1831.] A flairs in General. 75 



birds and beasts in exchange. A large cargo of those effective royal re- 

 presentatives,, which touched at Gibraltar, on their mission to their 

 respective courts, consisted of a hyaena, for the Emperor of Austria ; a 

 brown wolf from Mount Atlas, for Nicholas : a royal tiger from the 

 Zahara, for the Sultan ; a blue-rumped baboon for Don Miguel ; an 

 urus, or bull from the Berber country, for William of England; a 

 Fezzan calf, of the largest size, for William of Holland ; a bubo, or 

 great-horned owl, for the king of Spain ; a grey panther for the king of 

 Prussia ; an Arab charger for Louis Philip ; an antelope for Charles 

 Dix ; and a whole wilderness of monkies, to be distributed impartially 

 among the minor princes of Germany. 



The British Consul at Tangiera has, we presume, not yet informed 

 his sable majesty of the late principal occurrences in London, or he 

 would have honoured Sir Charles Hunter by a present of a white jack- 

 ass ; unless, perhaps, he may have heard that the military baronet has 

 been provided with a donkey already sufficiently conspicuous for civic 

 chivalry. 



Now that the ministers have come back from the elections, we must, 

 as Shakspeare says, " have a touch of their quality." We direct their 

 attention to the following paragraph in one of the newspapers : " We 

 have been informed that the salary of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles 

 Rowan, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is two thou- 

 sand five hundred pounds per annum, with the addition of a large house, 

 in Whitehall-place, coals, candles, &c." If these things be so, we call on 

 Lord Grey to do himself credit and the nation justice, by abating the 

 nuisance without further delay. Colonel Charles Rowan might have 

 made a very proper appendage to the military gentleman, who hitherto 

 grasped at all ministerial power in England with an avidity which was 

 not merely unexampled, but of a quality for which we leave others to 

 find the name. But of him and his ministry we have got rid ; he has 

 been broken down, and broken down by that hand, which, thank 

 Heaven, has hitherto never struck a blow in vain, and which has been 

 for ages the security of England against personal' vanity, however mad- 

 dened by official success, or military hatred of freedom, however hardened 

 by military habits ; the nation smote him, and he fell never to rise again. 



The winter, which has set in with some severity among ourselves, will 

 probably stop the progress of the cholera, or new Russian plague, through 

 Germany ; and yet the Russian accounts do not seem to authorize any 

 sanguine hope of its cessation in the provinces surrounding Moscow. 

 They have already had two months of snow, and the deaths are still 

 going on, though perhaps in some degree diminished. No subject can 

 be of more anxious importance ; yet the foreign governments appear to 

 have paid little attention to it, and we are still without any authentic 

 details. In the first place, the nature of the disorder is undetermined. 

 It is not ascertained whether it be the Indian cholera, or merely a vio- 

 lent fever produced by some sudden heat of the summer in the southern 

 provinces of Russia, and propagated and envenomed by the carelessness 

 and the gross food and habits of the people, who in those provinces 

 differ little from barbarians. Some conceive it to be a contagion from 

 the Turkish frontiers, or, more probably, arising from the seeds of that 

 plague which the Russian armies found in their Turkish campaign, and 



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