THE OBITUARY OF 1861.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume II, Issue 40, 3 April 1862, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE OBITUARY OF 1861.

(From the Home News, Jan 27.) In the Obituary of the last year have been recorded the deaths of more than an average number of member of royal houses. The Sultan and the Emperor of China, the King of Prussia, the Empress Dowager of Russia, and the King of Portugal died within the year. • The death of the Duchess of Kent took place in March last. The royal family of Portugal has been sorely smitten : an infant of the Queen of Spain lias died ; and the Count and Countess of Montemollin in the other branch of tho family. The mournful record closes with onr own great loss, by which our Queen is widowed. and millions of Englishmen become mourners in an hour. The world’s great calamity by death was when Cavour departed in June, just after he had seen the gathering of the first Italian Parliament. Poland lost her aged representative, Prince Czurtoryski; and Russia her well-known spokesman, Prince Gortchakoff. We have to mourn our best war minister in Lord Herbert; and in Sir J. Graham a statesman whose place in Parliament cannot be filled. Several members of both liouses have disappeared, of whom Lord Campbell, the Dukes of Bedford, Buckingham, and Sutherland,' and the Earls Fortescue and Eglington, have been and will be missed in the one, and Mr Buncombe and Mr. Sharraan Crawford in the other. Lord Campbell’s death moreover removed the ablest lawyer we have from one House to the other, converting Sir Richard Bethell into Lord West bury. An aged general and admiral were taken from us in Sir Howard Douglas and Admiral Dundas. 'the Bishop of Madras in India ; and others have gone from the clerical ranks—as Dr. Cunningham, eminent in the Free Church movement in Scotland ; and another Cunningham, of Harrow, a leader of the Evangelical movement in its early days. We might add the name of the Rev. Pat rick Bronte, the father of the melancholy group of doomed geniuses whose works and fate have interested all the world. Literature has had a mourning year, if it w'ere only by the loss of Mrs. Browning ; but there is also Thomas Flower Ellison (Macaulay’s aid and friend), and Mrs. Gore, and Agnes Baillie, the sister of Joanna; and Sir Francis Palgrave, whose position as Keeper of the Public Records was both cause and effect of his value as a literary antiquarian. The Russian traveller,!’. W. .Atkinson, is gone ; and fram tho company of savaus Professor Henslow, Bishop, tho astronomer, and Professor Qnekeft, the microscopist. Of physicians, Sir John Forbes and Dr. Southwood Smith died full of years ; and the lamented Dr. Italy was snatched away untimely. 'Among our engineers and architects there has been a great sweep. We have lost Joseph Maudslay, and Sir Peter Fairbairn, and Sir C. W. Paslcy, and Sir William Cubitt, and Richard Grainger, the pride of his native Newcastle. In art, music has lost Vincent Novello, and the great Staudigl, and Catherine Hayes ; painting has lost Dauby, Lindsay, and Pickersgill; sculpture, John Francis ; and drama our old favourites, Barren and Vandenhoff. Old Sir Peter Laurie will be remembered in his own way. We must not omit to notice that besides the loss of her greatest statesman, Italy has had to mourn that of her first dramatic poet, Niccolini, and her most brilliant forensic orator, Vincenzo Salvagnoli. In France the two extremes of dramatic gaiety and monastic rigour have beheld struck down their chief representatives in the persons of Eugene Scribe and of Father Lacordaire. Germany has had to deplore in the death of Passcvant that of a careful and erudite biographer of art ; and in the death of Schlosser that of a conscientious and laborious historian.