The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1853-11-29 00:00:00

Most dexterous of charlatans, most magnificent of
mimics, certainly Sheridan wert thou! In all-sided
similation, thou didst stand unrivalled and alone ! Thou
wouldst have volunteered to do (and couldst have in a
measure done) anything: construe a Greek play, without
a word of Greek ; give a Latin oration, or quote Lucretius,
without having ever advanced farther than the rudiments ;
preach a sermon on any subject at an hour's notice; solve
any problem in " Euclid," or in " Newton's Fluxion,"
without having ever crossed the Pons Asinorum ; plead a
complicated cause, as that of Hastings, "without a bag"
(trusting to thy power of " abusing Ned Law, ridiculing
Plumer's long orations, making the court laugh, and
pleasing the women !"); and support both sides of any
question according to whim, and without understanding
either ;—such, or similar, feats were easy to thee, un-
ballasted as thou wert by an atom of conscience, and filled
as thy sails were by the breath of boundless assurance and
the unmeasured spirit of wine ! What a pity that this
world had been anything else than a jest and a gala-day,
then thou hadst completely filled thy sphere, and gained
laurels inferior only to those of Momus, or of Bacchus, as
he returned from the conquest of India ! But, alas ! it is
a " serious thing to live, as well as to die," and men will
sometimes say of laughter, "it is mad," and of mirth,
" what doth it profit ?"

The above estimate of poor Sheridan is greatly
overcharged with gall ; his genius, it must be and
will readily be admitted, was not of the towering
and impressive character which stamps its own
features on the age, or which gives a peculiar turn
to men's thoughts. Still he was a man of great
and readily applicable talent ; of wonderful versa-
tility, and boundless resource. The feeling of over-
severity displayed throughout the article appears
even to have weighed upon the writer's own sense
of justice, and he endeavours to atone for it in the
following strictures upon

SHERIDAN'S DEATH AND FUNERAL.
Perhaps our tone toward Sheridan in the previous re-
marks may appear rather harsh. And when we remember
his melancholy end, we are tempted to think so ourselves.
"Poor fellow I he had many things to wound him;
It was a trying moment that which found him
Standing alone upon his desolate hearth,
When all his household gods lay shiver'd round him."
It was a very sad tragedy that of Saville Row. There
was to be seen the man on whose lips senators and vast
multitudes had hung, whose Jests had shaken Old Drury
from top to bottom, till it was one mass of loosened
laughter, lying in bed, broken in constitution and in
heart, deriving his chief consolation and strength from
the potion which had degraded and ruined him ; deserted
by his noble friends, ministered to indeed by his wife,
whose early love, much tried and long cooled, had revived
in its original strength for this hour of darkness and
distress, but with no hope on earth, and with but a cold
and dim prospect beyond the grave ; surrounded by duns,
and with difficulty saved from being carried in his blankets
to a sponging-house—behold the end of the admired, flat-
tered, overrated, underrated, spoiled, and murdered
Sheridan! And yet, in six days, what spectacle is it
that we see darkening the streets of London? It is a
funeral, and certainly it must be a royal personage whom
they are bearing to the grave, for royal dukes and belted
earls, and lord bishops, and celebrated statesmen, and
wits, and orators, are crowding there. No ! it is the
funeral of that very same shivering, starving, wretch—of
the wreck that was once Sheridan !
Besides the article referred to, there are other
contributions possessed of varying degrees of merit;
and two or three sweet pieces of poetry.

The Treatises of M. T Cicero, literally translated
by C. D. Yonge, B.A. London: Henry G. Bohn.
These treatises, which constitute a volume of
Bohn's Classical Library, consist of the well-known
essay on the Nature of the Gods ; those on Divi-
nation ; on Fate ; on the Republic ; on the Laws ;
and on Standing for the Consulship. They are
translated more with an eye to fidelity than to the
elegancies of classical English, yet the fire and
energy of the Roman orator are well sustained and
represented ; a task, the due execution of which
indicates scholarship of no mean order, combined
with innate talent of rare quality. Most of the
treatises have been already rendered familiar to
the English reader through the medium of trans-
lations ; but there is one novelty in the volume,
and that is a letter on " Standing for the Consul-
ship." This is a matter coming so close to the
popular movements relative to elections at the
present day, that it will be read with much interest
by all to whom election arrangements are objects
of importance. From the following extract it will
be seen that the art of making the worse appear
the better reason, and of pressing into the service
every adventitious aid to render a candidate popu-
lar, and, through that popularity, successful, was
known to, and practised and reduced to system
with a nicety and depth of study, by the ancient
Romans, from which the Coppocks and other
electioneering agents of the present day might
take a useful lesson. It may be called—

THE DITTIES OF A CANDIDATE

The standing for offices is divided into diligence of
two kinds ; one of which must depend on the zeal of your
friends, the other on the inclinations of the people. The
zeal of your friends must be 'gained by kindness and ser-
vices done by you, by length of friendship, by the affa-
bility and pleasantness of your own nature. But the name
of friends is one used more extensively in a canvass for
offices than in any other occasion in life ; for now, every
one who shows you any goodwill whatever, every one who
is civil to you, or who comes to your house, must be
ranked in the number of your friends. But still it is the
most advantageous thing of all to be beloved by and
agreeable to those who are our friends from any more
honourable cause, such as relationship, affinity, or com-
panionship, or any other connexion. In the next place,
you must labour diligently to make every one, in propor-
tion as he is familiar and intimate with you, love you,
and wish your honour to be advanced as much as possible ;
then all those of your tribe, your neighbours, your clients,
your freedmen, and, lastly, even your slaves ; for nearly
all the conversation with reference to a man's forensic
fame emanates from persons connected with his house.
Then you must make friends of every sort,—friends for
show, men illustrious from their rank and reputation,
who, even if they are not very effective as voters or can-
vassers, nevertheless add some dignity to the candidate,—
and magistrates, for the purpose of obtaining your rights,
among whom, the consuls especially, and next to them
the tribunes of the people, are men of preeminent influ-
ence in bringing over the centuries to your. interests.
Those who have ever gained the votes of a tribe or of a
century through your influence, or who hope to do so, or
who have ever received, or who expect to receive, any
kindness from you, conciliate and make sure of by every
means in your power. For, for many years, ambitious
men have been labouring vigorously, with all their zeal
and energy, to obtain the objects of their ambition fr?m
the men of their own tribe. And do you take pains with
these men, by all imaginable means, to cause them
in-
clinations. eager in your cause with all their hearts and all their
And if men were only grateful,' then all these
things ought to be ready done to your hand, as, in fact,
I trust that they are. For the last two years you have
laid under obligations four companies of citizens, who
may be of the greatest influence in aiding you in the
object of your ambition ; those, namely, of Marcus Fun-
dsenius, of Quintus Galbus, of Caius Cornelius, and of
Caius Orcininus. And I know what these companies,
when they brought their consent to you, promised you
and assured you of most positively, for I was present.
Wherefore you must take care that, on this occasion, you
exact of them a requital for your services, by continually
reminding them, by asking them, by renewing your
kindnesses, by cultivating their goodwill ; so as to let
them understand that they will never have any other op-
portunity of showing their gratitude. And, indeed, these
men will be excited to zeal in your behalf, both by hopes
of your services in future, and by a recollection of your
recent exertions in their cause. And altogether, since
your canvass is abundantly fortified by that kind of
friendship which you have gained by your defence of
causes, take care that, of all those men who are under
obligations to you, each man may have his part carefully
marked out and allotted to him. And as you have never
been troublesome to any one of them in any matter, take
care that they understand that you have reserved the
requital of all those obligations which you think that you
are entitled to demand at their hands, to the present time.
The whole of this treatise is of an equally prac-
tical and minutely painstaking description. It will