Dean Stanley has, of course, acquiesced in the decision of
the House of Commons, but not exactly with a good grace. The letter to Lord Sydney, in which he sums up the history of the matter, is not written in good taste. The mistake of the Dean, as we have more than once said, was hardly worth the zeal expended on it ; for, after all, there are in Westminster Abbey many monuments to persons whom we should hardly, as a nation, delight to honour ; and the monument to the poor young Prince who came to so sad an end, in the unfortunate attempt to make himself a subject of public interest to the French peopla, would not have been the worst of these, but for the sympathy with Napoleonic enterprises which it appeared to many to embody. Nevertheless, for the Dean, who had certainly made a blunder, to insist that ho looks back on that blunder with more satisfac- tion than ho feels in his retrospect of the greater part of his singularly wise and public-spirited administration of the Abbey, is rather a " superfluity of naughtiness ;" and to describe the agitation against the monument as sustained by "persistent misrepresentations and savage menaces," is vindictive. It was certainly not an "ungenerous spirit" which governed the Parliament of 1880, but rather, perhaps, a spirit of somewhat too sentimental a generosity towards the French Republic. Nor is it ungenerous towards Prince Louis Napoleon himself to maintain that, as a private man, he had done nothing to deserve interment in the Abbey ; while, so far as he was a
public man at all, he was identified with a cause which it was wholly improper for the English people to commemorate with tokens of honour. The Dean would have done better to repress the chagrin which he very naturally felt at his own defeat, instead of so carefully embodying it in this peevish letter, which is altogether unlike him, and may soon, we hope, be forgotten.
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