NEW PLAYS OF THE PASSIONS—TERROR.
THE effect of the news from the disturbed districts upon the Morn- ing Chronicle has been portentous. Never since Miss Griselda Oldbuck and Jenny Rintherout were terrified into the " exies" by old Caxton's firing the beacon have such strange incoherent rhap- sodies been heard as that unhappy and sorely-frightened journal has been pouring forth. Jossase BAILLIE might have found there a finer study of the effects of terror than she seems to have had while composing her plays illustrative of that passion. For example, on Tuesday morning, the Chronicle rambled sorely in its discourse: it took to complimenting Sir ROBERT PEEL! " Sir Robert Peel has chipped some of the links off the chain which binds the arm of industry ; we say to him, knock away the fetters altogether" : and "as was well and severely said by Sir Robert Peel of his prede- cessors " : and "for Sir Robert Peel we will venture to assign higher functions, more likely to conduce to that lasting fame, which, as he tells us, he so evidently courts." Even, however, in its invoca- cations of this new tutelar deity, we trace the lingering influence of old habits : the formula employed by the Chronicle in profess- ing its faith in PEEL—" It is not at the Horse Guards but in Downing Street, not by a Wellington but a Peel, that the difficulty must be grappled with "—seems cast in the mould of one of its former invectives against bim ; a profane parody of "not this man, but Barabbas." And then, to complete the in- congruity, the eloquent and emphatic writer diverges into a puff of the Southampton Railway ! "During these disturbances, the influence of railroads in securing the peace of a country has been strikingly exemplified. Eight hundred men arrived in two or three hours from Southampton, marched to the Euston Square terminus, and in twelve hours would be in Manchester." Such an incon- gruous medley of coaxing, spite, and attention to the shop, poured forth under a visitation of intense terror by one who for months before had been prating right valiantly about the terrors which have cowed him by their first distant apparition, has not been imagined by either dramatist or romance-writer. The Chronicle's state of mind would in itself be of little consequence ; but it is illustrative of the present condition of many comfortable, ambitious, well- meaning, simple, middle-aged, middle-class ffirters with Chartism.
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