the press a new edition of his
Tales and Romances. The occasion and coinci-
dence are alike exceptional. Literary First Lords
of the Treasury there have been, of course. The
two ex-Premiers, for example, are both of them
distinguished as Men of Letters. One of them,
indeed, has rendered himself illustrious, at once as
a scholar and as a poet, as a Greek scholar and as
an English poet, by his noble version, in our Anglo-
Saxon tongue, of the grand heroic epic of the
•‘ Iliad." Other Prime Ministers before the two
Earls, before Lord Russell, the friend of Tom
Aloare, and before Lord Derby, the translator of
Homer, have, to employ a hackneyed eupheuism,
cultivated the fields of literature. Canning, indeed,
tong after sewing his literary and political wild-
oats in the fertile furrows of the Anti-Jacobin,
indulged his ineradicable predilection for rhyth-
mical epigrams and rhyming jee d'e'sprit, even to
the penning of instructions to a diplomatic agent, in
the Netherlands. Bat there is uo record, until
cow, in the history at once of Politics and of Letters,
,f a popular novelist winning first of all success
Ifter success as a pare'.y imaginative writer, and
afterwards as the sequel to a series of bril-
liant triumphs in the House of Commons as a
great master of Debate, as an Orator of the highest
listinction, and as the undisputed leader during
fully twenty years of the Tory Party, that is to
iay of the party consisting chiefly of the country
gentlemen of England, winning his way to the
very pinnacle of power by assuming his place upon
;he Treasury Bench as the First Minister of the
ijrown, or, in other words, as the Head of Her
lajesty's :Government. This exceptional distinc-
tion has, as we all know well enough, been achieved
oy the now First Lord of the Treasury, the
iiight hon. gentleman the member for Backingham-
;hire. With his achievements as a politician,
iowever, with his position as a statesman, with
ais eminence as a debater, with the power and
splendour of his oratory, with the poignancy of his
:hetorical sarcasms, with his consummate skill as a
earliamentary tactician, with his inexhaustible
energy, whether in attack as leader of the Opposi-
tion or in defence as leader of the Administration,
we have here nothing whatever to do. It is, in
another sense than ordinary, with Disraeli the
Younger, it is with the Novelist rather than with
the Statesman, that we have now more immediately
to deal, when we come to an examination of this
latest and most interesting among all the numerous
editions of his works of fiction " I'he Disreali Eli-
,;ion" of these fourteen distinct products of his
Animated and animating imagination. It extends

—this new edition—to the length of Five handsome
volumes, three of them containing two imaginative
works in each, one three, and another five. A mere
enumeration of these fourteen imaginative works of
,he now Prime Minister of England will be suffi-
cient here simply as a reminder—the works them-
selves being thoroughly well known by this time
to the majority of novel readers. Sabdividing
the Premier's age into three score, however,
it may at once bo remarked, in general terms,
that the first twenty years of his life were given up
to education and preparation generally for his after
career, as one who had to make his way in the
world, and who was determined, and at the same
time qualified, to make it ! That the second twenty
years were devoted to literature and to the prelimi-
nary labours of a politician who was resolved upon
making good his claim to be regarded eventually
is both a statesman ant an administrator. That
the third twenty years were dedicated absolutely
and exclusively to the vindication of his position as
a Leader of Party, and ultimately, as we all see, as
the Chief Minister of the Crown, and as such, Head
of her Majesty's Government. Twenty years a
student—twenty years a N welist —twenty years a
Great Party Leader —and, at the close of these three
score years, Prime Minister of Englan 1. Sach, in
brief, has been the career of the present First Lord
f the Treasury. It is with the fddlle perio I
of his life that we have now to do. It
s with the fruit of that central score or.
:ears that we have here to deal exclusively.
Within that interval, his fourteen works, as a man
A letters, were produced. " Vivian Grey " was
the first, " Tancred" the last, of his novels. Toe
former, published anonymously, was, at one time,
reputed to be a posthumous work of Lord Byron's.
Che latter—closing abruptly, and altogether giving
one the notion of a pursuit suddenly and absolutely
abandoned, rather than of an individual task left
incomplete--" Tancred," that is to say, marks the
period at which the Novelist disappeared, and the
Parliamentary Chieftain assumed his place. In the
collective reissue of these remarkable fictions, it is
especiallyworthyof note th at in the Prefatory remarks,
or "Advertisements," so called, prefixed to two or
three of these works, the author, casting a retrospec-
tive glance back at his youthful productions, refers
to them almost as though they were the produc-
:ions of somebody else—leaving them to be regarded
and treated simply as they deserve. The Advertise-
ment to "Vivian Grey," indeed, is distinctly depreca-
tory of criticism, referring to books written by boys,
as, each of them, a kind of literary lusus, and as in-
variably founded on affectations. To this it may
h :re be added that what constituted the prominent
charm of that celebrated novel when it first male
its appearance was the sublime impertinence with
which it was written throughout. As to the love
story of " Henrietta Temple," which appeared nine
or ten years afterwards, it was significant of the
entourage of the young novelist that the work was
inscribed, and still stands inscribed, to Count Alfred
D'Orsay, by his affectionate friend the Author.
"The Young Duke," a novel descriptive of a
frivolous age, when George the Fourth was King,
;s referred to by Mr. Disraeli himself as a juvenile
production full of affectation and conceit, and yet
is vindicated by him, in a manner, as such, by the
extraordinary dictum that "every man has a right
to be conceited until he is successful." " Venetia,"
which was published originally in 1837, was
then, as it is still, inscribed to a very different
personage indeed—namely, to Lord Lyndhurst,
•‘ as a record of respect and affection." " Con-
tarini Fleming," a psychological romanc!,
penned some half-dozen years previously, was issued
from the press, like " Vivian Grey," quite anony-
mously. Several works of a minor or miscellaneous
character, it is only necessary here to particularise
by name—one carrying us into the empyrean, the
other conveying us to the nether regions, one of
them being entitled " Ixion in Heaven," the other
" The Infernal Marriage," the latter having rela-
tion, in fact, to the espousals of Pluto and Pro-
serpine. " Captain Popauilla " being descrip-
tive of an imaginary voyage, belongs in a manner,
:o that especial category of works of which Capt.
Lemuel Gulliver's record is the most memorable ex-
emplar, and to which, after a fashion belongs the
Robinson Crusoe" of Defoe, the " Utopia" of Sir
Chomas More, and the " Arcadia" of Sir Philip
Sydney, or its author would have us call it by pre-
ference, of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke.
Besides these lesser works of Disraeli just now enu-
aerated, three others have yet to be mentioned.
['here is the five act tragedy of" Count Alarcos"—

the period of which is in the thirteenth century,
::tud the scene of which is at Burgos, the capital of
Castillo, and its immediate vicinity. Then, too,
there is " The Rise of Iskander," the Kingof Epirus.
And, of more importance still, there is the won-
drous "Tale of Alroy," of David Airoy, the Prince
of the Captivity. In 1844, however, there was
!iublished for the first time what was certainly Mr.
Disraeli's most successful work, what we ourselves
,nust always regard as his literary masterpiece
Coningsby." Three considerable editions of
Coningsby" were sold off within three months
from the date of its first appearance : as many as
fifty thousand copies being quickly bought up in the
United States of America. Then again, there was
" Sybil, or the Two Nations," meaning the Rich
and the Poor here in England. And finally there
was the Premier's last novel of ‘‘ Tanered, or the

, New Crusade." Other literary productions then
are of his, not included in this collective edition ei
his writings, such, for example, as his it Reveltl"
tionary Epick " and his " Lord George 13e1P.
tiuck : a Biography." Here at anyrate in tbesde
five volumes we have, in a really handsome al!
substantial form the whole of his imaginative Writ-
ings—in companionship with which one of the
days we hope to see issued from the press another
set of books just as handsomely got up, a w°rkr
comprising within it the whole of his parliareewe
tary and extra-parliamentary speeches. As th
record of the Twenty years of his Literary Career,
the five volumes now placed within reach Of 1‘1r;
Disraeli's admirers as a Novelist, possess a peculiar
interest and attraction, not unnaturally enbsoced
by the fact of their appearance from the press
during the period of his Premiership.

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41.1 •,,vokt„ ;,A4114)
itsy,

II ER 111.1.IESTY.

BUCKINGHAM PALACE, June 22.
The Queen, accompanied by their Royal nigh'
nesses Prince and Princess Louis of Hesse, Prince3B
Louise, Prince Arthur, Prince Leopold, and roll,.
cess Beatrice, left Windsor Castle this morning am
half-past 11 o'clock, and arrived at Backingh3l3l
Palace at half-past 12.