The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-03 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, AUGUST 3, 1814.

at large—to raise a subscription fund of sufficient
extent to defray the expenses of a monument to the
memory of NELSON. The whole range of our heroic
history does not present one name, perhaps, asso-
ciated with more chivalrous daring, more tran-
scendent success, or more signal achievements in
the service of his country, than that of
our "great Admiral." At a time when our
military pretensions were humble, indeed, by the
side of those of continental Powers, whose armies,
under the chief command, as it may be said, of a
single captain, occupied the entire Continent in mili-
tary possession; when the moral impression and phy-
sical efficiency of our soldiery abroad were, as yet, in
an inverse ratio to the enthusiasm and energy of the
warlike spirit excited by the common danger in all
ranks of our people at home; NELSON was the greatest
among the great commanders who vied in elevating
our naval renown to a point of unapproached
supremacy. In 1798 he dealt, on the Bay
of Aboukir, a mortal blow to the naval power
of Republican France. In 1801 his consum-
mate conduct and impetuous bravery annihilated
the navy of the most formidable competitor we
could have grappled with for maritime empire,—
namely, Denmark. In 1805 he closed his mortal
career, a career of daring intrepidity and
successive triumphs—by extinguishing, in a single
action, the combined fleets of Imperial France and of
Spain. We select these three epochs of the brilliant
story of his eventful life, (crowded as that is with
a hundred episodes of stirring interest, not less glo-
rious to the dauntless bravery of this wonderful man,)
because they mark the periods at which the British
nation was most indebted, under Providence, to his
genius and his valour, for its escape from the
degraded fate of all the other kingdoms of
Europe. If NAPOLEON could have wielded,
with the military resources, the naval armaments,
also, of the great Powers of the north and south, whom
he successively conquered, and rendered subservient
to his own policy of aggrandising France at the ex-
pense of all her allies; Great Britain must have
become a mere tributary—a province—a dependency
of the new empire which he founded in defiance of
every obstacle. At this time of day it can scarcely
be necessary to expatiate on the irretrievable calami-
ties—social, moral, and political—the ineffaceable
disgrace—the irreparable injury to an ancient
Power of the first rank, and force, and
dignity, if it fall into the rear of Euro-
pean nations, and be blotted out from the
list of independent and permanent sovereignties.
And if this be true of any State, with how much
farce does the reflection apply to the case of Great
Britain, which, even forty or fifty years ago, had a
larger inheritance of renown and strength, of wealth
and power, of sacred recollections and brilliant des-
tinies to forfeit, than any other independent Power in
existence ?

Associating these considerations with the name of
NELSON, we have, from time to time, expressed our
sorrow and astonishment at the apathy—not to
say the ingratitude—of the public in permitting
the progress of such a memorial as that
hich has been erected to his honour in
Trafalgar-square to languish for the want of
pecuniary aid. We have lived to see the funds
raised for so sacred a purpose indebted mainly for
even their present amount to the munificence of a
FOREIGN Potentate ! We have lived to see the hand—
and we will not shrink from doing it all honour for its
liberality on this occasion, of the Autocrat of RUSSIA
opened heartily and generously in the work of con-
tributing to an imperishable record of the great hero
and the saviour of this country. We have
lived to blush for the unpatriotic parsimony of
those in high station—the royal and the noble favour-
ites of fortune, who, from their abundance, could not
spare so much to this offering in honour of British
heroism as probably the cost of the jewelled souvenirs
lavished by them on some ridiculous freak of nature
like an American dwarf. Nay, while the palaces of
royalty and the saloons of our ducal aristocracy
have been freely opened to receptions of unbounded
hospitality and gracious courtesy to the Yankee mi-
crocosm, her MAJESTY'S Ministers deny even the use
of the mere area of Trafalgar-square to the truly na-
tional purpose of giving a banquet—not at the public
expense, not at any charge to the Crown, or to
the Government—to the few gallant veterans,
the surviving comrades of the great NELSON, who
fought and bled with him in the estuary of the Nile,
at the entrance of the Baltic, on the rocky shores of
Teneriffe, or in the tempestuous sea that breaks upon
the Cape of Trafalgar ! We can scarcely believe the
evidence of our own eyes, or suppress the expression
of our indignation, when we read the statements de-
livered at a meeting of the " subscribers to the fund
for the dinner which was to have taken place in
Trafalgar-square," held on Thursday, at Willis's
Rooms, Sir EDWARD CODRINGTON in the chair.
The whole affair of the column which is, and the
banquet which is not, has been throughout an insult
to the illustrious dead ; a disgrace to the nation ; an
insufferable slight upon the veteran pensioners who
were to have paid, in the manner propo*ed, their
last pudic homage to the immortal commander whom
they served ; which will associate mingled
emotions of anger and contempt with the
name of the present Government in the bosom of
future generations, to whom the glory of NELSON will
be as a sacred relic of an age of heroes. In the first
place the beautiful shaft of the Corinthian column
was actually robbed of twenty feet of its length, in
order to dissipate the fears of Lord MONTEAGLE, and
other abettors of Mr. WILKINs's monstrosity—the
National Gallery—that it would give an effect of in-
significance to the elevation of that edifice. As if
anything could elaborate the meanness, or exaggerate
the ugliness of that disgraceful enormity. In the
second Sir ROBERT PEEL, the other night, stood
sponsor for this inconceivable violence on the beautiful
design supplied for the shaft (by Mr. REPTON
we believe), by quoting the sagacious opinion of
,onae professional authorities whom Government had
consulted, "that if the pillar was built of the intended
height, it would be dangerous." How exalted an
idea this ex-officio arbiter of art—this presiding
genius of all Committees for building, decorating, and
painting all kinds of public works—must have of the
the masonic skill of our builders—of the experience
of our contractors--of the strength of stone, and
the endurance of bricks and mortar—to be coaxed
into a fear, that in a city which has boasted for 170
years of such a column as the Monument, 160 feet
above its pedestal of 42 feet—a column so much
lighter and shorter as the NELSON pillar, as ori-
ginally designed, could not be erected with safety to
the vicinity ! Apprehensions, these, consistent
enough in the patrons of Sir JoaN SOANE'S uphol-
stery-like architecture, or Sir RouEur SMIRRE'S end-
less and monotonous copies of the most tame and in-
sipid Greek examples yet extant.
But to the business of Thursday. The ancient
friend and comrade of NELSON, Sir E. CODRINGTON,
apprised " a very thin meeting" that the permission
originally accorded by the Woods and Forests to
employ the area of Trafalgar-square for the projected
dinner having been withdrawn, all that remained for
the Committee to do was to explain the reasons of
their failure to carry out the design of their appoint-
ment, and to dispose of the subscriptions. In the
outset of the arrangements, Sir ROBERT STOPFORD,
Governor of Greenwich Hospital, had given per-
mission for the attendance of the Trafalgar men; and
Lord LINCOLN, on the part of the Woods and Forests,
had granted the use of the square. This last had
since been, after various postponements to the anni-
versaries of the battles of the Nile, Copenhagen, &c.
withdrawn by Lord LINCOLN, who apprised the
Chairman that his reason was the fear of the walks,
terraces, &c. sustaining injury. But the contractor
for the works himself offered to make good any
damage they might sustain; (trumpery specimens
of unsightly asphalte as they are after all.) Then
followed the usual, well-understood, official trick of
bandying the Committee from one department to
another, between the Earl of HADDINGTON and the
Earl of LINCOLN ; the former, at least, having the
grace to declare that the Admiralty "did not intend
to interfere." (Why should they—in relation to so
insignificant a dead servant of his country,
as NELSON ?), Lord LINCOLN, at last, reite-
rated his refusal, not thinking " Trafalgar-square
a suitable place for such an entertainment--on account
of being situated in such a densely populated part of
the metropolis, where some disturbances might be
lik

ely to -ensue." " Trafalgar-square not suited,"
ndeed, for a commemoration of NELSON ! What are
his egregious young Lord's notions of suitableness
and appropriate adaptation ? And the vicinity is too