SHELLS BY MOONLIGHT.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 115, 17 May 1871, Page 2

SHELLS BY MOONLIGHT.

(From the SatufdayTie view February 18.) The special c&rnespopdent of the Daily Telegraph at Faris i^ites iv his own person two among the" most illustrious of Shakspeare's characters. He is the Lion and Moonshine of the Midsummer NigMs Dream all in one. Bully Bottom^ indeed, was so ambitious as to wish to play bt>thJ Fyramus and the Lion, but even he woulifll scarcely have thought of a combinatit!?W between the king- of the beasts and the moonshine. It is reserved for our illustrious Correspondent, in his letter of , last Tuesday, not only so to roar that " it will do any man's heart good to hear him," but also "to disfigure, or. to present, the person of Moonshine." Wjp scarcely know which'to admire more—the degree to which he was able to "aggravate his voice," so that even Bottom coull not have hoped to outroar him, or the success which he obtained, on a night when there was no moon, in flooding Paris with its light. The "hard-handed men" of Athens, appealing only to a limited audience, were able to make use of a bush of thorns and a lantern to increase the illusion which they wished to produce. What was possible, • howe vermin., a palace when only a Duke and his Court were the spectators is not possible in the columns of the Daily Telegraph with its 197,000 subscribers. Without any of the realistic aids of the Athenian or of the modern stage, the Editor boldly says, " Let there be moonlight,?' and there is moonlight. Duke Theseus did indeed object, when he saw the man carrying His lantern, "This is the greatest .error o,f T all the rest ; the man should be put into the lantern." To which Demetrius replied, "He dares not corae.there for the, caudle ;*for you see it ..is. already inVsnuff.' So, too, our' 'modern Mgonshine 'is somewhat afraid of burning his fingers, and. keeps, we cannot bnt conjecture, atuaY mosti respectable distance y < JBor^renufjjnder pf news see JburtJi page.

outside of the light with which he illuminated Paris on the 20th January last.; ' And after all, if a lantern will not admit a man, nor Paris a Special Correspondent, the best thing to do-is to stand outside both the one and the other and loudly to proclaim, I am the Man in the Moon, I am the Special Correspondent in Paris. There will have, 'been of course a few precise knaves, altogether: destitute of imagination, who, as they read in Tuesday's Telegraph the column headed '" Shells by Moonlight/ crfed out u A calendar! a calendar! look at the almanac ; find out moonshine, find out moonshine." '■ We must confess that we were one of these, and that we were at - first not a little confounded when we compared the preliminary flourish of Our Correspondent with the tables of our Almanac. Certainly there is an apparent inconsistency, capable, we hope, of some explanation, between the Almanac which ■'■ says "New Moon, 21st day of January, Oh. 32 inih. morn," and the Correspondent who writes "Paris, Jan. 20, Midnight ; a bright moon overhead; violent cannonading, in the distance." Can it be the " case that there has been a careless transposition of words, and that the passage originally stood, " Midnight, a violent cannonading overhead;- a bright moon in the distance — "i.e. a good fortnight off? fXJrrseconn TEofigh tßrittJw^rer,'ttr-d^l**ti o t seem necessary to 3b any violence to the text, when we call to mind that only eighteen, mon ths ago a Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph at St. Cloud considerably, interfered with the regular course of that steady going luminary. Our modern Joshua, indeed, on July Bth, 1869, as on the present occasion, was not content with merely staying the course of the moon, but got it up full in honor of the Emperor and the fete he gave at St. Cloud to the Viceroy of Egypt. It would be scarcely decent to do less for tbe Republic than he had done for the Empire. Accordingly, as he brought irp the moon to let the electric light be. seen by which the Imperial f£fce was illuminated, so now he calls upon the luminary to do the sanie friendly services to those dark substances called bombs. We remember more than once to have heard boys wish, as the Fifth of November drew near, that the moon might shine on that auspicious day so that there might be light enough to see the fireworks. It is therefore some- . what excusable that as this thrilling Special Correspondent's letter was getting composed in Paris or Fleet Street, and as " flash after flash lit up the skies, to be surely followed by a heavy boom and then a rattle of fallen masonry," a little light was thrown in for fear the flash might not'happen to be seeu, and that, as the Correspondent "crossed the Place dv Carrousel," it was "white and shimmering in the moonbeams." We must do the Correspondent the justice to admit that he d*es§f6*fc do violence to the poor moon very long;, but that in his letter, more -quickly even than in Peter Quince's play, Moonshine makes his exit. For in the same paragraph in which he tells us of the "shimmering Place dv Carrousel" he alsOjquit^.forfie.tfui^^his moonlight, tells us hW" '" th&^ldng picturessyue line of domes and statues was relieVga from time to time in a black mass " by the flashes. After "plunging still further into the darkness," he reached the Rue de la Comedie to find it " wide and gloomy, the petroleum lamps flickering and dying out —a sorry substitute at best for the bright jets of gas which are associated in 'our minds with Paris." A short continuation of his walk, perhaps a furlong or so, as it does not bring him to the end of his first column, and he has passed from midnight and the moon overhead ito "the g»ey light of coming dawn." Can it/be that Jupiter overhead and Jupiter the younger of Fleet Street have both taken pity on, podi^ Paris, and not only given her an extra allowance of moon, so that she may see the coming bomshells, but also accelerated the dawn of the January day ? Let not Paris, or . France despair. They have supported themselves on mere moonshine for a long while* already, and the Editor iof the Telegraph will take care that the supply does not fall short. .-...., Whije we are, we hope^ j doing i full justice to the Editor or to his Special Correspondent; — perhaps, indeed, they are one and the same— for the skill', .with which he has played the part of Moonshine, we are forgetting the no less admirable skill which he has shown in the part of the Lion. We must admit that it is a, part, which "you may do extempore, . for it is nothing but roaring." ' Biii then • 4bere are such different Kinds' of roaring. It is- not every one who can say with the; Editor bf> the; Daily Telegraphy with ai slight parody of the, speech of his pre-' decefifeor^ Bully Bottdm, "I will roarj that I •wjlljnake the * Let him roar ag-ajn, ' Jet^hlm.roar^^^ we venture to express a hope that in the 'present case; '4wq\ 'W© --Offce more dealing familiar roarer ? If he o^ld break through the veil that shrouds the

Correspondent^ and let '" half bis 1 face be seen through the lion's neck," should we not find him saying, " If you think I come hither a 'Hon "(or as a Special Correspondent yin Paris), it were pity of mf life ; no, lam go such thing , lam a man as other men/are," and there, indeed, let him name his name and- tell theni plainly he is only the celebrated- — — . After such " a prologue 1 ' as this even the ladies need not "be nfeard" of such a passage as the following : — " The tortuous streets were growing into light; Btill the roar of the guns continued, and none but myself was stirring. Yes, one — a woman, who was moving Rapidly along about fifty yards ahead. fl'hiz — a shot that made me crouch — and the woman had disappeared. No, she had only fallen on theVoad. I ran up to her. The upper portion of her body was stripped, and blackened, and smoking, with a frightful attendant smell of roasted flesh ; fragments of her skull Jay strewn among tbe flowers of her bonnet, while a long line of black blood oozed slowly between the stones. I obtained a brancard from a neighbouring ambulance, and saw that her remains were safely transported thither. The inexorable guns boomed on — the sheila continued to clatter down ; but being by this time thoroughly 6ick at heart, I hurried home to bed." •..•■■* By the way, to whom does the word " safely " apply — to the bearers or to the remains ? We imagine that by the time the writer reached the word ambulauce, he had forgotten the mortal nature of. the wound he had inflicted. It may, however, be that he can-, .eon I rol bom-shells-as well as the planets, and that be saw* or took care that the men of thehmbulance were bojth lighted up and kept free from: injury in*their benevolent task. Be this as it may, we can exclaim with Theseus, " Moonshine aud Lion are left to bury the dead." What a miserable thing itjs that men should be found thus. to trade, I|j6 undertakers, on sorrow ! We^can perhaps forgive tbe conductors o&XJorrespondents of the Telegraph if they remedy, the Emperor's want of consideration towards them aud the British public by the assumption that they: were present at a fete to which he forgot to invite them. It is not au uncommon thing for men gifted with a powerful imagination to be present, in the spirit at all events, in the houses of the great, and to describe at length scenes which they never had a chance of witnessing. But for a man to sit down deliberately to describe scenes of fearful suffering which he never witnessed; to trade on. the children, the deaf and dumb, and ot\vv helpless victims, amidst the horrors of a bombardment ; to particularise "the smell of Wasted Nflesh," •"• the black blood," and all the other abominations, is to outrage not only truth, but also the best feelings of human nature. It is in vain, we fear, that we protest against those miserable experiments on public endurance. So long as the proprietors can announce with pride that their daily circulation is on the average over 197,000 copies, they will no doubt remain as regardless of decorum as they are of common sense and common English. Day after day, we must expect their leading articles and their letters, thundering away quite as much as the artillery at Paris, with "that ever recurring boom! boom! like the; triumphant pasau of an exulting Nemesis." We do not know, by the way, if a bombshell can be 'said to bear "horror and consternation in its wake." We should have thought that by the time we had reached the wake most of the consternation, if not the horror, was over. We must admit, however, that a so-called Paris Letter, which carries •fiction on its very front, bears in its wake nothing bi*t disgust and indignation. ," •■ .. ,t«. ; ;; : .jaj^ . a ■•■-, .-