A DISTINGUISHED "FRIEND."
"In consideration of a costly present which Mr. Joseph Pease, of South-end, Darlington, has made to the Spanish nation, the young King of that country has conferred upon him the Grand Cross of a Spanish order, and Mr. Pease, who is a Quaker, has agreed to accept the distinction."—Echo.
A Quaker a Grand Cross! We should as soon have expected to be introduced to a Quaker Field Marshal. Henceforth the sensation of surprise must be numbered amongst the lost feelings. Nothing now can move us more. Not the sun rising in the west, not the spectacle of an Irish Roman Catholic Bishop teaching in a Protestant Sunday school, not a Teetotal Lord Mayor, not the appointment of Mr. Tomline as Master of the Mint, or Sir Charles Dilke as Lord-Lieutenant of Middlesex, not the total abolition of the Income Tax, not the conversion of Mr. Whalley and Mr. Newdegate to Popery, not the purification of the streets,—no, not even the bestowal of the Grand Cross of our own Order of the Bath on some Englishman eminent in Art, Literature, or Science!