The Sun.
London, England, 1842-06-01 00:00:00

CAPTAIN MANBY.

Sir C. NAPIER presented a petitM33 from Captain Manby,
pra)ing the House to take his invention into consideration, and
moved for a Select Committee to refer the subject to.
Sir R. PEEL thought if the Hon. and Gallant Officer went
to the Board of Admiralty, the matter would be better discussed
there than by a Committee of the House. He thought the
House ought to be allowed time to consider the subject.
Sir G. COCKBURN said it would be better to delay it for
some time, to afford a more full consideration of the subject.
Mr. HUME said it appeared rather strange to bring torward
the subject without. previous consideration.—(Hear.)
Capt. PECHELL suggested that some time should be spe-
cified for again bringing the motion forward.
Sir R. PEEL said, if the invention was one of public import-
ance, he should recommend the Board of Admiralty to try the
experiment. But, if inventions of this kind were to be
investigated by the House, he hardly knew to what extent
they might be occupied with such subjects. If the tmo!ion
were postponed, he would consult with the Board of Ad-
miralty.
Sir 'C. NAPIER said that Captain Manby only wished to
give evidence before the Committee. The Hon. and Gallant
Officer opposite knew Captain Manby, and said he did not
think a Select Committee would be refused. Unless the Right
Hon. Baronet would give him his assurance that the subject
would be taken into censiderasion by the Admiralty, he should
more the appointmteot of a Select Committee.
Sir R. PEEL said, that all he asked was an opportunity of
reading the petition before he gave any pledge. It
the Gallant Officer was determined to persevere, he must vote
against him, but if he would allow the matter to stand over, he
(Sir R. Peel) would confer with the Board of Admirity on
the subject.

Sir C. NAPIER had no objection, upon that understanding,
to postpone the debate till Thursday.
the debate was then adjourned till Thursday.
The Poor-law Amendment Bill was deferred till Tuesday next.
The New SoUth Wales BM was read a second time, and
ordered to be committed.

The other Orders of the Day were then disposed of, and the
House adjourned at Half-past Twelve o'Clock.

MAGAZINE DAY.
BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.
We have read with great pleasure. Sir Richmond
Shakspeare's " Narrative of .a Journey from Heraut
to Ourenbourg on the Caspian," which heads the
present Number. This journey was undertaken in
1840, and its object was to obtain the withdrawal of
the Russian army which was at that period within
three days' march of the' city of Khyva. The gal-
lant officer accomplished his mission so satisfactorily
to,all parties concerned, that on his arrival at St. Pe-
tersburgh he was personally thanked by the Emperor
Nicholas ; and when soon after he came to England,
he received•promotion and rank for his services, and
is now Military Secretary to the Commander-in-
Chief of the Bengal Army, at present in the Khyber
Pass, on its way to relieve General Sale. The nar-
rator gives very minute details of his proceedings
from day to day ; of his sufferings from intense
thirst in crossing the Desert ; and of his
voyage across the Caspian to Ourenbourg. But
the most entertaining passages in his Journal, are
those wherein he sketches the habits and characters
of the nomadic tribes of the Turcomans, whom, con-
trary to general opinion, he represents as a cowardly,
crafty race intent on pillage, and careless what atro-
cities they perpetrate on those unfortunate travellers
who may chance to fall into their hands. In the
" Sketches of Italy"—the most hacknied of themes—
there is a graphic account of the approach to Venice,
with which the tourist seems to have been much dis-
appointed, justly remarking, " to apostrophize distant
Venice, as travellers do, as a cf ty of noble edifices
rising out of the sea, such.being unquestionably the
fact, is all very well, and very veracious ; but to plain
vision, any given city, divorced from the magic of its
name, rising out of water, and at some miles' distance,
must appear, while this earth is round, very much the
same as if it had the misfortune to be below water-
level. Even when you draw near Venice, the first
buildings offered to sight are by no means
of a character to suggest that they spring
up as by an enchanter's wand, rather than
in the usual course of scaffold. building." In
the " Passages in the Career of El Empecinado" oc-
cur several romantic incidents, illustrative of the cha-
racter of this enterprising Spanish soldier of fortune."
The Verdict of a French Jury" is a singular account
of a trial that took place in France in the year 1834, and
excited public attention in an extraordinary degree.
The prisoner was a young man of rank and fortune,
who was accused of having entered the bed-chamber
of the daughter of a French General at midnight, and
proceeded to the worst extremities. The evidence
was exceedingly contradictory, nevertheless he was
found guilty, and still remains in prison expiating his
crime: " Things of the Day," is a ,piquant melange
of criticism, anecdote, and biography. In alluding
to Madame D'Arblay's Memoirs, the writer makes
precisely the same objection to it that we made while
noticing the first volume, and complains in no mea-
sured terms of its intolerable egotism. Ma-
dame D'Arblay evidently laboured under the
ridiculous notion that she was one of the greatest
luminaries of the eighteenth century, and that society
was exclusively occupied with the consideration of her
powers as a novelist. . Hence there is scarcely a page
in the first volume that is not devoted to the subject
of " Evelina"—just as if it were one of those glorious
productions destined to immortality ! Never was
poor authoress so mistaken in her estimate of herself
and her works ! Of her six or eight tales scarce one
is now remembered. " Evelina' sleeps tranquilly,
on the shelves of old-fashioned circulating libraries,
and " Cecilia" and " Camilla" keep her company.
Yet there was talent in these works—some humour,
much shrewdness of observation, together with a
power of pourtraying and contrasting character ;
but nothing that indicated the presence of first-
rate ability. Of Hannah More—Madame D'Ar-
blay's contemporary—the writer observes, that " she
was one of the most fussy women, alive. or
dead." This is true; but it is not the whole truth,
for the sainted Hannah—the " tenth Muse," as her
sycophantic admirers called her—was neither more
nor less than a pompous propounder of shallow,
twaddling, orthodox common-places. We defy her
warmest advocate to point to one really vigorous or
original idea in' all her voluminous works, whether
prose or verse. She has added nothing to the general
stock of knowledge ; she has suggested no new ma-
terials for thought ; but merely repeated, in grood set
phrase, what has been said—and better said too—at
least a hundred times before she ever took to scrib-
bling. Her " Ccelebs " is dreary twaddle ; her tra-
gedies, if possible, are worse ' • and asSonher theology,
it has nothing but its orthodoxy to recommend it.
We quote the writer's sketch of Sheridan, who started
into celebrity about the same period—or nearly so—
as the over-rated Hannah :

Poor Sheridan ! the world was willing enough to do
him justice, and a great deal more. His manners,
talents, and even his vices, were exactly of the order
which the world loves. He was, of all the men of his
day, the most gifted by nature with variety of extraor-
dinary powers. But he threw them all away, and, after
a life of as restless and fruitless anxiety as ever wore out
the spirit of man, perished deserted, unhappy, and un-
done. lie had but one want, and that was a formidable
one—he wanted dignity of mind. Nothing could teach
him the value of principle. Ascending from the humble
condition of the son of a travelling lecturer—for to this
the elder Sheridan had ultimately fallen—he suddenly
rose into the most showy circles of professional, public,

and aristocratic life ; was the first dramatist arid the

first wit of a period distinguished for stage authorship
and social animation; suddenly appeared the first orator
of Parliament, in a time which boasted of the memorable

names of Pitt, Fox, and Burke ; and gave the promise
of raising British eloquence to the noblest heights of
Greece and Rome. I am perfectly aware that all this
has been doubted ; that he has left but little behind

him ; and that Sheridan's suppression of the Hastings'
Speeches apparently justifies the common idea, that they
were merely things of the time—gaudy flourishes, the
tinsel vesture of a temporary and overworked imagina-
tion. But the speeches which excited the wonder which
we know those singular displays to have excited—which
first held Parliament, and then the whole assembled
legislature, in astonishment for hours together—which
were not merely endured, but admired by such men as
Burke, Pitt, and the whole crowd of taste and talent who
had been taught eloquence by those illustrious masters,
and taught fastidiousness by the habit of witnessing
excellence, cannot have been tinsel or temporary. We
know that the House was in a tumult of applause ; that
every man without doors was quoting the fragments of
those great performances for months together ; that all
the journals of the time were labouring to collect hints,
figures, maxims, the strong rebukes and brilliant
appeals of those magnificent ornaments. And are
ue, not entitled to ask, could this effect have
been produced without something that was worthy of
admiration—something that deserved to be recorded as
one of the great memorials of intellectual power—some-
thing that ought to have been preserved and commemo-
rated as the orations of antiquity are preserved, in evi-
dence and illustration of the intellectual rank of the
national genius ? That Sheridan never published those
Speeches is as much to be regretted as if the Parthenon
had been swept away in the days of its first splendour,
and before it could have given the architects of future
ages the rules of the bold and the beautiful in their noble
science. That Sheridan's omission to publish them arose
,first from the various dissipations of a life of fashion,
next from the various vexations which so soon began to
sow his path with thorns, cannot be doubted. No man
earlier felt the vanity of human life, or discovered the
wretchedness of attempting, without fortune, to sustain
himself in a rank with the wealthy of the world. In a
few years he was utterly ruined ; and literature, elo-
quence, and wit, gradually passed away from a mind