The Sun. — 1840-04-15 (London, England)

LARDNER. FROM A CORRESPONDENT.) In last evening's Sun there appears, in a very prominent place, and distinguished by a very attractive heading, a Paragraph commencing thus : " The Reverend Dr. Dyonisius Lardner [the italics and spelling are copied strictly], who so recently abused the confidence and destroyed the happiness of a family in Brunswick-square, Brighton, has met the punishment he so richly deserved." In the remainder of the article Dr. L. is twice stiled " Reverend Doctor," and the writer's drift evidently is to cast, by implication, the odium of this dreadful transaction upon the clergy of the Church. Now this cannot be done in ignorance or mistake. Dr. Lardner is a well-known personage, an eminent man among the Useful Knowledge and London University people ; a man never suspected even of Christian, much less of clerical habits or tendencies: All this is, and must be, well known to the editor of The Sun, who is himself a bit of a literati,—writes plays, reviews books, &c. All this, I repeat, must be well known to him, and yet he deliberately inserts an article imputing the offence of this " liberal" Doctor to the Church I An act of baser falsehood, of more perfect scoundrelism, I never saw perpetrated in the columns of a newspaper.[Our Correspondent's language is much too strong, an& in our opinion, unjust. We do not know whether Dr. Lardner is in orders, but he certainly has been in the habit of styling himself "the Reverend," which has naturally led the Editor of The Sun to consider him a clergyman of the Church of England; that the wretched man never acted in this country as a clergyman of the Church is, however, certain ; and it is, therefore, impossible to acquit The Sun of acting most uncandidly in ascribing his conduct to the Church. As well impute the misconduct of the Rev. Robert Taylor to the sacred Establishment, to which he has never been more malignantly disposed than the Rev. Dionysius Lardner has been.—Editor of the Standard.] Now though the head of the Church, unfortunately for Churchmen, fits,the cap which The Sun manufactured, there was no intention of imputing Drit Lardner's peccadilloes to the Church. The devotees of that worm-eaten institution naturally expect that others should mete to them the same measure they mete to the Socialists, and impute to the doctrines taught by the Church every crime committed by Churchmen, as Dr. Philpotts imputed to Mr. Owen's doctrines the suicide committed by one of his followers. With the sad fate of Castlereagh and Bishop Jocelyn still fresh in the publicmemory, we were surprised at Dr. Philpotts imprudence, and we can assure both the Editor of the Standard and his learned Correspondent that we disdain to imitate his bad habits. We meant no reflection on the Church, but inserted the article as we received it. In fact we demurred to giving Dr. Lardner the title of Rev., he not being so well known to us as he is to the Editor of the Standard, till we were shown an official paper in which he is designated by his clerical title. The Correspondent of the Standard is evidently not a reader of that nor any other Tool journal ; he must confine his reading to our pages, or he never would have spoken of our paragraph as an act of base falsehood, and, as he ungrammatically calls it, " more perfect scoundrelism'." Infinitely worse paragraphs than ours, if that which was in no sense bad can be susceptible of such a comparison, appear every day in the Standard, Post, Herald, Times, and Co. The virtuous Editor, too, of the lying Standard, cannot acquit us of being uncandid, though he is obliged to confess that Dr. Lardner has been " in the habit of styling himself the Reverend." We only assigned him his usual title, rank, and dignity, and for doing that, without hinting that his culpability was the consequence of his station, the painfully sensitive Editor, and his painfully sensitive Correspondent, abuse The Sun, as if it had coined one falsehood, and then coined half a dozen more to give it currency. The Standard alai its Correspond‘int are t not angry, we admit, without a cause ; but whether cause be their own consciousness of the effect of the doctrines and practices of the Church, or our words, the impartial reader must determine.