and London drained de novo, not only without levying new rates, but with a positive reduction of existing rates, swelled as they are by the enormous flushing-costs of the present defective structures. Finally, in our anxiety to bring these advantages home in a tangible form to every class of our readers, we showed how the proposed consolidation would have for its effect to abate the risks of fire, and the costs of insurance; to promote and cheapen public and personal cleanliness; to extend, by the provision of a distributive vehicle, the applications of steam-power-available, henceforth, not only for industrial but also for domestic use; to embellish with cascades and fountains not only our public squares, but also our private dwellings; and, lastly, to relieve the labouring poor from a needless drudgery, wrongful to themselves, and burdensome (like Wrong in every form) to Society at large. From these details, severally minute, though broad in their collective scope, we would willingly return with the indulgent reader to the philosophical ground whence we started together; and, rising to a higher point of view, study with him the true import and ulterior tendency of the Sanitary Movement, its relations to the higher political life of Society, and its rank among those characteristic developments, which distinguish modern from ancient civilization. But in the few lines and moments remaining at our present disposal, we could scarcely propound, much less develope, these vast and pregnant themes; which therefore for the present we forego:-content if, at the point which our argument has reached, we have in any degree fortified the reader's judgment as to the distinctions between real and nominal Self-government, between wholesome and obnoxious Centralization, between substantive and shadowy Responsibility; distinctions which, once clearly apprehended, can scarcely leave a doubt between the rival claims of a Grand Junction Trading Monopoly, a Metropolitan Parish Parliament, and a Board of Crown-appointed Commissioners, to the future sanitary government of London. It is, indeed, obvious that the responsibility, avowedly wanting in the first body, and but nominally attaching to the second, would be really and availably inherent in the third:-unfluctuating as its composition would be; its members few, paid, and removable; its labours continuous; its errors subject to the triple censure of the Parliament, the Press, and the Public; and its duty and interest concurring with the clauses of a stringent Act, to maintain it in steadfast allegiance to the great principles of Sanitary Consolidation. As for those admirable principles themselves, we should indeed rejoice if we could inspire the reader, at parting, with our own profound conviction of their truth, and earnest solicitude for their prevalence. From whatever point of view, in deed, deed, we contemplate the luminous Code in which they are embodied, we find it still pregnant with incalculable good, to ourselves as well as to our successors. We find it strengthening the double basis, local and central, of our well-poised constitutional government, by a simultaneous expansion of municipal and imperial institutions. Concurrently with this development of our collective or social life, we find it prolonging the term, and enhancing the enjoyment, of our individual existence, by bringing its material conditions into closer conformity with Natural Law. Nor is it merely a physical emancipation which we find the Sanitary Movement thus gradually working out. Each alleviation of bodily disease and drudgery absolves also our nobler faculties from the reaction of a degrading bondage; and makes us at once fitter and freer for the pursuit of those high destinies which, albeit originating amidst the corruptions of the present, have their term in the brightness of futurity. To secure these inestimable advantages, what self-abnegations are we called upon to practise what perils to encounter-what personal sacrifices to undergo? None,-absolutely none. In the very lowest, as well as in the highest sense of the term, we shall be gainers, each and all of us, by the progress of Sanitary Reform: and our private interests, personal and pecuniary, are closely bound up in the success of a Cause, which might well inspire, and would worthily requite, the most heroic self-devotion. ART. VI.-Foreign Reminiscences by Henry Richard Lord Holland. Edited by his Son, Henry Edward Lord Holland. pp. 362. London, 1850. IT is impossible, we think, to read ten pages of this volume without feeling a double surprise the one, that the late Lord Holland should have written such trash-the other, and the greater, that the present Lord Holland should have thought that the publication could in any point of view be creditable to his father's memory. The notices of it which have appeared in several journals, and particularly a very able one in the Times of the 27th of January, must have already spread abroad a strong impression of its literary demerits; but we feel it to be our duty not only to state a full concurrence in those unfavourable opinions, but to enforce them by details on some points in which we cannot but feel a special degree of interest, inasmuch as they relate to falsifications and calumnies which we had heretofore refuted, but which this performance has obstinately and, we must say, impudently revived. Lord Lord Holland was fond of literary society, and had a very creditable and not unsuccessful ambition of literary reputation. Of his Life of Lope de Vega we gave a full and favourable account many years ago (Q. R. vol. 18). The habits of his life and the lively and anecdotical style of his conversation naturally suggested the probability that, in emulation of Horace Walpole (whose Memoirs of George II. he edited), he also might be found to have left behind him Memoirs of his own time; and it would be naturally anticipated that one who had lived so much in the atmosphere of fashion and politics would have a good deal to tell that might be new to the general public, and at all events amusing and interesting from the graces of the narrator. Having been all his life a strong partisan, it might also be expected that whatever he wrote would have a strong political bias; but his manners were so amiable-his personal good-nature and bonhommie indeed so remarkable-that no one could have suspected that his pen would be found dipped in gall, and, still less, in any worse menstruum. The surmise of the existence of Memoirs has, we see, been fulfilled. We learn indeed from some notes to the present publication that it is but a portion of Memoirs' which Lord Holland left prepared for the press. He had, it seems, bequeathed all his papers to Lady Holland, and she subsequently bequeathed them-with, we believe, the bulk of her personal property-to Lord John Russell. Lord John, with natural delicacy, handed over the papers to the heir of the Holland peerage-but whether by an absolute and legal transfer seems from the sequel doubtful. It must be inferred that Lord John himself conceived that he had still retained some kind of discretionary power over them; since, when the advertisement of this volume came forth, some old intimates of the late Lord Holland expressed to Lord John their apprehension that it might contain something not altogether fit for the general eye, whereupon Lord John conveyed that suggestion to the present Lord Holland, with a request that the work might be submitted before publication to the judgment of some common friends. The book, unluckily, had been already printed off; but after some further correspondence between the two Lords. and their common friends, three passages, equivalent altogether to about two or three pages of the text, were cancelled, and asterisks substituted (pp. 19, 64, 65, 113, 114). This seems to us by far the most extraordinary part of the whole affair; the truth being that this tardy tribute to decency is so absurdly, and indeed incomprehensibly managed, as to make matters, to our understanding, worse than they could originally have been-for we know not how what has been suppressed can have been so bad as the inferences VOL. LXXXVIII. NO. CLXXVI. 2 L inferences which must naturally be drawn from what has been left. We shall exhibit these three strange emendations to the wonder of our readers. After having stated that Madame Campan had acknowledged that she was privy to more than one adulterous intrigue of Queen Marie-Antoinette's, and furthermore that she confessed that Count Fersen was tête-à-tête in the Queen's boudoir and bedchamber on the night of the 6th of October, and escaped in a disguise which Madame Campan had herself procured for him' -after this statement three lines are suppressed, and the blank space (p. 19) is sprinkled with asterisks—to replace, it would seem, something more disgraceful to Marie-Antoinette than the accumulated profligacy just recited. We shall examine this charge historically by and by; we at present only notice it as one of the delicate suppressions produced by Lord John Russell's interference. The next instance is thus presented : 'The exiled and divorced Queen of Prussia, wife of Frederick William, is much belied if, on the marriage of her daughter with the Duke of York, she did not observe to the chamberlain who announced it, that it was a good match enough for the daughter of Muller the musician [Here come a page and a quarter of asterisks.]—— An education in such a court as Berlin was not likely to produce, and probably did not produce, any great austerity of principle; BUT the Duchess of York was certainly distinguished through life for the gentleness and frankness of her disposition,' &c. &c.-p. 65. what can have been suppressed worse than what the two contexts reveal that the Princess Frederica of Prussia was the child of a mean adultery, and that her education probably did not produce any great austerity of principle? And does not the subsequent encomium on her conduct as Duchess of York-introduced with a disjunctive 'BUT'-seem intended to convey a most offensive, most cruel, and, we believe, totally calumnious inuendo against an illustrious lady-daughter and sister-in-law of three kings of England, and aunt of our present Sovereign-whose memory is still dear to many private friends, and still venerated by public feeling? Lord Holland wrote, he tells us, a complimentary epitaph for her monument; it would have been better not to have also penned a libel on her early life. The third instance relates to the marriage of the Prince of the Asturias (afterwards Ferdinand VII. of Spain), who is represented as being remarkable for nothing but a false, cowardly, vindictive disposition,' and 'a sinister countenance,' indicative of hisodious qualities;'-we are then told that 'for for some months after his marriage it was apprehended that no issue could be expected [Here follow two half pages of asterisks.]— The bride was a pale, sickly, ugly young woman, with a gentle expression of countenance and great propriety of manner. It was not long ere the court suspected, or affected to suspect, the young Princess of gallantry; she was more than once confined to her apartment by an order from the King [Charles IV.].'-pp. 112, 113. The reader is thus left to guess at something worse than gallant on the part of the Princess, and than odious, base, cowardly, on that of the Prince. If these suppressions were, as we cannot doubt, dictated by a sense of decency, we are astonished that whoever made them did not see the corresponding necessity of suppressing the adjoining passages, which enhance the defamation and additionally envenom the scandal. . Of the particular mode in which these suppressions were operated, it is said that Lord John Russell and the present Lord Holland are equally innocent. Lord John only suggested in general terms caution and delicacy, and Lord Holland, who was in Italy, is understood to have committed the alterations to other hands. Those other hands were probably much embarrassed by so formidable a task as that of removing from the text all that might appear objectionable on the score of prudence and decorum. The injunction would have been equivalent to that of washing a blackamoor white. The correspondence on this subject had been circulated amongst the present Lord Holland's friends in a spirit, as it would seem, of complaint against Lord John Russell's interference; but for our own part-waiving the point of legal right, as to which we have no precise information-we should be inclined to say that in Lord John's very peculiar position, his interference was perfectly justifiable on the score of friendship as well as duty; and we think that a more serious and juster complaint against his Lordship might be, that having assumed the responsibility of interfering at all, he did not do so more effectually. We have heard that in fact he never saw the work till it was published, but surely, when his suspicion was once excited, he ought to have seen it; and we are sure it must now be a matter of regret to him -both as the friend of the late Lord Holland, and as a confidential servant of the Queen's, that he had not-as it is evident he might have done-prevented the promulgation of the wanton scandal on the Duchess of York. Our literature is abundant in ridicule of the little profit that young English noblemen were supposed to derive from the 2 L 2 Grand |