The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1851-07-22 00:00:00

hence the heat in " all the blood of all the Howards."
Of course this statement would be immediately contra-
dicted by the dupes, but it has the advantage of being
true, and has ended in the retirement of the Duke of Nor-
folk's son from the family borough of Arundel, and the

return of that ancient campaigner, Edward Strutt, not
Jack, who was " too much for Buckingham," but the
rustic admirer of the woods and forests.

The condition of society in Oxford is at present really
fearful. Those who are interested in learning and the
Church, must set about devising some means of restraining
the extravagance that is encouraged by the frightful gang
of bill-discounters and shop-keepers who live upon the
unfor:unate undergraduates, or rather on their more
unfortunate parents. The avowed and acknowledged
occupation of " money-lending" seems to flourish more
than any other trade. The fellows who pursue it are a
regularly organised confederacy, allied with a number of
London Jew Attornies ; and, since the passing of the
County Courts Acts, these Jew Attornies have found their
London business exceedingly flimsy. They cannot extort
the dreadful costs they were once accustomed to receive,
and Oxford and Cambridge turn up as the next proper
places for robbing the rising generation. There could be
very little objection, one would fancy, to make the Uni-
versities, or rather the persons in stalu pupilarii exceptions
to the usual laws, and to take away altogether the power
of arresting such ; for the bill-discounters hate nothing so
much as " privilege,"—whether of Parliament or anything,
else. The deplorable case of a young man, the son of a
clergyman, who now stands convicted of a charge of
forgery, made by a person whose evidence the judge
characterised as infamous,—a Jew, who had tried to urge
the foolish boy as a " decoy duck," and then destroyed
him, added to the case of Caudwell, at the present assizes,
surely show that the course I speak of ought at once to be
taken.

Do not call me: a Goth, or a Barbarian, or any other of
the names with which the flatterers of a certain personage
compliment those who differ from them, if I say that the
Commissioners of the Woods and Forests have been carry-
ing their adoration for the " Crystal Palace," as the big
greenhouse is called, a little too far. The positive
oppression of the Queen's subjects, for the purposes of
the convenience of the Exhibition, would certainly not be
attempted at St. Petersburgh. There are many cases like
that of the poor old woman Hicks, whose deplorable state
bas come before the public—creatures thrown out of their
paltry livelihood by the necessities of the Exhibition—but
the evil has spread a great deal farther, and the functions
of Parliament seem to have been totally superseded. The
Commissioners of Police have withdrawn the license, or
rather caused it to be withdrawn, of 800 cabmen, for
alleged private bad character. Fouche dare have ventured
on no act so barbarous ; and the feeling arising about it
will not be easily suppressed without a Parliamentary
explanation. The cabmen, doubtless, have a good crop of
vices ; but espionage is not much liked in England, and
the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police have,
ever since 1848. and the Chartist alarm, quite forgotten
themselves. The dismissal of these men and their chil-
dren to starvation, has not been for any crimes of which
they are publicly convicted, but for supposed impro-
prieties of which the Commissioners are to judge. In fact,
between the Woods and Forests and the Police, we
Cockneys are simply at present under the despotism of
paid servants of the Crown.
There is no longer any doubt that it is the intention of
Lord John Russell's Government to dissolve, and imme-
diately on the return of the new Parliament resign ; but
among the many small clap-traps preceding the dissolution
will be one of pardoning all the Irish state prisoners.
smith O'Brien's scuffle in the cabbages of Widow Cor-
mack did nobody any injury, and the Whigs will throw a
last sop to the Irish Papists by pardoning him and all the
others who tried to make

"The Queen's crown by one kingdom less."

In literature we have little novelty, all the publishers
declaring, as, indeed, almost all persons in trade do, that
the Great Exhibition has decidedly interfered with their
operations. In the meantime, however, the small lights
of our modern literature are teaching, viva voce, what
they hare hitherto done in monthly numbers. Mr.
Thackeray, who has been for about twenty years a labo-
rious litterateur, in the description of the lesser manners
and morals, and a sort of refined and graphic caricaturist
of high life, has just concluded his lectures on the humo-
rists of the last century, in which he has shown too truly
bow easily a man may be a fair enough writer but a bad
critic—an exact specimen of
Critics of less judgment than caprice,
Curious, not knowing, not exact, but nice.

Surely a man must have been sadly misled to set him-
self in the chair of criticism, who tells us that Swift's
peculiar characteristics were all English—that the Dra-
per's letters, for instance, in reading which you almost
fancy you can hear " the brogue," are peculiarly English
in their style. He might as well have added that they
were English in their opinions. Mr. Thackeray (as might
be expected of a man wleocondetnned Swift) had much
praise for Fielding. Now,upose lam a great heretic,
but never could find in Toml Jones anything but obsce-
nity, blasphemy, and monotony,fowolotlp one solitary
spark of interest. The rollicking Smollett glosses
over or palliates his impunities, but Fielding
rI think as
stupid as he is immoral. Of Sterne's choarcterratrerr.
Thackeray's estimate was, I think, unfair,a
without proof, but of his ability the less said the better.'
It is well known now that the parade of learning in Tris
tram Shandy was stolen from that strangest of all books,
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the story of
Sterne's book is nothing, and its moral worsethan nothing.
I have not the least sympathy with Mr. Thackeray's
assurances that literary men are not looked down upon
by the aristocracy. Mr. Warren's hero, Aubrey, may
weep that he is not going to dine with the nobility ; but,
if the beef and beer were of a sound quality, the absence
of stars and garters ought not to break a sensible man's
heart. The fact is literary men are looked down upon by
the highest classes if they have no claim extrinsically to be
of their order ; and Mr. Thackeray, to use Sir James
Graham's famous phrase, " knows the reason why."
He himself has got into a certain class of high society, and