The Sun.
London, England, 1850-05-20 00:00:00

FORGUTTEN TRUTHS.

" She recognised in those prisoners her brother-
men, born with like wants, animated with like pas-
sions, gifted with like powers, heirs to like promise,
destined to like immortality; but put in harder places,
untaught, undisciplined, unenlightened; put in the front
row, exposed to the enemy's deadliest weapons, his
fiercest temptations, without friends, or home, or re-f,
fuge, or a God. Such is the dark population of our
prisons. Men who, though now deformed by vice, and
hardened to insensibility by its baneful inilneno,:.,
might, under other circumstances, with softer training,
patient tuition, brighter examples, have become good
and beneficent. They are but the refuse, the dregs of
society ! is often coutmaptuously said ; and why are
they so? Chiefly because they have not early learned
habits of self-restraint."
Some portions of the narrative display considerable
power of description and great depth of feeling.
Marie Augustine at the convent, struggling between
inclination and remorse, and Lady Emily's agony on
learning her husband's perfidy, are portrayed with a
master-hand—the description in each case being ren-
dered doubly powerful and pathetic from its exceeding
simplicity and seeming naturalness.

PENDENNIS. Part Xi'''. By W. 111.
Thackeray.

Little Fanny Bolton, the daughter of the porter at
Shepherd's Inn, is evidently destined to exercise an
important influence over the fate of Pendennis. Our
readers no doubt remember the Vauxhall party, at
which Pendennis first became acquainted with Fanny,
who was chaperoned to the gardens by Captain Cos-
tigan. They each become in love with each other,
and Pendennis, in order to save the girl from ruin or
himself from a inesallianee, which would to him be
ruin, determines not to see her. This first attempt at
self control is, however, too much for him, and throws
him into a raging fever, during the course of which
he is delirious, and his mother, accompanied by Laura,
and the Major, having heard of his danger, come up
to town and knock gently at the door of his chambers,
which is opened to them by Fanny Bolton, concern-
ing whom it should be observed that poor Helen had
heard all sorts of evil reports. The following account
of the miseries of life in chambers is admirable. It
is the introductory paragraph to the description of the
illness of Pendennis

" A committee of marriageable ladies, or of any Chris-
tian persons interested in the propagation of the domestic
virtues, should employ a Cruikshank or a Leech, or some
other kindly expositor of the follies of the day, to make
a series of designs representing the horrors of a bachelor's
life in chambers, and leading the beholder to think of
better things, and a more wholesome condition. What
can be more uncomfortable than the bachelor's lonely
breakfast?—with the black kettle in the dreary fire in
Midsummer; or, worse still, with the fire gOne out at
Christmas, half an hour after the laundress has quitted
the sitting-room? Into this solitude the owner enters
shivering, and has to commence his day by hunting for
coals and wood; and before he begins the work, of a stu--
dent, has to discharge the duties of a housemaid, vice
Mrs. Flanagan, who is absent without leave. 'Or, again,
what can form a finer subject for the classical designer
than the bachelor's shirt—that garment which be wants
to assume just at dinner-time, and which he finds without
any buttons to fasten it? Then there is the bachelor's
return to chambers, after a merry Christmas holiday,
spent in a cozy country-house, full of pretty faces, and
kind welcomes and regrets. He leaves his portmanter,u
at the Barber's in the court: he lights his dismal old
candle at the sputtering little letup on the stair: he
enters the blank familiar room, where the only tokens to
greet him. that show any ince7est in his personal welfare,
are the Christmas bills, which are lying in wait for him,
amiably spread out on his reading table. Add to those
scenes an appalling picture of bachelor's illness, and the
rents in the temple will begin to fall from the day of the
publication cf the dismal diorama. To be well in
chambers is melancholy, and lonely and selfish enough;
but to be ill in chambers—to pass nights of pain and
watchfulness—to long for the morning and the laundress
—to serve yourself your own medicine by your' own
watch—to have no other companion for long honrs but
your own sickening fancies and fevered thoughts: no
kind hand to give you drink if you are thirsty, or to
smooth the shot pillow that crumples under you,—this,
indeed, is a We so dismal and tragic, that we'aliall 'not!
enlarge upon its horrors; and shall only heartily pity
those bachelors .0 the Temple who Prue it clay clay."