"So Telephus, renown'd of yore, can tell
How cured the fatal spear by which he fell."
The disinterestedness of Rowland (not he of Roncesvalles, nor even of the honest Macassar oil) need not be doubted, because he claims a large reward for a penny-post scheme, ruinous as it is, utterly unavailable and impracticable, even if as excellent as notoriously prejudicial, but for the really ingenious discovery of the pre-paying stamp system, by a party preferring no title to remuneration, and through which alone, unfortunately, the pretentious project could be practically placed in operation.
Dismissing minor worthies, such as Benjamin Hawes, junior, of the Commission of Fine Arts, selected probably and appropriately from the consideration that home-produced savonnerie may lead to clean ideas of taste, and who, in his own interest, would be a capital Commissioner of Excise; and Bowring, so well qualified to be chairman of a general board of Commissioner Tourists, from his multifarious practice—come we at last to Cobden, of corn and colonial fame, fiercely struggling with gaunt O'Connell himself for stentorian supremacy—
"Linguæ centum sunt, oraque centum,
Ferrea vox."
Cobden and the colonies! The conjunction is euphoniously alliterative at least, if not a consistent consequence; yet who more fit to perform at the funeral as the undertaker who alone has got the hearse and mules all ready for the job? Cobden, who has denounced—more still, has passed sentence upon—the colonies, should be the executioner. All hail, therefore, to the Right Hon. Alderman Richard Cobden, M.P., Secretary of State for the Colonial Department—worthy compeer of the Cabinet, where sit Lord Chancellor Gibbon Wakefield, and First Lord of the Treasury Rowland Hill! Rare will be the labours of the trio; the "self-supporting" supported on either hand by a destroying angel.
In the prospective cabinet of Charlatanerie, composed inter aliis, moreover, in addition to the Haweses, the Bowrings, the Brights, the R. R. R. (why does not the man write the names out in full, as Raving, Roaring, Rory) O'Moores, there is, however, already a "split;" the members are each and all at sixes and sevens, for as each has his own sovereign conceit, so each would rule sovereign over the rest, and bear no rival near the throne. All would be kings, but not in turn. That powerful and sarcastic writer, Paul Louis Courier, depicts the same regiphobia as raging among the Parisian Charlatanerie of his day; and with an anxious care for his own reputation and respectability, thus purges himself from contact or connexion with it:—"Ce qui me distingue de mes contemporains et fait de moi un homme rare dans le siècle où nous vivons, c'est que je ne veux pas être roi, et que j'évite soigneusement tout ce qui pourrait me mener là." Chadwick and Cobden are agreed upon pauperizing the whole kingdom; but the former insists upon keeping the paupers in bastiles, whilst the latter requires them in cotton manufactories; both are agreed upon the propriety of reducing the labouring classes to diet less of quantity and coarser of quality, by which the rates of wages are, and are to be, ground down: but Chadwick naturally insists, that to new poor-laws the post of honour should be assigned in the work of desolation; whilst Cobden, though acknowledging their efficient co-operation as a means to an end, and their priority as first in the field, fiercely contends for the greater aristocratical pretensions and more thoroughgoing operation of corn-law abolition. The Wakefield "self-supporting" colonial specific comes into collision, moreover, with Cobden's "perish all colonies." Kay Shuttleworth vaunts the superiority above all of his analytical schemes for training little children at Norwood to construe, for after age,—
"The days that we went gipsying a long time ago;"
whilst Hullah simpers forth, in softest accents of Cockaigne, the superlative claim of choral shows in Exeter Hall—
"That roar again, it had a dying fall.
Oh! it came o'er my ear like the rude north,
That bursts upon a bank of violets."
Bowring and Hume did, certes, pull together once in the matter of Greek scrip; but, Arcades ambo no longer, the worthy doctor turned anti-slavery monger, whilst Joseph, more honest in the main, cares not two straws whether his sugar be slave-grown or free, excepting as to the greater cheapness of the one or the other. So also with Hawes, never yet pardoned by the financiering economist of "cheese parings and candle ends" for the splendid Thames tunnel job, and £200,000 of the public money at one fell swoop. These people range under the generic head Charlatanerie, as of the distinct species classified as farceurs according to the French nomenclature. For other species, and diversities of species, of a lower scale, but of capacity to ascend into the higher order with time and opportunity, the daily papers may be usefully consulted under the headings devoted to the "pill" specific line—pildoras para en contrar perros, as the Spanish saynete has it.