NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE DrxE is dead ! London's Duke, England's Duke, is dead ; and each of us, front the Queen in her palace to the man that sweeps the crossing, will henceforth miss the chief among the old familiar faces. No interval of sickness and retirement from public life had prepared the blow ; and the sudden unexpected shock was felt the more that it came when political turmoil was for a sea- son quiet, when the strife of voices was suspended, when all were complaining of stagnation and the utterly uninteresting character of domestic news. The old proverb that "no news is good news" has seldom been verified more impressively than now by its re- verse ; and few among us will have caught the tones of the passing bell that tolls slowly for a hero gone to his rest, brit will have felt a consciousness of a personal loss, and have sighed to think that a life that was really life is quenched, and that England is poorer by one great man the less.
Yes ! these are the thoughts that half-unconsciously colour the cheek, and fill the eye and make the voice tremulous as the news is passed from mouth to mouth. The nation is startled into a mood of instinctive hero-worship, and, forgetting for an hour its pleasures and its gains, and the movement of its busy and absorbed exist- ence, is penetrated through all its classes with an emotion wholly unselfish, wholly unconnected with anything that is base or petty or even material. When a mere duke dies, the man farthest re- moved from flunkeyism, who has not thought and talked all the in- stinctive humanity out of him, must be impressed and saddened at the contrast between the outward magnificence and glitter of the life that has closed and the gloomy squalor of the charnelhouse that is opened to receive what remains of it—between the obse- quious homage of the world and the stern equality of Death—be- tween the smiling flatteries of society and the dread presence of him with whom is no respect of persons. This feeling has its play even in the ease of the illustrious victim just departed; but here it is overpowered by other and higher sources of emotion. It is not only a duke that is dead—not only a coroneted brow that is laid low in the common dust—not only an inhabitant of palaces that has gone into the narrow house appointed for all living—not only one who was borne up above his class by the respect and homage of the noble and illustrious, by the acclamations of a peo- ple—that is now far beyond the echoes of these grateful sounds ; but that head is ice .locked and that hand is moveless which shaped European history in one of its most critical and important periods. Upon the tissues of that brain hung suspended the destinies of the civilized world ; and since Cromwell exchanged an earthly for an immortal crown, it may well be doubted whether such a brain ever got their full work out of the hearts and limbs of English soldiers. And this it is which thrills through the nation's heart—the feeling that a man of unequalled power and capacity, a man of wondrous fitness for the task he had to execute, of wondrous adaptation to the one great want of his country and his age—a true English hero of the silent sort, who spoke mostly by his actions and whose action-speech was altogether of the highest kind and the best of its kind—has now ceased to act among us, to move visibly among us, so as to recall his earlier practical laeroisms, and remind us that our age in its manifold activities is not an age merely of calico and cant, but that the old virtue of the Roman and the Tenton is alive among us ; and but for its manifestation not many years back calico and cant would be now having a poor time of it.
And with this feeling that so much power of thought and action, so much life that was really alive, has passed from among us, is coupled that other, that it is England which has lost it—England, which has, as we so often hear, no great men nor even shadows of great men to spare. However that be, one is gone, one upon whom in spite of age and growing infirmities the nation did rely, in ease of not altogether unexpected emergency and danger. This practical homage to the Duke of Wellington was valuable as keep- lag alive among us a sense of the distinction between men of words and men of action. He was the last man left us who had rendered great national services, and had become famous and historical, otherwise than in the Parliamentary-debating line. So long as he lived, men could not forget that it was his acting and not Castle- reagh's talking that saved Europe ; and he remained there in his old age a warning and an example of those qualities aftd exercises by which nations are saved. New that he is gone—now that his voice is no longer heard among us, conjuring us not to be wilfully blind to the signs of the times, nor wilfully to expose ourselves to the greatest of earthly ills—let us not forget that almost his latest utterance in public was an expression of extreme joy and thank- fulness that the country for which he had so laboured and so triumphed, the country which had so honoured him, was beginning to arouse herself and was laying the foundation of her national de- fences. Let that speech of Wellington's be a legacy to our states- men of whatever party; a legacy of common sense, high spirit, and pacific wishes, which, if acted on, will do more to prevent actual war, than a thousand years' preaching of peace when the condition of things is such as naturally to tempt the assault and guarantee the success of our enemies.
Peace to his ashes and honour to his memory ! It will be long before the place that knew him will grow accustomed to his loss. Not one place alone will feel a sense of something gone that ought to be there ; but in the main haunts where all that is illustrious in our land assemble for business and for pleasure, there will the well- known face be missed as something that gave historic grandeur and serious interest to the scene and the occasion. Business will miss him, pleasure will miss him, solemn festivity will miss him ; above all, the public presence will miss him. Long may his image dwell in the minds and hearts of the people, side by side with that of the illustrious statesman, his friend and colleague, in whose councils he shared, in whose plans he sympathized. in whose wisdom he trusted, and whose ever-growing sense of popular interests and growing re- gard for the people's welfare the great soldier aided to develop into legislative action, with his authority, his name, and his straight- forward good sense. Thus embalmed together in a nation's grate- ful recollection, may they symbolize the great truth that a worthy and a fruitful peace rests often on a successful war, and that a sue- cesful war is only then completely successful when followed by such a fruitful and peaceful rera as intervened between the battle of Waterloo and the repeal of the Corn-laws.
