The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-05-31 00:00:00

Etberpooi :'-)tartbarb,

FROM OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT.

MONDAY MORNING.

THE two main incidents of the week were the celebration
of Her MAJESTY'S birth-day on Tuesday, and running
for the Derby on Wednesday. On the first-named day,
London was alive ; on the second, dead and deserted. A
stranger would not believe how thin the Derby makes the
metropolis of company, until about six in the evening,
when the dust-covered carriages roll home with their
thousands of jolly lads and lasses,—choice specimens of
English breed. Bad as we are, on such a day, we CBE
turn out men and women, and cattle, the like not to be
seen in the world. Louis NAPOLEON and his suite ride
fine horses, beautiful creatures in hide and symmetry ;
but then the Emperor and his toadies have not so many
as we can show. For fire, vivacity and caper, the French
beasts take the shine out of most of ours. It is all edu-
cation. Prank. English gravity, respectability of de-
meanour, are taught our horses by our skilful masters of
the manige. Never was monarch's birth-day celebrated
with greater glee and gusto than VICTORIA'S last Tues-
day. Prodigious was the consumption of green turtle,
turbot, salmon, in prime condition at present, together
with the smaller fry of mullet and dory; prime venison
also not a little was spitted ; lots of it at the venerable
fishmonger's opposite the Admiralty; and a droll fellow
is he, though blind as a bat, he is not to be done ; it is he
who supplies the Cabinet fish-kettles. Say that you are
a bachelor, your friend the Duke of R. sends you his bi-
yearly H. of V., you are going out of town—Pegwell Bay,
perhaps, on a shrimping excursion,—you send your haunch
to our friend the Ministerial fishmonger,—blind, he ma-
nipulates with skill ; another friend has a haunch from
that plucky old soldier the Marquis of L. ;—it goes the
way of all (such) flesh ; and so with the products of half
the deer parks in England, and let me couple those im-
mense wilds of Scotland where the red deer and the roe
abound. Well, it is not considered shabby for a bachelor,
or a man with a limited batterie de cuisine, to send his
haunch, as aforesaid, just as you would send a heap of
your parliamentary papers in exchange for DICKENS or
BULWER ; only your fishmonger stumps. I was quite
astounded to note the rich blind tradesman with a haunch
on his lap, one day, which the glorious old Duke of R.
sent to a poor acquaintance once ; the venison-dealer
knew not whence the article had come,—he manipulated,
as I have said, drew his fingers kindly over the fat, felt for
the " alderman's walk ;" and, without hesitation or moral
reservation, mentioned the park where the venison had been
reared. So he would with SEIrTON'S or any one. Nice
discrimination. Pardon this episode. All the Ministers
gave banquets on the birth-day,—the grandest being PAL-
MERSTON'S ; the merriest, Sir ALEXANDER COCKBURN'S,
the QUEEN'S Attorney-General, which, he being a ba-
chelor in a double sense, he gave at a decent public-
house, where I have dined many a time, and oft, yclept
the Albion, in Aldersgate-street. The guests were all
lawyers, poor and rich ; for little " Cockey" don't value
the sixpence a cowrie. The dinner, I need not tell you,
was of the right sort ; the arrangement of the dishes and
enfremets being according to the last and best authority,
each morsel having a " chromatic relation" with its an-
tecedent ; no condiment without a studied specific pur-
pose ; and every glass of wine was either harmonic or in
proper discord with the particular entremet to which it
formed the accompaniment. After dinner, in approval of
the said great authority, there was the chasse (cognac),
then a rincette (old Port), then sur rincette (Burgundy) ;
next, the Gloria—any liquid but water. Then each im-
bibed ad lib. Bluff Sergeant Wieicirts boozed, and kept
four on each side of him in a roar. Sir ALEXANDER is
a choice lad enough over a carafe of punch, and does not
hurry ; on the present occasion he had better not. FRANK
MURPHY, Q.C. and M.P. for Cork, had just got " his
character" all right from the Parliamentary Committee ;
he came down to the Albion, determined to have a night
of it. MURPHY, though a Whig, and having, like all that
class, a tendency to forget old acquaintances, unless, in-
deed, he meet them on Salisbury plain, or the top of the

monument, is not a bad table companion, though not
nearly so good in this respect as he was twenty years ago,
when he and Baron MAULS, and —, and —, used to
see two or three hundred " goes" of OFFLEY'S brandy,
and as many pairs of kidneys disposed of at a sitting. By.
the-bye, Baron MATTLE did not go to either of the legal
banquets in honour of the day ; he was in the Court of
Common Pleas in the morning, apparently well enough,
with Jost.? JERVIS. the Chief Justice, " chaffing" the
Queen's Counsel, who came in without their full-blown•
honours, big-bottomed wig, &c. PALMY bad all the
cracks at his dinner, and it need to have been recherche;
there were among the learned guests more than one,
whose " feeding" has puzzled me much to ascertain
whether it was that of the epicure or the mere glutton.
Upon my life I lean to the latter belief. Oh, NOON TAL.
.7OURD, how you do enjoy a good dinner, and—amiable
trait—how you like to talk of it afterwards ! The illumi-
nations were very brilliant and numerous, and thousands
of artisans, with their wives and little ones, perambulated
the busy streets till midnight, cheering themselves every
now and then with a grateful pull at BARCLAY, PERKINS
and Co., as Madame MALIBRAN used to call London
porter.

There was a raggamuffin debate in the House of Com-
mons on Thursday evening, the cause of which—abolition
of church-rates,—drew together a great number of new
members, not the most aristocratic, by which I mean
good-looking, in the world ; for men of sour aspect go to
the conventicle ; several of such, by hook or by crook,
have got into Parliament, and, of course, we must put up
with them. But for a man bearing the time-honoured
name of PEIILLIMORE to rise in his place, in the House of
Commons, perfectlysober, (he rarelygoes to BELLAMY'S')
and move, or as good as move, the abrogation of Church-
rates, appeared to more than one in the house too much
of a good thing. And then the Clay baronet, refining
the motion, as the late Mr. HusicissoNt used to talk of
clayed sugars, came in to have a shy for a little Tower
Hamlets popularity—by moving an amendment, pew
rents, vice Church-rates. The motion and amendment,
thanks to the good sense of Parliament, were lost. I
hesitate not to affirm that the parishioner who refuses to
pay Church-rates, sometimes they only amount to fifteen-
. pence a year, as bad as denies the faith, and is worse than
-an infidel. Who with any heart would grudge a few oboli,
even for the saki of his boyish acquaintances, the rooks
and jackdaws, to keep the dear old belfry of the parish
church in order ? The decent edifice still stands there:
you—boy—now man,—may have traversed this world of
care from one end to the other ; you like to come home
again ; don't you like to see the old church ? I believe
you, my boy ! Yet, if lank-sided MIALL had it all his
way, the parish church might go to —, and I mean
the worst place one can mention. Oh, but say the oppo-
nents, we object on the score of principle ; I dare say
you do. Some points of the motion, amendment, and
debate, were absolutely profane to my poor thinking ;
higgling about necessaries for body and soul, as if each
was no better than a bundle of old do',—anybody by
signing a statement that he—anybody—was a Dissenter,
should be exempted from Church-rates; but, then, the
anybody so exempted would have " short shrift, I trove."
Here it is in the vernacular—that he should not be enti-
tled to the performance of any rite or ceremony by the
clergy of the Church of England. Sir WILLIAM CLAY
had a long palaver, and the next day strutted about town
to find out what people thought of him. He is essen-
tially vain, tall—l mean long. If he dressed with better
judgment he might, in a crowd of Radicals, pass for a
gentlemanly-looking man ; but he always has such a
"large stock of linen on hand"—l suppose he calls it
wristband, and so much long cloth about his feet, that
he by no means looks so smart as when I remember him
a young Water-company's Clerk.
LEIGH HUNT, I think it is, who, in one of his graceful
papers, written about this time of the year—the Chimney-
sweeper's Holiday—merry month of May—in a happy
moment, when writing about the juvenile portion of the
sooty brotherhood, characterised them as duodecimos in
black letter. Those were the days when the poor little
creatures, all soot and nakedness, with bag and brush,
used to sound their childish pipe in the cold winter morn-
ings, disturbing the occupants of the eider beds in May
Fair. That nuisance was stopped ; so, likewise, had the
horrible ascent of the five-storey chimney. Still it
appears that the fraternity are ill-used : little boys, with
no wills of their own, are apprenticed to the trade ; and
the Earl of SHAFTESBURY, in his place in the House of
Lords, the other evening, in a speech fraught with good
feeling, came forward to mitigate the evils of the class ;
but it is not to be done at least for a hundred years.
Salutary acts are passed, but not a creature looks to their
being carried out. I beg pardon—two or three police.
men are certainly on the qui vive visiting the " common
lodging houses," most of them worse than dens of the
accursed cities. The Building Act is evaded every day ;
chimneys are still constructed narrow and zig-zag, full of
elbows which no machine can touch. What. the occu-
pant of a house, with a decent Kitchen
.1n it, to do but
employ the poor sweep. yes,?? says
inLvorIdorSHAFTES-
BURY, " get chimney doors." Fudge . .
that plan will never cure the evil. What's the use of a
door of any kind if you don't enter ? I felt for the Earl of
SHAFTESBURY ;heis a well-minded man—a serious
youth, if you will. He got a precious drubbing, in a
quiet way, from MILES STAPLETON' a shrewd Whig
lord, who sits as Baron BEAUMONT; I believe his father
was a doctor—a horse one, perhaps—in Yorkshire, not
very long ago, for the peer is not more than five or six
and forty. The title had been in abeyance many years ;
and I dare say the blood of the first peer, Sir HENRY DE
BEAUMONT, temp. Ed. 11., became slightly degenerate;
such events do happen : be that as it may, the present
baron is a very cranky, common-looking, but clever
fellow, who has travelled much, is fond of letting the
world know it : he talks about everything and everybody,
even in the uttermost ends of the earth ; can tell the
price of rough sulphur in Sicily or uncut blubber in the
arctic circle. He began snapping SHAFTESBURY, who can't
stand that sort of thing, and told the amiable earl that but
for his good character he would say that his chimney-
sweep legislation was the pitiful cant of pseudo-philan-
thropy. SHAFTESBURY winced, and the bill was sent to
the tomb of all the Capulets—a select committee; like a
petition, ordered to lie on the table. What cellars-full of
the people's petitions they have somewhere ; the petitions
never find their way to the cheesemonger's or the trunk-
maker's. It is said they are to be filed and placed in the