The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser. — 1853-08-30 (Liverpool, Merseyside, England)

VICTORIA. and a family of children The changes produced in the structu  f GEORGE the  Foxrpan seem to be still beginning—never ending. I need not hesitate to affirm that the stables and the kitchen are the only two departments worthy of mention, "which have escaped the finger of improvement. GEORGE the Founx H could design for both; he was also an excellent landscape gardener, as the beautiful bit of park and water in front tof Buckingham Palace testify to this hour. In the true principles of art, from the Grecian edifice down to the late pavilion at Brighton, all his ideas were grotesque—inhar.  monious—defYing unity. Hence, since Buckingham House was changed from the modest-looking brick building of  our boyhood to the present palace on its site—now thirty years agone—masons, plasterers, and bricklayers have never been a year away from the building ; and now the timedesecrated stink of Pimlico is entirely absorbed—made dead and tasteless by the oceans of white lead and rivers aturpentine,vvith which the rotten stone of whichthe walla are constructed is now being bedaubed. Paint—nothing but paint—quoth the master of the works, can prevent the walls froth crumbling. The whole exterior of the -palace is benetted with scaffolding. This was the principal cause of the QUEEN not proroguing parliament in person ; she had no place nearer than Windsor in which to put on the "regal purple." St. James's Palace, though the most commodious in Europe for levees, is but an indifferent place for a Queen to robe in. Prince ALBERT, they say, is in treaty for a beautiful country residence two or three miles out of town, situated in the luxuriant shades of St. Jobes-wood. There is, considering its proximity to London, a large expanse of farm land attached, so that his Royal Highness can indulge his favorite agricultural pursuits. It is meant, also, as a " hop-step-and-jump" residence for the royal children.  Among the few legal and other friends one has still left to enjoy the kindly cigar and the club smoking-room, rock ing-chairs, the commission appointed by .the QUEEN to inquire into the Birmingham borough prison has afforded subject of conversation in lack of other. At the Homeoffice they are all primed ; I may venture to affirm that they almost know which way the inquiry will go, or rather end. The commissioners could not have been better selected. There is all through a compound of what is necessary in a commission of the sort : of sound legal knowledge in Mr. WELSBY, the barrister; a great acquaintance with the statistics of morality and vice, prison discipline, &c., in Captain WILLIAMS; and Dr. BALM'S ame is a guarantee for an intimate knowledge of those peculiar and fell diseases to be found even yet within our prison walls. The doctor has had ample opportunity of acquiring this knowledge in that government pest-house, Idillbank Penitentiary, where the most robust fellow that ever snared a hare "on a shiny night," and the burglar, with his mask and lucifer, fresh from agragrian outrage, broad as HERCULES and brown as autumn, begin to lose their health after twelve months' imprisonment,—so much 30, that no prisoners, of whatever grade, are kept in Millbank more than a year or a year and a half,—more murders them. Captain WILLIAMS was a good while at the Bx.°Mee, and his reports as a prison inspector have always been read with interest, and spoken of eulogistically in Parliament. Birmingham borough prison has been a queer concern for some time. Captain.