The Sun.
London, England, 1827-12-22 00:00:00

THE CLUBS OF LONDON.

This book is ascribed to a Member of Brooks's,
and it abounds with .Aneedotes- of the most distin-
guished Members of that far-famed Club, in its
most brilliant era.

That it will be read with great avidity we do not •
doubt. There are few men of. any celebrity.inrpo-
litics or literature, of the past or. present generation,
that do not figure in our author's pages.
Is the author a Member of Brooks's ? We be-
lieve he is; and what is more, we think we can
identify him.
We lay claim to no great sagacity in discovering
what we do not believe the author wished really to
conceal : and yet the strictures on several distin-
guished men in the present day will not be read by
them with unmiagled satisfaction. Men of experi,
ence and good feeling generally confide their im-
partial remarks on their contemporaries to posterity,
for two reasons—first, because they know that the
truth, when unpalatable, always provokes enmity;
and secondly, because, except where some good pur-
pose is to be answered, there is no use in dispelling
the harmless illusiens which most men entertain
with regard to themselves.
That the writer has been unjust to several indi-
viduals, whom, though he has not named, he has
sufficiently pointed out, we ourselves know.
11 His account of William Linley, the brother-in-
, law of Sheridan, is exceedingly characteristic; but
Mr. Moore will hardly thank him for the following
account of Sheridan's Biography :—" Liulcy im-
parted to Mr. Thomas Moore some interesting ma-
terials for the work which, under the title of a Life
of Sheridan, is such a motley patchwork of metaphor,
simile, and quotation from Ovid's Metamorphoses,
that the slender streak of Biography that intersects
its gaudy and enamelled pages is hardly discernable.
He is a warm admirer of Lord Erskine, but no
very warm admirer of the Bar of the present day, as
may be inferred from the following severe observa-
tions on one of its most distinguished members :
" Where is the monument which we were told was
to be erected by the English Bar to his memory ?
Whose was the base envy, the low-minded avarice
of his own personal fame, that extinguished the
project ?He is well known—the pertest, primmest
pleader of the modern Bar—thethatd sophisticalepgreatestar t
‘e,
department
aong
them in this day of its littleness. Honours may be
fEsohrto.sEkwite.nsrele:idsneuep:vooangsuhneilomicee;
liebsruktt:ien
Ad populum plialeras, ego te intus,:et in cute nevi.
How immeasurably below the masculine vigour of
rhetoric of this fortunate prated Probably, in
mere scholarship, S— is somewhat superior;
retire."

heavybe rltvsohno.,
In the character which he has drawn of Sir James
Mackintosh, he is palpably unjust towards that gen-
tleman. This we could easily sliew if Ave had lei-
sure at present. Speaking of his early style, he says,
it " was disciplined in the school of Robertson and
Gilbert Stuart, who by too cold a correctness, and
too religious an adherence to the laws of propriety,
have converted English into an almost foreign lan-
guage." All Scotch writers are necessari►y haunted
by the dread of national peculiarities, and look with
suspicion on every idiomatic expression,'and the
charge of a cold correctness is therefore generally
applicable io them ; but Mackintosh is pointed and
antithetic, and' by no means chargeable with the
Inatofifiliemoin-1
round-about modes of exprodsisi
t
then, is the author of the Clubs ? He tells
us be was a Barrister in the time of Lord Kenyon—.
that he has seen many countries. He introduces a
letter written to him by Lord Erskine, when the
Whig Administration was displaced, commencing,
Dear —," and when he was himself where the
murmur of British politics could not reach him. He
appears to have been a warm admirer of FON. These,
add,
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mission
abi sexseSi ton
Ivatticsoi duringnine
e.
str:iteilaslaetkr
tosNeeciNi,dl- hlvolait:oss.
Administration as a Diplomptah:caui.
e author, whom ore
deed‘eyliiri o
ninifeoit:e