The Sun. — 1848-01-10 (London, England)

XVIII. no doubt considered that Napoleon, who had taken service under Robespierre, was fully prepared to carry out the views of his former patron ; besides all which, we have heard it remarked, during the days of the restoration, as a proof of the complicity of Robespierre with the Bourbons, that the sister of Robespierre was in the regular receipt of a pension from the Government of the Restoration. Mr. St. John quotes a passage from one of his reports to the convention, as a proof that his talents have been much underrated. " The man," says Mr. St. John, " who could write an ironical passage like the following could not be wholly contemptible :" .. The False Revolutionist.—Full of fire for great resolutions which signify nothing—more than inditierent for those which might honour the cause of the people and save the country—much devoted to patriotic forms, and attached (like the bigots they war against) to exterior forms, they would rather wear out a hundred red caps than do one good action. . . . . Should we act, they talk; should we deliberate, they commence by acting; should we defend the territory, they wish to go in search of tyrants beyond seas and over mountains; should we retake our frontiers, they are for assaulting our churches and scaling heaven! They forget the Austrians to make war on devotees ; should we support our cause by the fidelity of our allies, they declaim against Governments, and prepare a decree of accusation against the Great Mogul!" Mrs. Crowe, who has recently joined the Mirror corps, contributes a highly interesting tale, entitled "The Two Women of Nuremberg," and Maxwell, also a new hand here, commences one of his unrivalled pictures of camp life, under the title of "The Revelations of a Mess Table." The letter on "The Choice of a Profession," by Cmlius, is full of quiet sarcasm, and "A paper on Pantomimes," by Morris Barnett, is quite a propos to the season ; but we are forgetting our old friend " Paul Pevensey," whose adventures are continued in this number. Paul is arrested as a spy by the miners out on strike, and conveyed to their stronghold The account of a strike in the colliery districts is admirable ; there is something very graphic in the description of the murder of the magistrate, and the reflections of the writer on popular tumults are worthy the consideration of the philanthropist and the statesman. 'Would that the gentry of Ireland would ponder over the following passage : " The insurgents had been taught, through no one knew what agency, to believe in the lawfulness of assassination. Secret societies meeting sometimes in remote and desolate places, as in the beer-shop and ruined windmill above described; sometimes in the alehouses and crowded streets of the towns, drew up the muster-rolls of death, distributed daggers, and coolly inculcated the principle that to assassinate a rich man was to remove a public enemy—consequently, a virtuous rather than a vicious action. Still, to the credit of the educated classes be it spoken, there took place no instance of pusillanimous flight. The gentry firmly stood their ground—confronted the danger—reasoned, when opportunity offered, with their misguided neighbours ; and sought to impress them with the belief that their past neglect and oppression ought rather to be attributed to the operation of general laws, acting alike on all classes, for the preservation of barbarism, than to any tyrannical propensities in the possessors of property. Even the murder of the magistrate, though reports of it spread like wildfire, mixed up with innumerable exaggerations, produced no difference in their conduct. They seemed ready to brave the assassin's dagger, or any other form of peril to which the circumstances of the times might give birth, rather than ignobly abandon the posts, as persons have at various times done in other parts of the empire, where the consciousness of some deserving may possiby inspire mere craven thoughts. An excited populace is terrible, but may often be successfully encountered by a frank and manly courage, upheld by the consciousness of rectitude—as was proved again and again by incidents which would all deserve to be narrated, were it my object to give here a complete history of the strike." The Mirror begins the new year well. It is equal to any, superior to most of its contemporaries.