Wheeling daily intelligencer. [volume] (Wheeling, Va. [W. Va.]) 1852-1859, 1856-01-10
FROM the pI,Iladelphia North American.

and no one remains for illustration but he, who,
like the man in one of Alr. Dickens tales was a
master Of department and was called "the
first gentleman of Europe That portrait is left
to be painted. We can afford to speak of these
lectures as a thing nearly gone by, and to record
anew the high degree of enjoyment we have had
in them all. The lectures on the second and third
Georges, had great beauty of contrast. As "a
specimen of fierce invective, grave and severe, no
one will ever forget Mr.. Thackeray's description
of the court and life and morals of George the
Second, and the melancholy craving he express
ed, for something good or graceful in all that
Waste,-for something that honest men and wo-
men might love-and from the dark and hollow
| place, untenanted by any one who had right
| to answsr there came noting but the scott and
sneer, and the coarse reveiry of very unpictur-
esque vice. The best woman he could find was
Lady Sutfolll-the good Howard who stood by
| the Queen at Kensington, when Jeanne Deans
made her plant, and whose merit it was that she
was an English mistress, and not . German one. 4
hundred years ago, an English writer, anobIeman
aud a statesnan-one for whom, in spite of Mr..
IThIckeray, we have sincere regard-sketched
these same folks, and Lady Suffolk in particular
and one almost seems to hear our satirst's tones
| in the words which Lord Chesterfield wrote Of
this good lady and her husband: .Thus,n says
| he, Chesterfield, and not Mr.. Thackeray) "thcy
| loved, thus they married, and thus they hated
each other for the rest of their lives
Let US in this connection, and no where more
appropriately than at the moment when we are
quotinga last century satirist, say q word on a
charge that is whispered about to Mr.. Thacke-
ray S dsparagement, which!Seems to us essential
ly absurd 1t is that these lectures, descriptive
Iordenuneiatory or simply satirical of Kings and
1 Courts, were written for our American market.
meant to appeal to our peculiar prejudiccs, and
! them in England. This, we say, seems very alb
surd or irrational THERE'S monosyIable word
| in our language which Mr. Thackeray has coin
/ cd or Illustrated and which, we fear, we .imeri
cans may sometimes deserve. We hesitate to
say SO, but may we not Ill our prudery, our COM
placency, our strange and contradictory Sympa-
hies and antiplthies, cur bitter anti-Angl icansm
to-day and our excessive pro-AngicaniSm to-
morrow our kosiuthism and our Mcagherism of
! this year,, and our anti-Paya!, anti-fnreigner
spasm of the next, ourh hatred of English Kings
when an EngiShman praises them, and our over
| flowing pity when he abuses them our thin skim
nedisul-may wa not fill chapter to be entitled
the American Snob. Mr.. Thackeray will never
write it. but we have the perfect ri hit to suggest
the large eapabiiity the subject And seems
to us that it is little exuding of this strange
spirit of perversity that finds fault with these
lectures on this score How could Mr. Thacke-
raw, orauy decent man, speak otherwise of these
| defunct Georges, and are they so canonisett in
the affections Of England that any one here or
There cares a copper for their memory Why
should the early Georges, or indeed any of them,
/ be more exempt from manly criticism than the
IStuarts Of the century before or the Tudors be-
fore them.
George the Fourth, was not a whit better
than Henry the Eighth. He would have made
a fine figure on the field of cloth of gold. and
was as willing to get rid by violence, Of his one
wife, as bluff Harry was of his five or six.
Bluff was the word for both these royal bru-
Utilities. And why should not an EngliShman
or an American talk as freely of the eighteenth
as the fifteenth century? Mr.. Thackeray speaks
Of the men who, in their day, .dishonored us as
well as his countrymen. They were our Kings
too, once. Wewere further off, and saw royal
indecency through u reversed glass George
the Second, happily reigning," wrote DIR.
Franklin, in IT'S, on the corner stone of our
Pennsylvania Hospital, and SO he was, so far as
we were concerned, for he troubled himself little
IabOut us-but he certainly was not tiscently
reigning, for Lady Yarmouth, (Slr. Thackeray's
Wamotlen), was mistress paramount, and the
poor Queen was in her grave. Why, We re-
lpeat should not these people be talked about as
they deserve, here or elsewhere? One might as
well be shocked at Mr.. Cough talking in Eng
land about American drunken men and Women
la portion of tour sovereignS' If Mr. Thacke-
ray had come here, and praised English kings
and mobiles, how seOrufnlly should we have lis
tened, and how busily at work should we have
Ibeen to dig up and shoot at him all the truths of
history, which we now scold him for telling!
And let it be remembered too, that in all these
descriptions of the hdeous past, in these strict
lures on the grotesqne, inappropriate present, no
word escapes the lecturers lip of irreverence to
. the 0AOI nd mr. Of
tue as it stands in marble purity on its pedes-
tal;-there is good deal of melting Of wax
work, q terrible inroad into Madame Tussaud's
tehamber ofhistory, but no harm to high art and
tmoFal beauty. Nor is there q word or thought
of disoyalty to his nation or her constitutional
institutions, and no one will forget in his lecture
on George the Second-the one whose acerbity
seemed most extremc-the allusion to the pres
emit Queen and her purity of life and character
$50 cordial, so expressive, so graceful. 1t had
its response, too in the hcsrts and from the lips
Of his American listeners.
! To hint that Mn. Thackeray wou!dnot orcould
not say these harsh things in England, implies
a grievous mistake and not a little ignorance
| Mr.. EhackcTay has said and written and printed
lust as savage things in England; and others be-
side him have said worse things. In 1915, there
appeared in England revised edition of Lord
Chesterfeld's works, edited by a ViScount, now
4 al laF WIFI q GOEOuS1 euDhAollcu Oh IIle COW
er, and there we tindin English print for English
readers, that everything in George the Seconds
mind was little; he had all the Weaknesses of a
little mind without any Of the virtues or even
the vices of great one. Ayaricc, the meancst
of all passions, was his ruling one; and never
knew him to deviate into generous action."-
This is pretty plain writing. Lord Brougham,
in 2 work revised and republished in this very
year, 1865, saysof George the Third Queen
Victoria grandEther):-"He had narrow I'M
EderstanIing, which no culture had enlarged, an
obstinate disposition, which no education could
have harmonized. When thwarted, the hab-
its of friendship, the tiesof blood, the dictates of
conscience, therules of honesty were alike forgot
ten; and the fury of the tyrant, with the
resources of a cunning, whichmental alienation
is supposed to whet, was ready to circumvent
or destroy all who interposed an obstacle to the
fierceness of unbridletl DESIRE a thousand in
stances of this sort of truthful speaking might
be cited, but unless ditterentrule is to beapP!i
ed to noble and to plebeian writers, it seems
j