NAPLES SOAP AND PALMERSTON CAUSTIC LEY.
HAVING entered into the bookselling business, Lord Palmerston has been invited to increase his connexion ; and he displays a sin- gular amount of irritation at the friendly hint. As the Irish Education Board entered into rivalry with Messrs. Longman and Murray in the distribution of elementary works, so Lord Palmer- ston enters into competition with Mr. Ridgway for the distribution of political pamphlets, and undertakes a foreign agency : his first venture consisted in the exportation of Mr. Gladstone's Letters. Wishing to encourage the young enterpriser in his new line, Prince Casteleicala offered him the distribution of Mr. Mac Farlane's reply, and obligingly sent fifteen copies for that purpose. Lord Palmerston receives the offer with indignation, as though it were out of the regular course of his new business. The diplomatic Ridgway is affronted at being taken for a diplomatic Hatchard.
"It was all very well to dissemble your love, But why did you kick me down stairs ?"
Lord Palmerston might have declined what certainly seems a very natural extension of the business which he had entered volun- tarily, but why fly in the face of Prince Casteleicala with so much asperity? He rates the Prince's government in good set terms, for " illegality, injustice, and cruelty," " abuses," " long-continued and wide-spread injustice." He falls on Mr. Mac Farlane with the trenchant ardour of a veritable reviewer : having worked up his fine phrensy, in a diatribe on Naples in general, his eye rolls upon the pamphlet, consisting of "a flimsy tissue of bare assertions and reckless denials, mixed up with coarse ribaldry and commonplace abuse of public men and political parties." Prince Castelcieala's place in London, it is said, has become too hot to hold him, and he is to go : he is kicked down the stairs of St. James's. Sallies of this End are no novelties in Lord Palmerston's career, and cannot take himself by surprise. Narvaez can testify to the in- civility of Lord Palmerston's lectures on constitutional government; only that in the affair of the Spanish marriages, it was not the Spanish Ambassador in London, but the English Ambassador in Madrid, that was kicked down stairs. We all remember the per- sonal rudeness against the King of Greece and his private garden, into which Lord Palmerston was betrayed by his warmth of heart and his zeal for Don David Pacifico. It is evident that he is very strongly, not to say passionately, moved by the cruel outrages of the Neapolitan Government : he must have been suppressing his feelings for a long time, since, though his brother has long enjoyed the coveted post of English representative at the court of Naples, Lord Palmerston never so much as let a touch of this emotion es- cape him ; but now, when Mr. Gladstone has told the English all about it, when Prince Castelcicala and the " ribald " Mac Farlane come before the Foreign Secretary, he can no longer restrain the artless impulse.
His divine fury demands some victim, and what victim so ready as Prince CastekicaLs or the "ribald" Mac Farlane P He must be in earnest, when his feelings make hini so far forget himself as to send messages to .Frankfort on behalf of the prisoners in Naples— when he is betrayed into language so undiplomatic—when living victims feel the force of his indignation. As King Otho was a sa- crifice to the Palmerstonian furor, as even the beloved Bulw.er fell in the diplomatic combat, so fall Castelcicala and Mac Farlane. It is true, that the victims are of no importance—that nobody misses them or is hurt for them; true, that Naples still pursues her course unmolested in practice ; true, that Poerio's chains have just been renewed, though he is still in the infirmary: but how strong are Palmerston's sympathies with popular what-do-you- eall-'ems ! how earnest is he about.the rights of thingum-bob
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