Mr. Alfred Austin, who, as our readers should know, is,
an oratorical poet, is also something of a poetical orator, and at Brighton on Monday, in addressing the "Conservative and Con- stitutional Association " of that place, he indulged in a good deal of poetry as to the collapse of the autumn agitation of last year against giving aid to the Turks. That agitation collapsed just as coal collapses in the process of heating the boiler of a locomotive, only by attaining its object. It suits Mr. Alfred Austin to say that Lord Beaconsfield has acted on the policy he gave expression to at the Mansion House last November, and that the time has not yet come for England to strike a blow. But we venture to think that the people whom Mr. Alfred Austin, with such refined and subtle alliteration, describes as "fuming philosophers, prancing professors, and hysterical historians," have got the best of the argument with the English people, and that if Plevna and Erzeroum and Kars were all to fall before the winter, as we hope they may, there would be no more danger of our going to war with Russia, or even of Lord Beaconsfield again indulging in a Mansion House romance of last year's pattern on the 9th November next, than there would be of Mr'. Alfred Austin's becoming a Tyrtseus in the Turkish language, and reanimating the armies of the Sultan by the mere raptures of his Oriental strains. The English people certainly are not likely to be converted by his rather artificial epigrams, which have nothing in them of the peculiar contagion of deep-rooted convictions.
Previous page
