The Sun. — 1855-06-22 (London, England)

THE SUN, LONDON, FIIIIJAY LITINE 2), 1855.  Committee, to be combined within the all-embracing purpose of the suggested " Literary Institu tion of Great Britain." ,An association the administrative body of which would have, on the one hand, to grapple with the calamities of a multitude of sorrow-stricken applicants, and on the other, to minister to the thirst of a crowd of insatiable tea-drinkers, while endeavouring to appease with intellectual food the appetites of a hungry swarm of famished book-worms and ravenous gobemouches. No wonder the amendment proposed by Mr. MILNES was carried by the meeting on Saturday instead of the original motion proposed by Mr. DICKENS, that the Report of the Special Committee be adopted—the amendment  savoured with this notable preference acknow ledging with gratitude the labours of the Special Committee, and recognising the value of some of their suggestions as subjects for further deliberation : but, at the same time, rejecting the advice that any new charter should be applied for, on the score that the proposals contained in the Report involved an entire alteration of the nature and intentions of the Literary Fund Society, and that its means are inadequate to the attainment of the very incongruous purposes we have already enumerated. No wonder, we say, that an amendment so exceedingly rational was carried—rather than a motion so generously intended, but so injudiciously combining in one scheme the incompatible projects of a Library, a Charity, a College, and a Club ! It was the old wonderful feat all over again—that of " vaulting Ambition overleaping itself"—the most astonishing of all known summersaults ! The Special Committee had success already within its grasp—had it been content with restricting its earliest efforts in the way of reform to matters which would have necessitated no new  charter ; had it endeavoured to improve the Literary Fund Society in its strictly eleemosynary character; had it refrained, as yet at least, from any inopportune attempt to expand a simply charitable establishment into a manifold, or rather multiform, institution rivalling at one and the same time the French Academy, and the Book Society in St. James's-square, and the Pall-mall Athenmum, although sustaining meanwhile upon a larger scale than ever its original character as a benevolent association.  Again, we cannot but earnestly express our' regret that the Special Committee should have defeated its own object so completely by the adoption of a Report too daring to admit of its aim being regarded as within the limits of immediate practicability. Nothing could well be more admirable, more humane, more generous, than the proposal, through the Report, of loans, instead of gifts, to the literary applicant for secret assistance. As to Mr. MILNES' objection that such loans could never be sued for in a County Court by a society undertaking " to do good by stealth" —that of course ! The objection we venture to regard as altogether valueless, seeing that loans like these would be numbered amongst the most sacred of all debts, namely, " debts of honour." And as Sir EDWARD LYTTON, with a noble reliance upon the purity and elevation of the literary character, observed, on Saturday, we might confidently expect that ninety-nine out of every hundred of these advances would be faithfully reimbursed. However, it were idle to talk just now of the advantage of substituting loans for gifts as among the benefactions to be hereafter diffused by the Literary Fund Society, seeing that, for a time at least, the hope of instant reform in that Society has been dissipated by the humane but mistaken temerity of the Special Committee. Nothing is left for us at present, thanks to that unlucky over-rashness, except to await the dawn of some just possible future, when the over-slept Literary Fund Executive may at last be knocked up in earnest, and, as Mr. DICKENS has reminded us, "please GOD, we must get it out of bed one way or another "—either to commit an involuntary suicide by jumping out of windows, as the Bishop of OXFORD suggested, or to bestir itself rationally by setting its house in order betimes.