ther, and where her remains were interred. It was his own wish that he should be buried beside her, and that the funeral should be as private and unostentatious as possible. His injunctions were obeyed. His wife, his daughter, and his niece followed him weeping to the tomb; a few private friends and his medical attendants joined in the last sad honours to mortality; while the sympathising villagers and several members of the theatrical company of Portsmouth filled the little edifice, and listened reverentially to the solemn service of the Church, impressively read by the Rev. Dr Gatty, Subdean of York, Vicar of Ecclesfield, and one of the oldest friends of the departed.

The merits of Charles Kean as an actor were not, during his lifetime, very ungrudgingly conceded. He did not spring into popularity and fame at one bound, but had to fight hard to make good every step of his progress. All who aspire to fill the highest place in this most arduous of professions must undergo the same ordeal. From the days of Macklin, Quin, and Garrick, to those of Cooke, Young, the Kembles, the elder Kean, and Macready, the recognition of the public was never easy to win. The most successful had to extort it by dint of energy and perseverance, rather than to expect it as a matter of grace and favour, until they had reached that turning-point in their career when the hostile became friendly and the indifferent were roused into acclamation. Many considered that Charles Kean was as truly a man of genius as his father, or any other great tragedian who had ever graced the stage; others were of opinion that his talent was but the perfection of art that almost approached to genius, but did not attain it; while a third section denied his claim to rank as a tragedian at all, either in the first or the second rank. But this is always

the fate of the living. The illnatured too commonly judge of the great and the ambitious by their worst performances, and ignore their best. The grave, however, reverses these judgments; and when the tongue and the pen are silent, and the great actor and the great poet have gone to that bourne "where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest," the spirit of detraction is awed by the sanctity of the tomb, and the world remembers them no longer by their worst but by their best efforts, and begins to think that perhaps it will never look upon their like again. Though the earth is still fresh over the grave of Charles Kean, this result is already obvious; and when the day comes when those who were young and ardent, and in the first flush of manhood and womanhood, at the time, not now remote, when Mr and Mrs Charles Kean revived at the Princess's the masterpieces of Shakespeare, shall arrive at old age, the world will doubtless hear from their lips, when grown garrulous, the same laments of the degeneracy of the stage, and the same recollections of those "palmy" days of their youth when Kean, as Hamlet, as King John, as Cardinal Wolsey, and as Louis XI., delighted the town; and when Mrs Kean, as Katharine of Aragon, as Hermione, as Portia, and as Rosalind, drew from all hearts a genuine and enthusiastic applause.

We cannot say that we look forward with hopefulness to any considerable revival of the Shakespearian drama in our day. Music, the ballet, the farce, and the vaudeville, native and imported, are more consonant to modern taste than the grandeur and magnificence of Shakespeare. There may be, of course, a reaction; but it will require great actors to bring it about, and since Charles Kean has left us we know not where to look for them.

THE struggle for place, of which we spoke by anticipation in our last number, has begun in earnest, and the Government accepts it under circumstances of no common disadvantage. They have lost a leader in whom all sections of the Conservative party, with not a few who scarcely profess to be of that party, reposed undoubting confidence. Lord Derby has succumbed to broken health, and retires from office never, in all human probability, to undertake its responsibilities again. It would be impossible to exaggerate the weight of this blow, falling upon us, as it does, at a juncture so critical as the present. Lord Derby's business habits, energetic yet methodical; his skill in the management of men, and in smoothing down differences of opinion; his tact in advancing exactly when it became him to advance in legislation, and in pausing or falling back as often as one course or the other might be recommended by prudence these great qualities, as well as his fervid eloquence in debate, are no longer at hand to encourage and sustain his party. That he will be seen again, ere many weeks expire, in his place in the House of Lords, is, we are glad to think, a contingency quite to be reckoned upon; and come when he may, his presence there will be greeted with universal rejoicing. Because, true as he has ever been to his own friends, and fixed in his own opinions, not the bitterest of his political opponents can charge him with having ever forgotten, even in the heat of debate, the courtesy that is due from one gentleman to another. But though, as a private member of Parliament, we look to him still to fight our battles, and are confident that he will fight them vigorously as often as he enters into the arena, we cannot forget that the prestige of

his genius and great historic name no longer sheds its lustre over us ; and it would be the merest affectation to deny that we feel the privation acutely. At the same time, our regrets are not untempered by other feelings. The mantle which Lord Derby lets fall has lighted upon the shoulders which are justly entitled to wear it. Mr Disraeli becomes the successor, not to Lord Derby's office alone, but to his policy; and it remains to be seen how far the House of Commons, which has long recognised in him one of its most distinguished members, will accept him as First Minister of the Crown, and its now acknowledged leader. Now this is precisely the point, the determination of which one way or another the chiefs of the Opposition are hurrying forward. Maddened by the recollection that, as Lord Derby's lieutenant, he tripped them up upon their own chosen field of battle, they are determined, now that he has become himself the head of an Administration, that he shall find no opportunity of explaining upon what principles of general policy it is to act.

How bitterly in concert they are straining to effect that object! how ludicrously inconsistent are the reasons which they assign for their earnestness! To-day we are assured that the Tory party are unworthy of their leader, because they give him an uncertain confidence, and make no secret of their opinions; to-morrow we are overwhelmed with sarcasms, and told that the gentlemen of our party are too stupid to supply the Tories with a leader, and that, therefore, we have been forced to seek for him among the lowest of the people! The lowest of the people!! And this comes from the Liberals,-spoken, too, and written, of one whose lineage, though it connect him not with our English aristocracy, is far more

ancient than any to which the proudest of them can lay claim. Well, be it so. To us Mr Disraeli is a man of the people. As a man of the people he entered Parliament some thirty years ago, indebted for his seat to no faction, and looking for opportunities of advancing himself to no family connection. How he was then shunned, slighted, repulsed, snubbed, and, as it was supposed, extinguished, none who are old enough to look back upon the dawn of his public career can have forgotten. How vain the effort was to keep him down! A genius ever fertile in resources, an energy which no temporary failure could destroy, a natural disposition patient and forbearing, albeit brave and manly enough when provoked too far, lifted him by degrees above prejudice; and now, with the frank and hearty assent of the great Tory party, he has become at once their chief-the First Minister of the Crown. Is there in this anything of which the party or their leader need be ashamed? Is not the connection between them very much, on the contrary, to the honour of both? So we think, and so think, likewise, all in every grade and station who, within the compass of the four seas, put its rightful interpretation upon the term "Liberality." It is a beaten faction, calling itself Liberal, which alone pretends to believe that England is disgraced by having the councils of the sovereign mainly directed by "a man of the people." Against this "man of the people" all their violence is in consequence directed; and verily they are not scrupulous as to the means which they adopt in order to expel him from office.

We are far from denying to any body of independent statesmen the right to demand from the Government, at proper times and seasons, a specific avowal of its intentions on any point of policy, foreign or domestic, whether in explanation of the past or in anticipation of the future. We have therefore no charge to bring against the

member who questioned Lord Stanley on the subject of the relations of this country with the United States. It was a perfectly legitimate course of action, and its results have been most satisfactory. It enabled the Foreign Minister to make a clear exposition of his views on the vexed question of the Alabama claims, and to make them in such a way as not alone to satisfy both his own countrymen and all reasonable American citizens, but

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to pave the way for the acceptance by England, and through England by other nations, of a new, pregnant, and most salutary_doctrine of international law." These issues, whether so intended or not, have immensely strengthened Lord Stanley's position in the House of Commons and with the country. They bring into view a farsightedness of which his predecessor at the Foreign Office knew nothing. They make manifest the fact that, while yielding on principle not one inch of the ground which Lord Russell had taken up, nor conceding that, under existing circumstances, it is assailable, Lord Russell's successor is nevertheless prepared to inaugurate a new code of international law, and to do it gracefully. Lord Russell, let us remember, treated the fitting out and escape of the Alabama as a mere infraction of our own municipal law. On this ground he declined to submit to arbitration the claims for redress which the American Government brought forward. And looking at the question through the medium of usages actually in force, he had right upon his side. But arrangements which suit very well for one condition of society, are altogether out of place when applied to another; and this important fact, not Lord Stanley only, but the House of Commons, and the common opinion of all well-instructed Englishmen, has at length accepted. A new doctrine is thus established-viz., that the duties which neutrals owe to belligerents

shall be under the sanction, not of municipal, but of international law; and that one of these duties is, that not, under any circumstances, can neutrals escape censure and the liability to make amends, if vessels of war pass out of their territories to prey upon the commerce of the belligerent. The Government, therefore, is much indebted to the Opposition for enabling them to enunciate a principle so sound; from the general acceptance of whichand it cannot well fail to be univer

sally accepted-no country on the earth will gain so much as our own. But having assented thus far to the tactics of the Liberals, we find ourselves constrained to stop short. Their manoeuvres in the House of Lords may be less practically mischievous than the course which it has pleased them to take in the House of Commons; but they evince a pettiness of spirit for which it is impossible to invent an excuse, while they lay their party open to charges such as we should certainly not have brought against them had not they themselves, in their blind eagerness to misrepresent their rivals, broadly stated the facts.

On the 5th of last month, as soon after the accession of Mr Disraeli to his present office as circumstances would allow, Lord Russell took occasion, in his place in Parliament, to make an ill-natured attack upon him, not because of anything which he had done, or threatened to do, since called to take the lead in her Majesty's councils, but for certain words uttered while he was yet the colleague and subordinate of Lord Derby, at a dinner given in his honour by the Scotch Conservatives in Edinburgh. The obnoxious words, read them from what version of the speech we may, told a truth which nobody pretends to deny. But Lord Russell chose so to express himself on the subject as to convey a specific charge of wilful dishonesty against his rival of a dishonesty so small

as to show itself in the intentional substitution of one set of words in what was to become the authorised version of a speech, different from another which had escaped the speaker while addressing his auditors. Now, we happen to have before us both the newspaper report and the pamphlet from which, as they stand respectively, we shall take the trouble to quote. The newspaper report runs thus :

"During that period of seven years, instruction of my colleagues, after conwith the advice-I may say under the

stant communication with them, it was at their wish that I continued to express the principles upon which, in our opinion, a complete measure of Parliamentary Reform ought to be established. Now, mark this-because these are things which you may not have heard of in ancity of Edinburgh,-1 had to prepare other speech which was made in this the mind of the country-to educate, if it be not arrogant to use such a phrase -to educate our party, which is a large party, and, of course, requires its attention to be called to questions of this to prepare the mind of Parliament and character with some pressure; and I had of the country on this question of Reform. Now, what were the points which, not only with the concurrence of Lord Derby and my colleagues, some of whom are in this room-what were the points that, during the course of these seven years, I tried to impress upon the conscience and conviction of the country?"

It was to this declaration, and to the statement of the five points, which is confessedly the same in the newspaper report as in the pamphlet, that Lord Russell endeavoured to pin Mr Disraeli, with a view to convict him of deliberate fraud. Who can trust a man who says one thing over-night, and, correcting next day the manuscript of his speech, alters it so as to say another? Did Mr Disraeli alter his speech on this occasion? Did he manipulate the pamphlet so that it should assert something differentwe will not say in substance, but well-nigh in letter-from what had been said in the newspapers? Our