The Sun. — 1859-10-21 (London, England)

THE SUN. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1859  Already we have had several distinct celebrations of one of the most memorable events of 1859—the  virtual completion of the grandest of all modern  achievements in naval architecture.  The Great  Eastern, however, is worthy, indeed, of this reiterated jubilation. It is worthy of it as one of the most signal products of our engineering genius and commercial enterprise. Wednesday, howbeit, at length it may be observed, witnessed the gratifying incident of its crowning inauguration. For ur on that evening, at the Royal Hotel, Holyhead, the directors of the Great Ship Company were entertained at a  grand banquet, in company with a numerous gathering of distinguished public characters, by the London and North-Western Railway Company,  termed by one of the speakers, the greatest  railway company in the world. Conspicuous among those who participated in these festivities, its will be seen through the interesting report of the proceedings published in another part of our impression of  this evening, were the late First Lord of the Admiralty and the present Chancellor of the Exchequer. Between the speeches delivered by those two prominent members of the House of Commons —one, a man of rare genius, the other, a man of remarkable common sense, energy, and general in telligence—there is, of course, observable a very marked difference indeed. But the kind of diffia ence is not, perhaps, altogether precisely what the majority might have anticipated. Mr. GLADSTONE, in returning thanks for his cr,vn "health,"  not contented with giving a dry toast, must needs give one, if we may venture upon the vulgarism, very thickly and over abundantly buttered. He it is who tells his hosts that their's is " the first railway company in the world." He speaks of the Chairman (the Marquis of CHANDOS) to his face, as " an honour to the order to which he belongs." He has a word of panegyric to be pronounced over the recently devoured banquet itself, declaring it ecstatically to have been "so admirably served !" He has, almost we were going to say the indelicacy, but we will call it instead of that the effrontery, to tell the audience he is addressing that it is " incomparable company Altogethcr piling the Pelion upon the Ossa of flattery, and making the Olympus of ordinary compliment quite a wart by comparison ! Besides which, there comes blown to us in the rather empty wind-bag of Mr. GLADSTONE'S after-dinner oration cn Wednesday, a distorted fragment of a ridiculously applied extract from Dr. JOHNSON, and one admirably selected quotation, quite the gem of the speech, from POPE'S " Windsor Forest." As to the former—that is, the Johnsouian " elegant extract"—quoth Mr. GLADSTONE, "Dr. JOHNSON, I thilZ7Z, says"—so that the right hon. gentleman is actually not quite certain about the right authorship of a remark that must surely, to the ordinary run of English students, be familiar as household words—a remark which the Chancellor of the Exchequer thus goes on to murder in cold blood for the purpose of a prepo.,terous misapplication—" Dr. JOHNSON 1 think says that whatever induces a man to lire more in the future and less in the present exalts him in the sale of creation." If Mr. GLADSTONE will but take down fro:n his bookshelves the volume ofJoHNsoN's works, containing the Doctor's account of his " Tour to the Hebrides," he will find the original passage in its integrity and entirety—one of thz most exquisitely beautiful rhetorical passages in the English language : we