From the Athenæum.

Correspondence, Despatches and other Papers, of Viscount Castlereagh, Second Marquess of Londonderry. Edited by his Brother, the Marquess of Londonderry. Third Series, 4 vols. Murray.

THOUGH We could have desired that this very voluminous work had been condensed, and though the greater portion of it cannot be described as interesting to general readers, we admit its importance to future writers of history. In his postscript to the present and concluding series, the editor says

It may be thought that portions of the correspondence are redundant, and might have been curtailed or suppressed, but I have been unwilling to exercise an arbitrary judgment on such points, and I have preferred giving, perhaps, too much to incurring the suspicion of having made a partial and one-sided selection. Where there could be any question between good taste and good faith, I have abided by the latter.

There is some reason in this latter remark and the publicity of the whole Correspondence is perhaps the most effectual tribute to Lord Castlereagh's character that could be planned.

The whole of the Correspondence included in this work confirms, we have again to repeat, the character always given to Lord Castlereagh by well-informed persons not biased by strong partisanship. Without genius or originality of mind, he had great capacity for business and he combined resolution of character with suave and attractive manners. Ile led the British House of Commons for ten successive years; performing that feat in presence of a spirited opposition, formidable from its numbers, its influence out of doors, and the mingled virtues and talents of Ponsonby, Tierney, Grattan, Horner, Romilly, Whitbread, Plunket, and, last not least, Henry Brougham. The scandals of the royal family, the unpopularity of the prince regent, the distress and discontent of the masses, and the reaction after the revolutionary war, rendered the post of leading minister hazardous, toilsome, and unpopular. Accordingly, Lord Castlereagh was the target aimed at by all the missiles of opposition - and whether we regard the savage sarcasms of Byron, the sparkling jeux d'esprit of Moore, or the mordant satire of a host of hostile critics in the public journals, it may be assumed that, in both the quality and the quantity of the invectives uttered against him, Lord Castlereagh was the best abused man of his age.

These despatches seem to vindicate the statesman's character from one charge brought against him that of being a cold-blooded, corrupting political schemer, intent only on his own aggrandizement. Their tone throughout is frank and fearless, like that of one who has nothing to conceal. They show, however, the limits of hi understanding, and do not

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Yet his

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A little success will

I am happy to find that you think the military position good; and I trust that a speedy success will be the means of restoring to us all we have lost. On this part of the subject, I have never had any serious apprehensions; the enemy is, in my view, a source of danger much less to be dreaded than what arises among ourselves. I cannot too often represent to you the real state of the minds of those weak men by whom Europe is governed. The seeming agreement at Langres covered distrust and hate. cement them again; but if they are to be severely Your presence has done much, and, I have no tried in adversity, their dissolution is certain. doubt, would continue to sustain them in misfortune, but without it they could not exist. It is not a bystander who speaks, but one who knows what their real feelings are, and who knows that they are actuated by feelings more than by principle. In all events, I am heartily rejoiced that you are in a situation to see and judge for yourself in all things. It will do you no harm to see and know the interior of a coalition.

In a postscript to the same letter, the writer says: “Firmness and perseverance will certainly do all; and, as long as you remain, the Allies may have these qualities, whatever may be their fortune."

The following letter of another prime minister, the late Earl of Liverpool, is a curious testimony to the popular power and independence of English journalism. It derives additional importance from its confidential character::

Fife House, September 15, 1815.

My dear Castlereagh I can assure you that I am fully sensible of the injurious effect which must result from the general line on present politics taken by our daily papers, and par

ticularly by those which are supposed to be government papers. You know, however, full well, that there are papers which are vulgarly called government papers, in consequence of the support which they give to the government rather than to the opposition of the day; there are no papers over which we have any authority, or even any influence, on which we can depend. It is supposed by many at home, and, I have no doubt, generally believed on the Continent, that these pipers are in the pay of government; whereas no paper that has any character, and consequently an established sale, will accept money from government; and indeed their profits are so enormous in all critical times, when their support is the most necessary, that no pecuniary assistance that government could offer would really be worth their acceptance. The only indirect means we possess of having any influence over the editors is by supplying them occasionally with foreign intelligence, and by advertisements; but, with respect to the former, it is notorious that some of the papers which are not conuected with government have always had the earliest foreign intelligence; and with regard to the latter, they know full well that the public offices will necessarily be obliged, sooner or later, to insert their advertisements in the papers which have the greatest sale, and they hold in consequence very cheap any menace to deprive them of this advantage. It may be difficult to make foreign governments understand many of these circumstances; but a very little inquiry ought to satisfy them that, even as to our domestic politics, we never can rely on what are called the government papers, on those points where their assistance would be most necessary. The Courier, at that time, as now, a government paper, took, as you will recollect, a most decided and mischievous part against the Duke of York in the year 1809, and we could not get any public print to support us last year, either upon the question of the Property Tax or the Corn Bill. The truth is, they look only to their sale. They make their way like sycophants with the public, by finding out the prejudices and prepossessions of the moment, and then flattering them; and the number of soidisant government or opposition papers abound just as the government is generally popular or unpopular. There can be no doubt that the line which has been lately taken by the daily papers in this country respecting France, has been in unison with the public feeling; and if

you ask me the cause of this public feeling, I have no difficulty in ascribing it almost exclusively to the impunity which has hitherto attended, with only one exception, all those who deserted the standard of the King of France, to join Bonaparte.

There is a great deal of the dashing boldness of the writer's character in the following letter to Wellington, written at the end of March, 1815, after Napoleon's escape from

Elba..

My dear Lord I have nothing material to add to my letter. We wait with impatience for intelligence from all quarters. The great question is, can the Bourbons get Frenchmen to

fight for them against Frenchmen? If they can, Europe may soon turn the tide in their favor; and, the process of fermentation once begun, they may create real partisans, instead of criers of Vive le Roi! and doers of nothing. If we are to undertake the job, we must leave nothing to chance. It must be done upon the largest scale. With Mayence, Luxembourg, and Lille, you start on solid grounds, and no fortresses in the rear to blockade as before. But you must inundate France with force in all directions. It Bonaparte could turn the tide, there is no calculating upon his plan; and we must always recollect that Poland, Saxony, and much Jacobinism, are in the rear. I wish you would turn in your mind the principles to be acted upon in France. The applying those you acted upon in the south to the force you will now command of all nations, is out of the question. The utmost we could attempt would be to be honest curselves, and this would only make our allies more odious. My notion is, that France must pay the price of her own deliverance that the king should consider the allied troops that every corps should be accompanied by a French ordonnateur, through whom all requisitions for forage and subsistence should be made, the value to be paid in Bons, the liquidation of which should be assured upon a peace, either in whole, or in the greater proportion, at the expense of the French government. Unless some system of this kind is agreed upon, the war will either degenerate, as it did last year, into an indiscriminate and destructive pillage, or we shall be bankrupts, and driven out of the field in three months. I know the difficulties of what I suggest; but the alternative in the less objectionable sense leads at once to impossibilities and ruin.

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The foreign policy of Lord Castlereagh has been very severely criticized from two opposite points of view. He was derided by Bonaparte at St. Helena for not having aggrandized England in 1815. The exile emperor took for granted that a British minister should have carved out Europe as imperiously as he himself would have done. On the other hand, the friends to constitutional government have attacked his policy as favorable to absolutism. It appears from these papers, that while he had a great dread of what he called Radicalism," he really wished to have England an arbitrator between the great -and the terms of a long private powers letter to the king warrant the conclusion that he was desirous of non-intervention. In that letter (dated April 30, 1820; vol. iv., p. 256) he cautions the king against giving in his adhesion to the plans of Russia and Prussia. But at the same time it is evident that neither he nor his colleagues grasped the difficulties of the times and that they were more fit to cope with external dangers of war, while they had a Wellington, than with moral evils arising from protracted misgovernment. On the 6th of May, 1820. Lord Castlereagh writes in the following style to Prince Metternich :

Your Highness will observe, that although we

From Household Words.

THE NOBLE SAVAGE.

To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale-face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilization) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or birds' feathers in his head; whether he flattens his head between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives. Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage-cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.

Yet it is extraordinary to observe how some people will talk about him, as they talk about the good old times; how they will regret his disappearanco, in the course of this world's development, from such and such lands where his absence is a blessed relief and an indispensable preparation for the sowing of the very first seeds of any influence that can exalt humanity; how, even with the evidence of himself before them, they will either be determined to believe, or will suffer themselves to be persuaded into believing, that he is something which their five senses tell them

he is not.

There was Mr. Catlin, some few years ago, with his Ojibbeway Indians. Mr. Catlin was an energetic, earnest man, who had lived among more tribes of Indians than I need reckon up here, and who had written a picturesque and glowing book about them. With his party of Indians squatting and spitting on the table before him, or dancing their miserable jigs after their own dreary manner, he called, in all good faith, upon his civilized audience to take notice of their symmetry and grace, their perfect limbs, and the exquisite expression of their pantomime; and his civilized audience, in all good faith, complied and admired, Whereas, as mere animals, they were wretched creatures, very low in the scale and very poorly formed; and as men and women possessing any power of truthful dramatic ex

pression by means of action, they were no better than the chorus at an Italian Opera in England - and would have been worse if such thing were possible.

a

Mine are no new views of the noble savage. The greatest writers on natural history found him out long ago. Buffon knew what he was, and showed why he is the sulky tyrant that he is to his women, and how it happens (Heaven be praised!) that his race is spare in numbers. For evidence of the quality of his moral nature, pass himself for a moment, and refer to his "faithful dog." Has he ever improved a dog, or attached a dog, since his nobility first ran wild in woods, and was brought down (at a very long shot) by Pope? Or does the animal that is the friend of man always degenerate in his low society?

It is not the miserable nature of the noble savage that is the new thing; it is the whimpering over him with maudlin admiration, and the affecting to regret him, and the drawing of any comparison of advantage between the blemishes of civilization and the tenor of his swinish life. There may have been a change now and then in those diseased absurdities, but there is none in him.

Are

Think of the Bushmen. Think of the two men and the two women who have been exhibited about England for some years. the majority of persons-who remember the horrid little leader of that party in his festering bundle of hides, with his filth and his antipathy to water, and his straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his brutal hand, and his cry of "Qu-u-u-u-aaa!" (Bosjesman for something desperately insulting, I have no doubt)-conscious of an affectionate yearning towards that noble savage, or is it idiosyncratic in me to abhor, detest, abominate, and abjure him? I have no reserve on this subject, and will frankly state that, setting aside that stage of the entertainment, when he counterfeited the death of some creature he had shot, by laying his head on his hand and shaking his left leg at which time I think it would have been justifiable homicide to slay him -I have never seen that group sleeping, smoking, and expectorating round their brazier, but I have sincerely desired that something might happen to the charcoal smouldering therein, which would cause the immediate suffocation of the whole of the noble strangers.

There is at present a party of Zulu Kaffirs exhibiting at the St. George's Gallery, Hyde Park Corner, London, These noble savages. are represented in a most agreeable manner; they are seen in an elegant theatre, fitted with appropriate scenery of great beauty, and they are described in a very sensible and unpretending lecture, delivered with a modesty which is quite a pattern to all similar exponents. Though extremely ugly, they are much better shaped than such of their predecessors,