The Sun.
London, England, 1850-04-11 00:00:00

TTIE SUN,

The Gold Cup, added to a Handicap of 20 sovs. each,
h ft. and 5 only it declatcd. Two miles. (13
7 of whom declared.) •
Lord Chesterfield na, Mrs. Taft, 5 yrs 1 hit (Clt,.rlti._:) 0 1
Mr. Arrowsniith's Lady Llyltia, 6 1 Itt J b 0 2
3tol on Mrs. Tat;. A fine race from the distance
iu a dead best. Deciding heat, 6 to 5 on Mrs.
Tait, who wou easy by a lerigih.
The Milton Plate of 501., for thue yrs old, Sat 71b; tour
yrs, list 31b; live 12st; six yrs r.Lii lige& 12st fiib;
half-bred horses allowed 6itis, mares and &eicliegs Sib
winners 51bs extra, it' of the Tallyho, Granby, or
Coplow, 101bs extra. Granby Course. One mile-and-
half.
Mr. T. Parr's Chorister, 5 yrs... (Mr. Scobell) 1
Lord Clifden's Sagacity, 6 yrs (Mr. Clarke) 2
Lord llowth's The Fidler, 5 yrs (Mr. White) 3
Mr. Green na The Polka, 5 yrs (Mr. Parkyns) 4
Inc follciwing also rau.—Mr. Briggs u Young Sultan,
6 yrs (Mr. Eiiiics), Mr. Tehbutt na Papa, 6 yr. (Mr.
Noel), and Mr. o,bortie's Gilnochie, 5 yrs (Mr. Brooke).
6 to 4 agst Sagacity, 2 to 1 agst The Fiddler, and
4to 1 agst Chorister. A good racy with three from the
distance. Won by half a length. _ _ _

[ADVERTISEXIENT.]—BETTING.—Mr. John l'Atoore,
the Sporting Publisher, St. Martin's-lane (established
1819), ccntinues to lay Tattersall's Odds against all
horses for the Metropolitan Handicap, Newmarket
Handicap, Lath and Somerset,.hire St,kos, the 2,000
Guinea, and the Derby. Abergatenny and Metropc-
Ltati Stecplechae3. Country commissionsfaithfully at-
tended to on the remittance of a post office order,
payable to John Moore, Charing-cross, Llndon.

LITERATURE.
ESSAYS. By _Archibald Alison. Vol. 1.
Several mestiniable volumes of a similar character
to the one jutA issued from trio establishment of the
Messrs. Blackwood, Edinburgh, have already adorned
the shelves of our public and private libraries,
tending greatly to the enhancement of the repute of
our contemporary literature in this manner. Much,
very much, of the genius of our greatest living
writers is expended for a considerable time anony-
mously in our various publications, in newspapers
and magazines, in periodicals, variously published
daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Until a re-
putation be formed by some, substantial work to which
the writer's name is affixed, a thousand, nay, a mil-
lion chances to one, but his very existence continues a
matter of obscurity, and whatever fame is
acquired by his anonymous contributions attaches
itself not to him individually, hut the general cha-
racter of the periodical with which he happens to be
associated as a contributor. Even when celebrity has
been lung achieved by one or other of these contri-
butors, the authorship of their respective effusions
remains a matter of mere conjecture with the unini-
tiated until such time as they are severally extracted
from the original publication, and re-issued in a sub-
stantial collection. This has been accomplished with
admirable success on divers occasions, in regard to the
contributions to the dinburgh Review, by certain
eminent critical and historical essayists. Thus, for
example, we have witnessed the republication of the
collected essays of Francis Jeffrey, the essays of
Sydney Smith, the essay s of Babington Ma-
caulay, and more recently we perceive
the announcement of a similar accumulation
of articles from the pen of Henry Rogers. With
Blackwood' s Magazine, the lord paramount of all the
magazines, designated, in token of its pre-eminence,
by the distinctive appellation of Maga, it has been
altogether different. Hitherto its sole republications
have been (not critical, historical, or political essays,
masterly as many of that class of contributions have
unquestionably been), but conversational serials, such
as the immortal confabs of his Most Gracious Ma-
jesty King Christopher, and several renowned and
highly popular fictions. With these, however, it
must be borne in recollection that long before their
collective republication the authorship was sufficiently
notorious. Thus, before their appearance in the form
of volumes, everybody (that is to say, everybody at
all claiming to be considered as anybody) knew per-
lectly well that " My Cousin Nicholas" was penned by
Thomas Barham, that " Ten Thousand a Year" was
the work of Samuel Warren, " Caleb Stukely," of
Samuel Phillips, the "Memoirs of a Statesman," of
Dr. Croly, and the " Caxtons" of Sir Edward
Bulvver Lytton. But with the political articles, the
critical papers, and the historical essays, it was other-
wise ; the personality of the writers remained shrouded
in an austere indistinctness. Not but that at inter-
vals it was impossible to avoid the recognition of the
master-hand of a great annalist in the rhetorical
graces of such contributions, and that on certain oc-
casiona it was equally *possible not to distinguish
his sonorous utterance in the thundering tones of
Blackwood. Yet up to the appearance of the adver-
tisement announcing the approach of the present
publication, the individuality of the contributor even
in those instances continued to be a matter of
dubious conviction. It is consequently with peculiar
pleasure that we hail the first volume of the collected
"Essays ; Political, Historical, and Miscellaneous,"
by Archibald Alison, the celebrated historian of
Europe. With two more additional volumes the ag-
gregated publication, under its present form, will be
completed. When we observe that the scale upon
which the present re-issue is planned tallies, in all
respects, with the library edition of the " History of
Europe," being a handsome decoy octavo, numbering
upwards of 600 pages in each volume, it. must be
sufficiently apparent that the form of publication is
worthy, in all respects, of the celebrity of the writer,
and of the high and brilliant reputation of the maga-
zine from which his contributions have been ex-
tracted. All we regret to observe is the non-
appearance of an engraved portrait of the Essayist
and Historian, as a frontispiece to the opening volume.
This omission, however, may possibly be rec-
tified before the issue of the volume des-
tined to bring the work to a conclusion.
Under any circumstances, however, the books will
not fail to be welcomed by all those who admire the
genius of Archibald Alison, and who respect the abi-
lity of Blackwood's Magazine. Having already from
month to month particularised the various characte-
ristics of the articles here brought together—articles
constituting the most remarkable of the political
essays inserted in Maga from 1831 to 1849 inclu
sively—it only remains for us now to announce the ap-
pearance of a work so long and so eagerly anticipated.
The fact of its ultimate publication cannot fail by
any possibility to enhance and confirm the popularity
of the Historian and the Essayist.

THE QUARTERLIES.

THE QUARTERLY RE VIEW. No. CLXXII.
Among the whole of the eleven contributions to
the current number of the Quarterly, the most inte-
resting is the one already noticed in our leading
columns, relating to the extraordinary vicissitudes of
Louis Philippe—vicissitudes which were brought to
such a striking consummation by the days of February
in the last French Revolution. Taking the lucubra-
tions of Guizot, of Lamartine, of Blanc, of Caussi-
diere, of Cnenu, and of Delahodde, of our distinguished
nautical writer Captain Chamier as the objects of his
criticism, the Quarterly Reviewer retraverses the
whole of that long and tedious road passed over by the
royal fugitives of 1848, a road which, considering the
number of writers that have travelled along it, must
be by this time tolerably well macadamised by their
footsteps. Of course the whole narrative is replete
with that scorn for democracy and that homage for
legitimacy (as the rule of the most illegitimate rulers
is absurdly called), which scatters ridicule alike over
the bourgeois dynasty of the House of Orleans and
over the 'revolutionary members of the Provisional
Government. The derision felt by the Reviewer to-
wards the former is more covert, of course, than that
expressed openly and emphatically in reference to the
latter : in fact, the terms in which the ex-King and
the princes are mentioned are not unfrequently terms
of sympathy and admiration. Nevertheless, through
all this apparent condolence, it is scarcely possible for
the discriminating not to recognise a secret predilec-
tion for the head of the regal house of the Bourbons
eclipsed by the shadow of three sombre and terrific
revolutions. If the weakness of Copperfield's ac-
quaintance (Hamlet's aunt, or some other such dis-
tinguished female) was Blood—Blood also, but more
especially Blood Royal, is a decided weakness
on the part of the Quarterly Reviewer. He is ready to
faint on the occasion when he tells us of the appoint-
ment of Albert ouvrier to one of the posts of the
Republican Government. He goes very nearly into
convulsions of disgust when dilating over the rise of
certain intellectual parvenus to authority. He evi-
dently sighs for the parfume de la tour and the bou-
quet de Versailles to allay the sulphurous stench of
the Revolution. So true was that saying of William
Hazlitt, that the aristocrats hate " the look of the
People, the touch of the People, the smell of the
People !" Another, and more coherent reference to
the age of continental outbreaks, is the critical notice
immediately preceding the one just mentioned, sug-
gested by several political brochures published in
1850, but especially by Mr. Baxter's "Impressions
of Central and Southern Europe." Utterly nauseated
as the public is with that everlasting and disgusting
topic of Dolly's Brae, a topic rendered infamous by
its association with Orange ruffianism in its state of
most rampant atrocity, the Quarterly must needs
allude yet once more to the debate in the Lords, for
the purpose of emptying the last dregs of its little
paltry vial of wrath on the doomed but still, happily,
illustrious head of the Right Honourable the " Lord
Lieutenant Clarendon." A most readable and de-
lightful paper of antiquarian small talk and topo-
graphical gossip has been penned in the Review by
one of the most appreciative of the readers of Mr.
Peter Cunningham's " Handbook for London," the
critical contribution in which that charming work is
considered being enlivened by clusters of agreeable
and attractive anecdotes. What shall we say of the
little intermediate criticism on a tiny volume pub-
lished last year by some one who, saving his initials
(H. E. 0.), wisely chose to remain anonymous
upon the title-page of the "Diary of a Dutiful
Son ?" How the volume ever came to be noticed by
a Quarterly Reviewer we cannot for the life of us sur-
mise, unless it was as a random freak of eccentricity.
All lovers of the comparatively modern science of
political economy will find a very relishable "nut to
crack" in the article entitled "Facts and Figures"—
a nut which may be rendered somewhat more
palatable (excuse the pun, gentle reader !) if taken
cum grand sails. In the course of an odd sort of
rambling, crabbed, and yet at times well tempered,
criticism on the works of the Urquharts—that is to
say, the writings of the famous translator of Rabelais,
and of the well-known Member for Stafford—one of
the Quarterly Reviewers delecteth his readers with a
grotesque sketch after the antique representing Fame
running away from one of her aspirants with her
thumb to her nose, and her fingers spread out deri-
sively, saying, Eexe rat xg.XE—" Catch me if
you c
turningn' my
fine
to, fellowanamusement. " Grote's History of Greece"—that
d r The woodcut (p. 430) is
worth we
warrant will afford some
masterly effusion of research, scholarship, eloquence, and
erudition—obtains another eulogistic notice from the
historic critic of the Quarterly. " Queen's College—
London," also passes under the second and revised
cons icl•,rat ion of the same periodical. At a
period like the present, when Austria and Prus-
sia are still competing with each other for
the chieftainship of the Germanic Confederation,
the "Memoirs of the House of Brandenburgh,"
by the annalist of the Popes, the learned and indus-
trious Leopold Ranke, must necessarily demand a
very large share of attention ; and hence it appears