Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 93, No. 569, March, 1863

by Various

THE PERIPATETIC POLITICIAN—IN FLORENCE.

There is a mysterious power in this nineteenth century before which we all bow down and worship. Emperors have grown powerful by its support, and kings that know not how to please it become the laughing-stock of Europe. The highest are not beyond its reach, the lowest are not beneath its notice. The Secretary of State spreads lengthy despatches as peace-offerings at its shrine, and the parish beadle is careful not to put his hat on awry lest he fall beneath its censure. The idol has innumerable votaries; but its high priests, the exponents of its law, are the great authors and statesmen of the day. And they have a hard taskmaster to serve: they must do the pleasure of their lord before he has signified his wishes—they must anticipate his thoughts and be beforehand with his commands; obsequiousness and obedience alone will not suffice them; they may sacrifice every friend and every principle for his sake, and nevertheless disgrace and proscription await them, unless they can know their master’s mind before it is known to himself.

Public Opinion is the unknown master to whom all submit; listening anxiously but vainly for his commands, not knowing how or where to study his humour. There are Houses of Parliament, newspapers, clubs, mechanic’s institutes, pot-houses, prayer meetings—but which of all these speak public opinion? A weekly gathering of articles from daily papers is not public opinion. Opinion after dinner is not public. It is evidently necessary to apply some means specially adapted to the place and the time in order to discover the mood of public opinion. In Syracuse, Dionysius constructed an ear for the purpose; unfortunately this invention has been lost.

In London, it is popularly said that the only means to ascertain public opinion is to take a seat in the omnibus for the day and drive continually up and down.

In Florence, public opinion walks,—it cannot afford to drive. The people must be studied on foot. The reader will therefore have already understood that the title of this paper was chosen from necessity and not for the sake of the alliteration; that in order to catch a glimpse of Italian affairs as seen through Tuscan spectacles—in order to enter for the moment into the jealousies, the grievances, and the vanities of the provincial town of Florence—there is no resource but that of treating the question peripatetically—that is, of walking the streets.

This course is the more natural because in Florence the streets are—thanks to the high price of manure—remarkably clean. Accordingly the people live in the street; there they are to be met at an early hour lounging along talking or smoking, wrapped in cloaks that take an extra twist with every degree of cold. The street is their assembly-room; it is frequented by men of all sorts, as will be at once seen by a moment’s scrutiny of the stream of people creeping slowly along over the pavement.

There is the commercial dandy who affects a felt hat with mandarin button on the crown, a knobby stick, and a would-be English shooting-jacket. Behind him is the sober professional man, in a French great-coat which has wandered from Paris, making room for newer fashions. There, too, is the priest of portly figure and wasted garments, which show at once his devotion to the inner man, and his neglect of the outer world, walking along with a blessing on his lips and a green cotton umbrella under his arm. By his side is the peasant come to town for the day, cart-whip in hand, and a long coarse cloak trailing from his shoulders, embroidered behind with flowers in green silk. Every stitch will show character in one way or another. Italians wear green flowers where Spaniards would have crosses in black braid.

And who is there among all this crowd who would trouble his thoughts about Victor Emmanuel and his Ministers? Look at yonder corner-wall where there is a sheet of paper prominently pasted on a black board: one solitary passenger gives it a passing glance: that is the telegram just received, announcing the formation of the new Ministry. But farther on there are collected a little company of people, whose animated and intent looks show something really interesting to be going on: it is that two or three young men are practising in chorus a snatch out of the last street-ballad. Farther on the respective merits of different ballet-dancers are under discussion, and some of the company are pronouncing the stage-manager unfit for his post. In the whole crowd there is not one word, nor even a passing thought, bestowed on the Government which is going on at Turin. So universal is the carelessness with regard to the current affairs of the day, that, as a general rule, if a man be heard to speak about politics, or in any way show himself conversant with public affairs, it may at once be concluded, more especially if he speak in a disagreeable voice, that that man is a Piedmontese.[^[4]]

In vain do loud-voiced criers hawk prints representing the murder of the Gignoli family by the Austrians in 1859; they offer them at half-price, at quarter-price, but find no purchasers. Even the photograph of the bullet extracted from Garibaldi’s foot has ceased to draw people to the shop-window.

Leaving the street for the moment, and turning the corner of the great Piazza, we find under the colonnade, opposite the picture gallery, an anxious crowd of people, eager and pushing. That is the entrance to the ‘Monte di Pieta,’ or municipal pawnbroking establishment (for private pawnbroking is illicit in Florence). There is a long table before the door, and on it are spread silver watches, coral bracelets, and other trinkets. Articles that have lain unredeemed are being sold at auction. The sale is well attended, but purchasers will not compete. There is much examination and very little bidding. This same scene has occurred regularly at stated intervals for the last several centuries.

In the time of the Medicis, public policy and private benevolence became copartners in founding a self-supporting pawnbroking shop on a large scale, to be kept under the supervision of Government. To a people who, whenever they begin to be pinched in circumstances, try to economise but never attempt to work, and exert themselves rather to save than to make money, it is no small object to have a public pawnbroking establishment where money is allowed at a fixed scale. If a Florentine have a bracelet too much, and bread too little, he has but to give the bracelet in pawn to the Government. In the same way, if he be troubled with a child too many, he proceeds to the infant asylum, rings the bell, and in the cradle which forthwith opens, he deposits the child for the Government to feed. Under the Governments which have prevailed in Tuscany for the last three hundred years, this is precisely the kind of political institution which the Florentines have learnt to value and appreciate.

The proper supervision of the pawnbroking shop, the maintenance of the foundling asylums and the hospitals (with which Florence is, in proportion, better provided than London), the grant made to the opera—these and other such questions are the matters of government in which a Florentine takes interest. To politics, in an Englishman’s sense of the word, they pay little or no attention. In the election of representatives to the Chambers at Turin the people appear to take little or no part. For instance: M. Peruzzi, the present Minister for the Interior, is one of the representatives of Florence. On accepting office he was of course obliged to appeal to his constituents. The seat was contested. On the day appointed for the election I had occasion to ask my way to the place where it was being held: several respectable citizens did not know that any election was to take place whatever. At last one man, better informed than the rest, had heard something about an election that week, but did not know where the elections were held. The election proved invalid for want of the legal complement of voters—namely, one-half the whole number. This is the general result of elections in Tuscany on the first trial. The second election is valid, provided only the same number of voters are present as attended the first. This is fortunate, otherwise it might occur that there would be a lack of representatives from Tuscany in the Parliament at Turin.

The fact is, and it needs repetition, the Florentines do not care about politics. They have accepted the revolution that was made for them, and on the whole are well contented with the change; at least we ought in justice to ascribe their general listlessness in political affairs to contentment and not to indifference.

To inquire, however, more exactly into the thoughts of those amongst the Florentines who do think about politics, it will be as well to obtain at once rest and information by sitting down for a few moments in the tobacconist’s shop, which may be called the centre of the political world. To begin with, the tobacconist is always himself by profession a finished politician, and he, moreover, enjoys the confidence of several distinguished friends, who keep him accurately informed of every word that passes in the Cabinets of Europe. The general burden of his conversation, which is a fair type of the talk at shops and second-rate cafés, is as follows:—The Pope-king is the father of all mischief; and how should it be otherwise? are not priests and kings always the promoters of every evil? and this man is a combination of both. Then follows a complaint against the Emperor Napoleon and his creatures, the Ministers at Turin, who, like true Piedmontese, are in secret jealous of the greatness of Italy, and treacherously keep in pay reactionary employés in lieu of filling the offices, as they should, with enterprising liberals. This sentiment meets with loud and general applause, and the company, waxing warm on this topic, forthwith launch into various prophecies as to the immediate future. French wars, Polish revolutions, Austrian bankruptcies, are all considered, and it is weighed what each might do for Italy. What the Italians themselves might do is a less frequent theme.

The Government, however, is blamed for its neglect of Garibaldi, which is only of a piece with its conduct in leaving the active and patriotic liberals of the country without employment while they are pensioning the reactionists—an opinion which usually serves as alpha and omega in the discussions of the Florentine liberals on the conduct of the Government.

Having exhausted this topic, our friend the politico-tobacconist resumes his seat, taking his scaldino (an earthenware vessel shaped like a basket, and filled with hot ashes) on his lap for the comfort of his fingers, and proceeds to draw the attention of visitors to various piles of newspapers, the sale of which is part of his trade. And as Florence produces, for a country town, a very respectable number of papers (some dozen daily papers, not to count two tri-weekly papers and other periodicals), which, moreover, have something of a national, or rather of a provincial character, it will be worth while to look over them before leaving the tobacconist’s shop. It is not every paper that will be found: for instance, the three retrograde papers will not be forthcoming. These have so extremely small a circulation that it is very difficult to hunt them up. It is only by favour, for instance, that a copy of the ‘Contemporaneo’ can be got, for, there being no public demand, there is no sale; a limited number of copies only are distributed among subscribers.

The newspapers to be found on the counter are all liberal, but of various shades of “colour,” as the Italians name party opinions.

The ‘Gazzetta del Popolo,’ which is strictly constitutional, has still the largest circulation of any (it prints about 3000 copies daily), though not half what it had. Its decline has been owing partly to general competition, partly to its having embraced the defence of the late Ratazzi Ministry, which unpopular course is said to have cost it in a few months nearly one-fourth of its circulation; partly, perhaps, to its sustaining the Piedmontese, who have not of late been growing in the favour of the Tuscans.

The other papers are all more “advanced,” that is, more opposed to Government. Among these the ‘Censor’ ranks first. This is a thoroughly Tuscan paper, and full of quaint, provincial expressions. In party politics it is red—a colour which evidently finds most favour in the eyes of the poorer citizens; for recently it lost no less than a fourth of its circulation by raising its price from three to five cents, that is, from about a farthing and a half to a halfpenny. In its columns, though not there only, may be seen a catalogue of indictments against the Piedmontese. The Tuscans voted annexation to Italy, it is said—not to Piedmont. With Rome unity, without it none. Does the unity of Italy mean the domination of Turin? Are we to accept from the most barbarous portion of Italy laws which are sent down to us written in a jargon which cannot even be called Italian? Tuscany is being fleeced by men so greedy of every little gain, that they supply all the royal offices with paper made only in Piedmont, in order that Piedmontese paper-mills may reap the benefit.

It speaks well for the Piedmontese that, with so much desire to find fault with them, these are the most serious charges brought forward.

In the Ratazzi Ministry the papers lost the most fruitful theme of declamation. The caricatures against this Minister were endless, representing him in every stage of official existence, from the time when he climbs the high ministerial bench by the aid of a little finger stretched out from Paris, to the moment when he is shown hiding his head under the folds of the Emperor’s train.

What is said against the Italian Government, however, is not said in praise of the Grand-duke’s rule. On the contrary, the Opposition papers—those at least that have any circulation—all lean rather towards the “party of action,” or the extreme Liberals. The most prominent paper of this description in Florence is the ‘New Europe,’ which is republican, and makes no mystery of its principles.

Indeed, the press is so outspoken, and is allowed such latitude, that it is difficult to understand for what purpose the Government maintains a censorship. Nevertheless, such is the case. It is not a very effective one. Every paper is bound to be laid before the Reggio procurator twenty-four hours before it is published; but that official is so little able to peruse them all within the specified time, that it has frequently happened that a paper has been sequestrated when it was a day old, and had been already read and forgotten. The right of sequestration, however, has been used pretty freely. The ‘Censor’ was sequestrated more than sixty times in the course of last year, and the ‘New Europe’ has been treated even more severely: on one occasion it was sequestrated for three days running.

It is, however, high time to turn from the ideal to the material world; that is, to leave the tobacconist and his newspapers, and dive into the recesses of some very dirty and narrow little lanes where the market is being held, in order to see whether the prices given and the business done prove any decline in the prosperity of Florence since the days of the Grand-duke.

Passing by the mountains of vegetables piled up ornamentally against the huge stones of the Strozzi Palace, the reader must pick his way carefully amidst the accumulated masses of cabbage-stalks, children, and other dirt beneath, avoiding at the same time the carcasses that hang out from the butchers’ stalls on either side, from poles projecting far into the passage, and stooping every now and then to avoid the festoons of sausages which hang down from above, garland-fashion, just low enough to come in contact with the nose of an average-sized mortal. If by strictly observing the above precautions he can make his way despite all these obstacles, he will on turning the next corner arrive safely in front of an old woman and a boy presiding over sundry emblems of purgatory in the shape of huge frying-pans fixed over charcoal fires. The boy is ladling a mass of tiny dainties out of a seething black liquid, which have an appearance as of whitebait being fished out of the Thames. It is, however, only an appearance; for these are nothing more than small cakes of chestnut-flour, by name “sommomoli,” fried in oil, from which they emerge copper-coloured, sweet, nourishing, and tasteless, costing half a centesimo, or the twentieth part of a penny, a-piece. The old woman is in person superintending a still larger frying-pan, in which are frizzling square cut cakes, resembling Yorkshire pudding, sometimes interspersed with small slices of meat. These, by name “ignochchi,” consist of nothing less than Indian corn savoured with hogs-lard. A penny (ten centesimi) will purchase ten of them—a larger quantity than most English, or any Italian stomach would find it convenient to dispose of at one sitting. A step farther on slices will be offered to the passer-by off a huge flat cake the colour of gingerbread, also made of chestnut-flour, and so satisfying that it would puzzle even an Eton lollypop-eater to consume a penny’s worth. There are yet other delicacies, one especially tempting, a kind of black-pudding or rather black wafer. It consists of a spoonful of hog’s blood fried in oil, and then turned out of the pan on to a plate, seasoned with scraped cheese, and devoured hot, at a halfpenny a-piece.

With street goodies at these rates, whatever rise there may have been in prices, it is impossible to believe that they are of a nature to press to any extent upon the people at large. But take the staples of the market; look into the baker’s shop; weigh the loaves sold over the counter, and the price of the best wheaten bread will prove to be fifteen centesimi (a penny halfpenny a-pound)—not to mention the sacks of maize-flour, of rice, and of millet on the threshold.

Nevertheless the Florentine market shows a general rise in prices, probably attributable in part to the increased facility for sending the products of Tuscany, this garden of Italy, into the adjacent provinces, in part, although indirectly, to increased taxation, by which is meant not merely Government taxation, but the municipal rates, which have considerably increased in Florence; for the corporation of the town, in common with many other municipalities and commonalties, are availing themselves of their greater freedom of action under the new Government to carry out numberless improvements, which it was difficult to execute before on account of the lengthy representations which were required to be laid before the Grand-ducal Government.

The increase of taxation consequently is very considerable. The “tassa prediale,” or property-tax, for instance, has been increasing in Florence since 1859 at the rate of about one per cent every year, and in some commonalties it is even higher. There are men in Florence who are now paying in taxes (local rates and all included) exactly four times what they paid in the Grand-duke’s day. It is true that this increase is not so oppressive as it would appear, because the taxation of Tuscany used to be extremely light, being under fourteen shillings per head compared with the population. Still the cheerfulness with which this increase has been borne is a hopeful sign of the general willingness of the people to support the Italian Government. No impatience even has been shown at the rapidly augmenting taxes, and this single fact deserves to be set against a multitude of complaints on smaller matters.

Taxation, however, probably enters for very little in the rise of market prices. The reason of this increase is to be sought in local causes. For instance, there have been several successive bad seasons for olives. This year the yield is better, and the price is falling. Wine is still very high, owing to the grape disease. Meat is nearly double what it was some years since, owing, it is said, chiefly to a drought last summer.

The rise in prices, however, has been counterbalanced, so far as the working population are concerned, by a rise in wages, which has been on the average from a Tuscan lire to a Sardinian franc, or about 20 per cent.

On the whole, comparing the rise in prices with that in wages, the real pay of the labourer would seem to have slightly improved. So far, therefore, as the people’s stomachs are concerned, the comparison is not unfavourable to the new Government. To persons residing at Florence on fixed incomes, however, the increase in both instances is unfavourable, and they not unnaturally regard that which is inconvenient to themselves as ruinous to the country.

The loss of the custom of the Court and its train, upon which so much stress has been laid, so far from having affected Tuscany, has not even really affected Florence. The amount taken on account of the “octroi” at the gates of Florence shows the consumption to be on the increase.

We may therefore leave the market with the conviction that there is no material pressure at work to cause discontent. Some tradesmen really have suffered from the absence of the Court, as the jewellers and milliners for instance; but trade generally has not felt the difference.

Continuing, however, our walk in search of public opinion, we come, in a street not far distant, to a real cause of complaint; and in Tuscany, where there is a cause, there will be no want of complaint. There are a couple of soldiers standing sentry before a large door, and all around knots of countrymen talking together in anxious expectation, or not talking, but silently taking leave.

The conscription is a grievance. It is the only act of the new Government which is generally felt to be a hardship, and sometimes murmured against as an injustice. Rather more than one in every five of the youths who this year attain the age of twenty-one are being drawn for the army. This is the proportion of those taken from their homes and sent to the depots of different regiments, for all are liable to military service under one category or another. Being inscribed and left at home, however, is no great hardship: it is the separation from home which is dreaded, and therefore the numbers of the first category in the conscription which have alone to be considered. This heavy conscription is something new to the Tuscans. In the palmy days of Grand-ducal Government, before 1848, exemption from military service could be obtained for something less than £4 English; after the Austrian occupation, the conscription having grown severer, the cost of exemption was about doubled; but now it amounts to a sum which none but the wealthy can possibly pay.

The young conscripts, however, become rapidly imbued with the professional pride of their older comrades; and it often happens that lads, who have parted from their home in tears, astonish their quiet parents a few weeks after with letters full of enthusiasm for the Italian army. Enthusiasm on any subject is a rare virtue in Tuscany; and if a military life for six years could infuse into the rising generation some energy and some habits of discipline, the army would prove a more important means of education than all the new schools which are to be introduced.

But how is it that throughout this perambulation of the town of Florence we have not come across a single sign of that touching affection for the late Grand-duke which has been so vividly and so often described in England?

The truth is, that although there is a good deal of discontent with the present Government, there is no regret for the last.

Of all the weak sentiments which exist in Tuscan breasts, loyalty towards the late Grand-duke is certainly the very weakest.

In order, however, that the reader may catch a glimpse of the “Codini” (or “party of the tail,” as the following of the late Grand-duke are called) before they are all numbered among the antiquities of Italy, it will be advisable to take one turn on the banks of the Arno in the “Cascine,” the fashionable walk, or “the world,” of the Florentines.

It is sunset, and the evening chill is making itself felt—in fact, to lay aside all romance about the Italian climate, it is very cold. The upper five hundred come out at dew-fall, when everybody else goes in, apparently for no better reason than because everybody else does go in. There are Russians driving in handsome droschkes, and Americans in livery-stable barouches of an unwieldy magnificence. But our business is not with these; the native gentility of Florence is just arriving—ladies in closely-shut broughams, and young gentlemen, some in open carriages, half dog-carts half phaetons; others, less fortunate, in open fiacres.

They drive down to the end of the Cascine, where old beggar women attend upon them with “scaldine” to warm their fingers over. There men and women alight and promenade at a foot’s pace, despite the cold, after which they all drive home again.

And what can they have been about all day before they came to the Cascine? The masters and mistresses have been sitting in their respective rooms, drawing such warmth as they might from a stove most economically furnished with wood; the servants have been sitting in the antechamber, holding their four extremities over the hot ashes in the “brasero,” a metal vessel something like an English stewpan on a large scale; for the Italian palaces are cold: the architect may have done well, but the mason and the carpenter have been negligent. The walls are joined at any angle except a right one; the windows do not close; the floors are diversified by sundry undulations, so that a space is left beneath the door, through which light zephyrs play over the ill-carpeted floor. Perhaps the lady of the house has been sitting in state to receive her friends; for every Florentine lady is solemnly announced as “at home” to all her friends one day in the week, so as to keep them out of the house all the other six.

This is the married life in the palace. The life of the young men, the bachelor life of Florence, is not a bit more active. In a word, the life of a Florentine in easy circumstances is a prolonged lounge. It is not that they loiter away their time for a few weeks, or for a few months—for “a season,” in short—that is done all the world over; but the Florentines do nothing but loiter. The most active portion of their lives is that now before us,—the life during the carnival. The carnival over, the rest of the year is spent in recruiting finances and health for the next winter.

Lest the reader should treat this description as exaggerated or unduly severe, it will be best to let the Florentines themselves describe their own manner of living, and give, word for word, the rules laid down in a Florentine paper[^[5]] for any young gentleman who wishes to live in holiness, peace, and happiness (sic).

“On waking in the morning, take a cup of coffee in bed; and if you have a servant to pour it out, mind that she be a young and pretty one.

“Then light a cigar (but not of native tobacco; it is too bad), or, better still, take a whiff of a pipe.

“Clear your ideas by smoking, and, little by little, have yourself dressed by the person who undressed you the night before.

“After writing a meaningless letter, or reading a chapter out of a novel, go out, weather permitting.

“Should you meet a priest, a hunchback, or a white horse, return straightway, or a misfortune may befall you.

“After a short turn, get back to breakfast, and, this over, bid the driver put to and whip up for the Cascine.

“There go from one carriage to the other, and talk scandal to each lady against all the rest: this to kill time till dinner.

“Eat enough, and drink more; and should some wretch come to trouble your digestion by begging his bread, tell him a man should work.

“At night, go to the theatre, the club, or into society. At the theatre, should there be a new piece, hiss it; this will give you the reputation of a connoisseur; should there be an opera, try to learn an air that you may sing at the next party; should there be a ballet, endeavour to play Mæcenas to some dancer, according to the custom of the century.

“One day over, begin the next in the same way, and so on to the end.”

This, in sober earnest, is the life of a Florentine noble; except that, if rich enough, he spends all his superfluous energy and wealth in occasional visits to Paris. If unusually clever, he will become a good singer, or a judge of art—not of pictures and statues, probably, but of antique pots and pans. Otherwise he has no pursuit whatever, and his sole occupation is to persuade himself that he is an Adonis, and his friends that he is as fortunate as Endymion.

Such is the stuff which the Codini nobles are made of, and so let them drive home in peace. These are not the manner of men to make counter revolutions. Brought up as boys by a priest, within the four walls of a palace, they have never had an opportunity of gaining any experience of life beyond that afforded by the café, the theatre, and the Court, and they feel alarmed and annoyed to find growing up around them a state of things in which men will have to rank according as they can make themselves honoured by the people, and not according to the smile they may catch at Court. To this must be added, with some, a genuine personal feeling towards the late Grand-duke, but these are very few; they are limited for the most part to the courtiers, or “the antechamber” of the Court that has passed away, and even with them it is no more than a feeling of patronising friendship—nothing resembling the loyalty of an Englishman towards his sovereign. But most of the regret expressed for the late Grand-duke is nothing more than ill-disguised disappointment at being no longer able to cut a figure at Court and rub shoulders with royalty; and this is a form of politics not altogether unknown among our good countrymen at Florence.

It is cruel of reactionary writers and orators in other countries to draw down ridicule on the harmless and peaceful gentlemen who form the small band of Codini at Florence, by endeavouring to magnify them into a counter-revolutionary party.

The Codini at Florence would wish for the Austrians: they have a faint and lingering hope of a Parisian Court at Florence, under Prince Napoleon; but they do not even pretend that they would move a finger in any cause.

There are men in Tuscany, and even gentlemen, who will work and form themselves, let us hope, on the stamp of Baron Ricasoli; but these are not to be found among the clique of the Codini at Florence.

The intelligence and energy of the country is for Italy, and nearly all the great names of Florence—the names of republican celebrity, to their honour be it said—are to be found in the ranks of the national party. It is true their name is at present all that they can give to forward the cause.

Let us hope, however, that the ideas of ambition, and the wider field for competition which the new system offers, may awake in the children now growing up in Florence an energy which has been unknown to their fathers for many and many a generation. Then, perhaps, a walk in the streets of Florence thirty years hence will no longer show us electors who will not step a hundred yards out of the way in order to attend an election. The Florentines may, at their own pleasure, by taking a part in their own government and the government of Italy, virtually terminate that Piedmontese tutelage against which they fret, and without which they are not yet fit to carry out a constitutional system.

Florence, Feb. 2, 1863.

THE FRANK IN SCOTLAND.[^[6]]

For the benefit of the reader who may not have time and inclination to work his way through two thick volumes of research—for the benefit also of him who might be inclined to that adventurous task, but desires beforehand to have some notion of the tenor and character of the work before he invests in it his time and patience—we gave, in our November Number, a sketch of what we thought the prominent features of the doings of our countrymen in France, during the long period when Scotland was alienated from England. We now propose to take up the other side of the reciprocity. The two sketches will necessarily be distinct in character, as the material facts to which they refer were distinct. France was, as we have seen, the centre round which what remained of the civilisation of the old world lingered; and, along with much wretchedness among the common people, she was of all the states of Europe that which contained the largest abundance of the raw material of wealth, and consequently of the elements by which men of enterprise could raise themselves to affluence and station. Scotland was on the outskirts of those lands in which the new civilisation of the northern nations was slowly and coldly ripening to a still distant maturity. These two countries, so unlike, were knit into a close alliance, by a common danger inducing them to adopt a common policy. But, being fundamentally unlike, their close intercourse naturally tended, by close contact and comparison, to bring out the specialties of their dissimilarity.

And in nothing is this dissimilarity more conspicuous than when we look at the method and the object of the Scots’ sojourn in France, and compare them with those which characterised the few Frenchmen who came to us. The ruling feature in the former side of the reciprocity is, the profuseness with which our countrymen domesticated themselves in the land of their ancient allies, and infused new blood into theirs. There was little to attract the Frenchman to pitch his tent with us. As soon almost would he have thought of seeking his fortunes in Lapland or Iceland. Here, therefore, we have less to do with the fortunes of individual adventurers than with the national policy of the French towards Scotland, and those who casually came among us for the purpose of giving it effect. Our country had in fact been in a great measure cleared of French names before our intercourse with France began, and they never reappeared, except casually and in connection with some special political movement. The Norman French who had migrated from England over the border having, as we have seen, rendered themselves offensive by helping their own Norman King to enslave Scotland, were driven away in considerable numbers at the conclusion of the war of independence; and afterwards the French, though they kept up the policy of a close alliance with us, and gave a hearty reception to our own adventurers, found nothing to tempt them to reciprocate hospitalities. Hence the present sketch is not likely to afford any such genial history of national hospitality and successful adventure as the paper devoted to the conduct of our countrymen in France.

The policy of our alliance against England as the common enemy had become a thing of pretty old standing; many a Scot had sought his fortune in France; and names familiar to us now on shop-signs and in street-directories had been found among the dead at Poictiers, before we have authentic account of any Frenchmen having ventured across the sea to visit the sterile territory of their allies. Froissart makes a story out of the failure of the first attempt to send a French ambassador here. The person selected for the duty was the Lord of Bournazel or Bournaseau, whose genealogy is disentangled by M. Michel in a learned note. He was accredited by Charles V. in the year 1379, and was commanded to keep such state as might become the representative of his august master. Bournazel set off to embark at Sluys, and then had to wait fifteen days for a favourable wind. The ambassador thought there was no better way of beguiling the time than a recitation among the Plat Dutch of the splendours which he was bound in the way of public duty to exhibit in the sphere of his mission. Accordingly, “during this time he lived magnificently; and gold and silver plate were in such profusion in his apartments as if he had been a prince. He had also music to announce his dinner, and caused to be carried before him a sword in a scabbard richly blazoned with his arms in gold and silver. His servants paid well for everything. Many of the townspeople were much astonished at the great state this knight lived in at home, which he also maintained when he went abroad.” This premature display of his diplomatic glories brought him into a difficulty highly characteristic of one of the political specialties of France at that period. It was the time when the nobles of the blood-royal were arrogating to themselves alone certain prerogatives and ceremonials distinguishing them from the rest of the territorial aristocracy, however high these might be. The Duke of Bretagne and the Count of Flanders, who were near at hand, took umbrage at the grand doings of Bournazel, and sent for him through the bailiff of Sluys. That officer, after the manner of executive functionaries who find themselves sufficiently backed, made his mission as offensive as possible, and, tapping Bournazel on the shoulder, intimated that he was wanted. The great men had intended only to rebuke him for playing a part above his commission, but the indiscretion of their messenger gave Bournazel a hold which he kept and used sagaciously. When he found the princes who had sent for him lounging at a window looking into the gardens, he fell on his knees and acknowledged himself the prisoner of the Count of Flanders. To take prisoner an ambassador, and the ambassador of a crowned king, the feudal lord of the captor, was one of the heaviest of offences, both against the law of nations and the spirit of chivalry. The Earl was not the less enraged that he felt himself caught; and after retorting with, “How, rascal, do you dare to call yourself my prisoner when I have only sent to speak with you?” he composed himself to the delivery of the rebuke he had been preparing in this fashion: “It is by such talkers and jesters of the Parliament of Paris and of the king’s chamber as you, that the kingdom is governed; and you manage the king as you please, to do good or evil according to your wills: there is not a prince of the blood, however great he may be, if he incur your hatred, who will be listened to; but such fellows shall yet be hanged until the gibbets be full of them.” Bournazel carried this pleasant announcement and the whole transaction to the throne, and the king took his part, saying to those around, “He has kept his ground well: I would not for twenty thousand francs it had not so happened.” The embassy to Scotland was thus for the time frustrated. It was said that there were English cruisers at hand to intercept the ambassador, and that he himself had no great heart for a sojourn in the wild unknown northern land. Possibly the fifteen days’ lording it at Sluys may have broken in rather inconveniently on his outfit; but the most likely cause of the defeat of the first French embassy to our shores was, the necessity felt by Bournazel to right himself at once at court, and turn the flank of his formidable enemies; and Froissart says, the Earl of Flanders lay under the royal displeasure for having, in his vain vaunting, defeated so important a project as the mission to the Scots.

A few years afterwards our country received a visit, less august, it is true, than the intended embassy, but far more interesting. In 1384, negotiations were exchanged near the town of Boulogne for a permanent peace between England and France. The French demanded concessions of territory which could not be yielded, and a permanent peace, founded on a final settlement of pending claims, was impossible. A truce even was at that time, however, a very important conclusion to conflict; it sometimes lasted for years, being in reality a peace under protest that each party reserved certain claims to be kept in view when war should again break out. Such a truce was adjusted between England on the one side and France on the other—conditional on the accession of her allies Spain and Scotland. France kept faith magnanimously, in ever refusing to negotiate a separate peace or truce for herself; but, as the way is with the more powerful of two partners, she was apt to take for granted that Scotland would go with her, and that the affair was virtually finished by her own accession to terms.

It happened that in this instance the Duke of Burgundy took in hand to deal with Scotland. He had, however, just at that moment, a rather important piece of business, deeply interesting to himself, on hand. By the death of the Earl of Flanders he succeeded to that fair domain—an event which vastly influenced the subsequent fate of Europe. So busy was he in adjusting the affairs of his succession, that it was said he entirely overlooked the small matter of the notification of the truce to Scotland. Meanwhile, there was a body of men-at-arms in the French service at Sluys thrown out of employment by the truce with England, and, like other workmen in a like position, desirous of a job. They knew that the truce had not yet penetrated to Scotland, and thought a journey thither, long and dangerous as it was, might be a promising speculation. There were about thirty of them, and Froissart gives a head-roll of those whose names he remembered, beginning with Sir Geoffry de Charny, Sir John de Plaissy, Sir Hugh de Boulon, and so on. They dared not attempt, in face of the English warships, to land at a southern harbour, but reached the small seaport called by Froissart Monstres, and not unaptly supposed by certain sage commentators to be Montrose, since they rode on to Dundee and thence to Perth. They were received with a deal of rough hospitality, and much commended for the knightly spirit that induced them to cross the wide ocean to try their lances against the common enemy of England. Two of them were selected to pass onto Edinburgh, and explain their purpose at the court of Holyrood. Here they met two of their countrymen on a mission which boded no good to their enterprise. These were ambassadors from France, come at last to notify the truce. It was at once accepted by the peaceable King Robert, but the Scots lords around him were grieved in heart at the prospect that these fine fellows should come so far and return without having any sport of that highly flavoured kind which the border wars afforded. The truce they held had been adjusted not by Scotland but by France; and here, as if to contradict its sanction, were Frenchmen themselves offering to treat it as naught. There was, however, a far stronger reason for overlooking it. Just before it was completed, but when it was known to be inevitable, the Earls of Northumberland and Nottingham suddenly and secretly drew together two thousand men-at-arms and six thousand bowmen, with which they broke into Scotland, and swept the country as far as Edinburgh with more than the usual ferocity of a border raid; for they made it to the Scots as if the devil had come among them, having great wrath, for he knew that his time was short. It was said, even, that the French ambassadors sent to Scotland to announce the truce had been detained in London to allow time for this raid coming off effectively. “To say the truth,” says Froissart, mildly censorious, “the lords of England who had been at the conference at Bolinghen, had not acted very honourably when they had consented to order their men to march to Scotland and burn the country, knowing that a truce would speedily be concluded: and the best excuse they could make was, that it was the French and not they who were to signify such truce to the Scots.” Smarting from this inroad, the Scots lords, and especially the Douglases and others on the border, were in no humour to coincide with their peaceful King. They desired to talk the matter over with the representatives of the adventurers in some quiet place; and, for reasons which were doubtless sufficient to themselves, they selected for this purpose the church of St Giles in Edinburgh. The conference was highly satisfactory to the adventurers, who spurred back to Perth to impart the secret intelligence that though the king had accepted the truce, the lords were no party to it, but would immediately prepare an expedition to avenge Nottingham and Northumberland’s raid. This was joyful intelligence, though in its character rather surprising to followers of the French court. A force was rapidly collected, and in a very few days the adventurers were called to join it in the Douglases’ lands.

So far Froissart. This affair is not, at least to our knowledge, mentioned in detail by any of our own annalists writing before the publication of his Chronicles. Everything, however, is there set forth so minutely, and with so distinct and accurate a reference to actual conditions in all the details, that few things in history can be less open to doubt. Here, however, we come to a statement inviting question, when he says that the force collected so suddenly by the Scots lords contained fifteen thousand mounted men; nor can we be quite reconciled to the statement though their steeds were the small mountain horses called hackneys. The force, however, was sufficient for its work. It found the English border trusting to the truce, and as little prepared for invasion as Nottingham and Northumberland had found Scotland. The first object was the land of the Percies, which the Scots, in the laconic language of the chronicler, “pillaged and burnt.” And so they went onwards; and where peasants had been peacefully tilling the land or tending their cattle amid the comforts of rude industry, there the desolating host passed, the crops were trampled down—their owners left dead in the ashes of their smoking huts—and a few widows and children, fleeing for safety and food, was all of animal life left upon the scene. The part, indeed, taken in it by his countrymen was exactly after Froissart’s own heart, since they were not carrying out any of the political movements of the day, nor were they even actuated by an ambition of conquest, but were led by the sheer fun of the thing and the knightly spirit of adventure to partake in this wild raid. To the Scots it was a substantial affair, for they came back heavy-handed, with droves and flocks driven before them—possibly some of them recovered their own.

The king had nothing to say in his vindication touching this little affair, save that it had occurred without his permission, or even knowledge. The Scots lords were not the only persons who broke that truce. It included the Duke of Burgundy and his enemies, the Low Country towns; yet his feudatory, the Lord Destournay, taking advantage of the defenceless condition of Oudenarde during peace, took it by a clever stratagem. The Duke of Burgundy, when appealed to, advised Destournay to abandon his capture; but Destournay was wilful: he had conquered the city, and the city was his—so there was no help for it, since the communities were not strong enough to enforce their rights, and Burgundy would only demand them on paper. What occasioned the raid of the Scots and French to be passed over was, however, that the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, who had the chief authority over the English councils, as well as the command over the available force, was taken up with his own schemes on the crown of Castile, and not inclined to find work for the military force of the country elsewhere. The truce, therefore, was cordially ratified; bygones were counted bygones; and the French adventurers bade a kindly farewell to their brethren-in-arms, and crossed the seas homewards.

Driven from their course, and landing at the Brille, they narrowly escaped hanging at the hands of the boorish cultivators of the swamp; and after adventures which would make good raw materials for several novels, they reached Paris.

There they explained to their own court how they found that the great enemy of France had, at the opposite extremity of his dominions, a nest of fighting fiends, who wanted only their help in munitions of war to enable them to rush on the vital parts of his dominions with all the fell ferocity of men falling on their bitterest feudal enemy. Thus could France, having under consideration the cost and peril of gallying an invading army across the Straits, by money and management, do far more damage to the enemy than any French invading expedition was likely to accomplish.

In an hour which did not prove propitious to France, a resolution was adopted to invade England at both ends. Even before the truce was at an end, the forges of Henault and Picardy were hard at work making battle-axes; and all along the coast, from Harfleur to Sluys, there was busy baking of biscuits and purveyance of provender. Early in spring an expedition of a thousand men-at-arms, with their followers, put to sea under John of Vienne, the Admiral of France, and arrived at Leith, making a voyage which must have been signally prosperous, if we may judge by the insignificance of the chief casualty on record concerning it. In those days, as in the present, it appears that adventurous young gentlemen on shipboard were apt to attempt feats for which their land training did not adapt them—in nautical phrase, “to swing on all top ropes.” A hopeful youth chose to perform such a feat in his armour, and with the most natural of all results. “The knight was young and active, and, to show his agility, he mounted aloft by the ropes of his ship, completely armed; but his feet slipping he fell into the sea, and the weight of his armour, which sank him instantly, deprived him of any assistance, for the ship was soon at a distance from the place where he had fallen.”

The expedition soon found itself to be a mistake. In fact, to send fighting men to Scotland was just to supply the country with that commodity in which it superabounded. The great problem was how to find food for the stalwart sons of the soil, and arms to put in their hands when fighting was necessary. A percentage of the cost and labour of the expedition, spent in sending money or munitions of war, would have done better service. The scene before the adventurers was in lamentable contrast to all that custom had made familiar to them. There were none of the comfortable chateaux, the abundant markets, the carpets, down beds, and rich hangings which gladdened their expeditions to the Low Countries, whether they went as friends or foes. Nor was the same place for them in Scotland, which the Scots so readily found in France, where a docile submissive peasantry only wanted vigorous and adventurous masters. “The lords and their men,” says Froissart, “lodged themselves as well as they could in Edinburgh, and those who could not lodge there were quartered in the different villages thereabout. Edinburgh, notwithstanding that it is the residence of the king, and is the Paris of Scotland, is not such a town as Tournay and Valenciennes, for there are not in the whole town four thousand houses. Several of the French lords were therefore obliged to take up their lodgings in the neighbouring villages, and at Dunfermline, Kelso, Dunbar, Dalkeith, and in other towns.” When they had exhausted the provender brought with them, these children of luxury had to endure the miseries of sordid living, and even the pinch of hunger. They tried to console themselves with the reflection that they had, at all events, an opportunity of experiencing a phase of life which their parents had endeavoured theoretically to impress upon them, in precepts to be thankful to the Deity for the good things which they enjoyed, but which might not always be theirs in a transitory world. They had been warned by the first little band of adventurers that Scotland was not rich; yet the intense poverty of the country whence so many daring adventurers had gone over to ruffle it with the flower of European chivalry, astonished and appalled them. Of the extreme and special nature of the poverty of Scotland, the great war against the English invaders was the cause. It has been estimated, indeed, by those devoted to such questions, that Scotland did not recover fully from the ruin caused by that conflict until the Union made her secure against her ambitious neighbour. It was the crisis referred to in that pathetic ditty, the earliest specimen of our lyrical poetry, when

“Away was sonse of ale and bread,

Of wine and wax, of gaming and glee;

Our gold was changed into lead;

Cryst borne into virginity.

Succour poor Scotland and remede,

That stad is in perplexity.”

It is not sufficiently known how much wealth and prosperity existed in Scotland before King Edward trod its soil. Berwick, the chief commercial port, had commerce with half the world, and bade fair to rival Ghent, Rotterdam, and the other great mercantile cities of the Low Country. Antiquarians have lately pointed to a sad and significant testimony to the change of times. Of the ecclesiastical remains of Scotland, the finest are either in the Norman, or the early English which preceded the Edwards. These are the buildings of a noted and munificent people; they rival the corresponding establishments in England, and are in the same style as the work of nations having common interests and sympathies—indeed the same architects seem to have worked in both countries. At the time when the Gothic architecture of England merged into the type called the Second Pointed, there ceased to be corresponding specimens in Scotland. A long period, indeed, elapses which has handed down to us no vestiges of church architecture in Scotland, or only a few too trifling to possess any distinctive character. When works of Gothic art begin again to arise with the reviving wealth of the people, they are no longer of the English type, but follow that flamboyant style which had been adopted by the ecclesiastical builders of the country with which Scotland had most concern—her steady patron and protector, France.[^[7]]

The poverty of the Scots proceeded from a cause of which they need not have been ashamed; yet, with the reserve and pride ever peculiar to them, they hated that it should be seen by their allies, and when these showed any indications of contempt or derision, the natives were stung to madness. Froissart renders very picturesquely the common talk about the strangers, thus:—“What devil has brought them here? or, who has sent for them? Cannot we carry on our wars with England without their assistance? We shall never do any good as long as they are with us. Let them be told to go back again, for we are sufficient in Scotland to fight our own battles, and need not their aid. We neither understand their language nor they ours, so that we cannot converse together. They will very soon cut up and destroy all we have in this country, and will do more harm if we allow them to remain among us than the English could in battle. If the English do burn our houses, what great matter is it to us? We can rebuild them at little cost, for we require only three days to do so, so that we but have five or six poles, with boughs to cover them.”

The French knights, accustomed to abject submission among their own peasantry, were loth to comprehend the fierce independence of the Scots common people, and were ever irritating them into bloody reprisals. A short sentence of Froissart’s conveys a world of meaning on this specialty: “Besides, whenever their servants went out to forage, they were indeed permitted to load their horses with as much as they could pack up and carry, but they were waylaid on their return, and villanously beaten, robbed, and sometimes slain, insomuch that no varlet dare go out foraging for fear of death. In one month the French lost upwards of a hundred varlets; for when three or four went out foraging, not one returned, in such a hideous manner were they treated.” As we have seen, a not unusual incident of purveying in France was, that the husbandman was hung up by the heels and roasted before his own fire until he disgorged his property. The Scots peasantry had a decided prejudice against such a process, and, being accustomed to defend themselves from all oppression, resisted even that of their allies, to the extreme astonishment and wrath of those magnificent gentlemen. There is a sweet unconsciousness in Froissart’s indignant denunciation of the robbing of the purveyors, which meant the pillaged peasantry recovering their own goods. But the chronicler was of a thorough knightly nature, and deemed the peasantry of a country good for nothing but to be used up. Hence, in his wrath, he says: “In Scotland you will never find a man of worth; they are like savages, who wish not to be acquainted with any one, and are too envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of losing anything themselves, for their country is very poor. When the English make inroads thither, as they have very frequently done, they order their provisions, if they wish to live, to follow close at their backs; for nothing is to be had in that country without great difficulty. There is neither iron to shoe horses, nor leather to make harness, saddles, or bridles; all these things come ready made from Flanders by sea; and should these fail, there is none to be had in the country.” What a magnificent contrast to such a picture is the present relative condition of Scotland and the Low Countries! and yet these have not suffered any awful reverse of fortune—they have merely abided in stagnant respectability.

It must be remembered, in estimating the chronicler’s pungent remarks upon our poor ancestors, that he was not only a worshipper of rank and wealth, but thoroughly English in his partialities, magnifying the feats in arms of the great enemies of his own country. The records of the Scots Parliament of 1395 curiously confirm the inference from his narrative, that the French were oppressive purveyors, and otherwise unobservant of the people’s rights. An indenture, as it is termed—the terms of a sort of compact with the strangers—appears among the records, conspicuous among their other Latin and vernacular contents as being set forth in French, in courtesy, of course, to the strangers. It expressly lays down that no goods of any kind shall be taken by force, under pain of death, and none shall be received without being duly paid for—the dealers having free access to come and go. There are regulations, too, for suppressing broils by competent authority, and especially for settling questions between persons of unequal degrees; a remedy for the French practice, which left the settlement entirely with the superior. This document is one of many showing that, in Scotland, there were arrangements for protecting the personal freedom of the humbler classes, and their rights of property, the fulness of which is little known, because the like did not exist in other countries, and those who have written philosophical treatises on the feudal system, or on the progress of Europe from barbarism to civilisation, have generally lumped all the countries of Europe together. The sense of personal freedom seems to have been rather stronger in Scotland than in England; it was such as evidently to astound the French knights. At the end of the affair, Froissart expresses this surprise in his usual simple and expressive way. After a second or third complaint of the unreasonable condition that his countrymen should pay for the victuals they consumed, he goes on, “The Scots said the French had done them more mischief than the English;” and when asked in what manner, they replied, “By riding through the corn, oats, and barley on their march, which they trod under foot, not condescending to follow the roads, for which damage they would have a recompense before they left Scotland, and they should neither find vessel nor mariner who would dare to put to sea without their permission.”

Of the military events in the short war following the arrival of the French, an outline will be found in the ordinary histories; but it was attended by some conditions which curiously bring out the specialties of the two nations so oddly allied. One propitiatory gift the strangers had brought with them, which was far more highly appreciated than their own presence; this was a thousand stand of accoutrements for men-at-arms. They were of the highest excellence, being selected out of the store kept in the Castle of Beauté for the use of the Parisians. When these were distributed among the Scots knights, who were but poorly equipped, the chronicler, as if he had been speaking of the prizes at a Christmas-tree, tells how those who were successful and got them were greatly delighted. The Scots did their part in their own way: they brought together thirty thousand men, a force that drained the country of its available manhood. But England had at that time nothing to divert her arms elsewhere, and the policy adopted was to send northwards a force sufficient to crush Scotland for ever. It consisted of seven thousand mounted men-at-arms, and sixty thousand bow and bill men—a force from three to four times as large as the armies that gained the memorable English victories in France. Of these, Agincourt was still to come off, but Crecy and Poictiers were over, along with many other affairs that might have taught the French a lesson. The Scots, too, had suffered two great defeats—Neville’s Cross and Halidon Hill—since their great national triumph. The impression made on each country by their experiences brought out their distinct national characteristics. The French knights were all ardour and impatience; they clamoured to be at the enemy without ascertaining the amount or character of his force. The wretched internal wars of their own country had taught them to look on the battle-field as the arena of reason in personal conflict, rather than the great tribunal in which the fate of nations was to be decided, and communities come forth freed or enslaved.

To the Scots, on the other hand, the affair was one of national life or death, and they would run no risks for distinction’s sake. Picturesque accounts have often been repeated of a scene where Douglas, or some other Scots leader, brought the Admiral to an elevated spot whence he could see and estimate the mighty host of England; but the most picturesque of all the accounts is the original by Froissart, of which the others are parodies. The point in national tactics brought out by this incident is the singular recklessness with which the French must have been accustomed to do battle. In total ignorance of the force he was to oppose, and not seeking to know aught concerning it, the Frenchman’s voice was still for war. When made to see with his own eyes what he had to encounter, he was as reluctant as his companions to risk the issue of a battle, but not so fertile in expedients for carrying on the war effectively without one. The policy adopted was to clear the country before the English army as it advanced, and carry everything portable and valuable within the recesses of the mountain-ranges, whither the inhabitants not fit for military service went with their effects. A desert being thus opened for the progress of the invaders, they were left to wander in it unmolested while the Scots army went in the opposite direction, and crossed the Border southwards. Thus the English army found Scotland empty—the Scots army found England full. The one wore itself out in a fruitless march, part of it straggling, it was said, as far as Aberdeen, and returned thinned and starving, while the other was only embarrassed by the burden of its plunder. Much destruction there was, doubtless, on both sides, but it fell heaviest where there was most to destroy, and gratified at last in some measure the French, who “said among themselves they had burned in the bishoprics of Durham and Carlisle more than the value of all the towns in the kingdom of Scotland.” But havoc does not make wealth, and whether or not the Scots knew better from experience how to profit by such opportunities, the French, when they returned northward, were starving. Their object now was to get out of the country as fast as they could. Froissart, with a touch of dry humour, explains that their allies had no objection to speed the exit of the poorer knights, but resolved to hold the richer and more respectable in a sort of pawn for the damage which the expedition had inflicted on the common people. The Admiral asked his good friends the Lords Douglas and Moray to put a stop to these demands; but these good knights were unable to accommodate their brethren in this little matter, and the Admiral was obliged to give effectual pledges from his Government for the payment of the creditors. There is something in all this that seems utterly unchivalrous and even ungenerous; but it had been well for France had Froissart been able to tell a like story of her peasantry. It merely shows us that our countrymen of that day were of those who “knew their rights, and, knowing, dared maintain them;” and was but a demonstration on a humbler, and, if you will, more sordid shape, of the same spirit that had swept away the Anglo-Norman invaders. The very first act which their chronicler records concerning his knightly friends, after he has exhausted his wrath against the hard and mercenary Scot, is thoroughly suggestive. Some of the knights tried other fields of adventure, “but the greater number returned to France, and were so poor they knew not how to remount themselves, especially those from Burgundy, Champagne, Bar, and Lorraine, who seized the labouring horses wherever they found them in the fields,” so impatient were they to regain their freedom of action.

So ended this affair, with the aspect of evil auspices for the alliance. The adventurers returned “cursing Scotland, and the hour they had set foot there. They said they had never suffered so much in any expedition, and wished the King of France would make a truce with the English for two or three years, and then march to Scotland and utterly destroy it; for never had they seen such wicked people, nor such ignorant hypocrites and traitors.” But the impulsive denunciation of the disappointed adventurers was signally obliterated in the history of the next half-century. Ere many more years had passed over them, that day of awful trial was coming when France had to lean on the strong arm of her early ally; and, in fact, some of the denouncers lived to see adventurers from the sordid land of their contempt and hatred commanding the armies of France, and owning her broad lordships. It was, in fact, just after the return of Vienne’s expedition, that the remarkable absorption of Scotsmen into the aristocracy of France, referred to in our preceding paper, began to set in.

This episode of the French expedition to Scotland, small though its place is in the annals of Europe, yet merits the consideration of the thoughtful historian, in affording a significant example of the real causes of the misery and degradation of France at that time, and the wonderful victories of the English kings. Chivalry, courage, the love of enterprise, high spirit in all forms, abounded to superfluity among the knightly orders, but received no solid support from below. The mounted steel-clad knights of the period, in the highest physical condition, afraid of nothing on the earth or beyond it, and burning for triumph and fame, could perform miraculous feats of strength and daring; but all passed off in wasted effort and vain rivalry, when there was wanting the bold peasantry, who, with their buff jerkins, and their bills and bows, or short Scottish spears, were the real force by which realms were held or gained.

The next affair in which M. Michel notes his countrymen as present among us, was a very peculiar and exceptional one, with features only too like those which were such a scandal to the social condition of France. It was that great battle or tournament on the North Inch of Perth, where opposite Highland factions, called the clan Quhele and clan Chattan, were pitted against each other, thirty to thirty—an affair, the darker colours of which are lighted up by the eccentric movements of the Gow Chrom, or bandy-legged smith of Perth, who took the place of a defaulter in one of the ranks, to prevent the spectacle of the day from being spoilt. That such a contest should have been organised to take place in the presence of the king and court, under solemnities and regulations like some important ordeal, has driven historical speculators to discover what deep policy for the pacification or subjugation of the Highlands lay behind it. The feature that gives it a place in M. Michel’s book, is the briefest possible notification by one of the chroniclers, that a large number of Frenchmen and other strangers were present at the spectacle. This draws us back from the mysterious arcana of political intrigue to find a mere showy pageant, got up to enliven the hours of idle mirth—an act, in short, of royal hospitality—a show cunningly adapted to the tastes of the age, yet having withal the freshness of originality, being a renaissance kind of combination of the gladiatorial conflict of the Roman circus with the tournament of chivalry. The Highlanders were, in fact, the human raw material which a king of Scots could in that day employ, so far as their nature suited, for the use or the amusement of his guests. Them, and them only among his subjects, could he use as the Empire used the Transalpine barbarian—“butchered to make a Roman holiday.” The treatment of the Celt is the blot in that period of our history. Never in later times has the Red Indian or Australian native been more the hunted wild beast to the emigrant settler, than the Highlander was to his neighbour the Lowlander. True, he was not easily got at, and, when reached, he was found to have tusks. They were a people never permitted to be at rest from external assault; yet such was their nature that, instead of being pressed by a common cause into compact union, they were divided into communities that hated each other almost more bitterly than the common enemy. This internal animosity has suggested that the king wanted two factions to exterminate each other as it were symbolically, and accept the result of a combat between two bodies of chosen champions, as if there had been an actual stricken field, with all the able-bodied men on both sides engaged in it. It was quite safe to calculate that when the representatives of the two contending factions were set face to face on the green sward, they would fly at each other’s throats, and afford in an abundant manner to the audience whatever delectation might arise from an intensely bloody struggle. But, on the other hand, to expect the Highlanders to be fools enough to accept this sort of symbolical extinction of their quarrel was too preposterous a deduction for any practical statesman. They had no notion of leaving important issues to the event of single combat, or any of the other preposterous rules of chivalry, but slew their enemies where they could, and preferred doing so secretly, and without risk to themselves, when that was practicable.

As we read on the history of the two countries, France and Scotland, we shall find the national friendship which had arisen in their common adversity gradually and almost insensibly changing its character. The strong current of migration from Scotland which had set in during the latter period of the hundred years’ war stopped almost abruptly. Scotsmen were still hired as soldiers—sometimes got other appointments—and, generally speaking, were received with hospitality; but in Louis XI.’s reign, the time had passed when they were accepted in the mass as a valuable contribution to the aristocracy of France, and forthwith invested with titles and domains. The families that had thus settled down remembered the traditions of their origin, but had no concern with Scotland, and were thoroughly French, nationally and socially. France, too, was aggregating into a compact nationality, to which her sons could attach themselves with some thrill of patriotic pride. She made a great stride onward both in nationality and prosperity during the reign of that hard, greedy, penurious, crafty, superstitious hypocrite, Louis XI. By a sort of slow corroding process he ate out, bit by bit, the powers and tyrannies that lay between his own and the people. Blood, even the nearest, was to him nowise thicker than water, so he did not, like his predecessors, let royal relations pick up what territorial feudatories dropped; he took all to himself, and, taking it to himself, it became that French empire which was to be inherited by Francis I., Louis XIV., and even the Napoleons; for he seems to have had the principal hand in jointing and fitting in the subordinate machinery of that centralisation which proved compact enough in its details to be put together again after the smash of the Revolution, and which has proved itself as yet the only system under which France can flourish.

Scotland was, at the same time, rising under a faint sunshine of prosperity—a sort of reflection of that enjoyed by France. The connection of the poor with the rich country was becoming ever more close, but at the same time it was acquiring an unwholesome character. The two could not fuse into each other as England and Scotland did; and, for all the pride of the Scots, and their strong hold over France, as the advanced-guard mounted upon England, the connection could not but lapse into a sort of clientage—the great nation being the patron, the small nation the dependant. Whether for good or evil, France infused into Scotland her own institutions, which, being those of the Roman Empire, as practised throughout the Christian nations of the Continent, made Scotsmen free of those elements of social communion, that amitas gentium, from which England excluded herself in sulky pride. This is visible, or rather audible, at the present day, in the Greek and Latin of the Scotsmen of the old school, who can make themselves understood all over the world; while the English pronunciation, differing from that of the nations which have preserved the chief deposits of the classic languages in their own, must as assuredly differ from the way in which these were originally spoken. The Englishman disdained the universal Justinian jurisprudence, and would be a law unto himself, which he called, with an affectation of humility, “The Common Law.” It is full, no doubt, of patches taken out of the ‘Corpus Juris,’ but, far from their source being acknowledged, the civilians are never spoken of by the common lawyers but to be railed at and denounced; and when great draughts on the Roman system were found absolutely necessary to keep the machine of justice in motion, these were entirely elbowed out of the way by common law, and had to form themselves into a separate machinery of their own, called Equity. Scotland, on the other hand, received implicitly from her leader in civilisation the great body of the civil law, as collected and arranged by the most laborious of all labouring editors, Denis Godefroi. We brought over also an exact facsimile of the French system of public prosecution for crime, from the great state officer at the head of the system to the Procureurs du Roi. It is still in full practice and eminently useful; but it is an arrangement that, to be entirely beneficial, needs to be surrounded by constitutional safeguards; and though there has been much pressure of late to establish it in England, one cannot be surprised that it was looked askance at while the great struggles for fixing the constitution were in progress.

The practice of the long-forgotten States-General of France was an object of rather anxious inquiry at the reassembling of that body in 1789, after they had been some four centuries and a half in a state of adjournment or dissolution. The investigations thus occasioned brought out many peculiarities which were in practical observance in Scotland down to the Union. All the world has read of that awful crisis arising out of the question whether the Estates should vote collectively or separately. Had the question remained within the bounds of reason and regulation, instead of being virtually at the issue of the sword, much instructive precedent would have been obtained for its settlement by an examination of the proceedings of that Parliament of Scotland which adjusted the Union—an exciting matter also, yet, to the credit of our country, discussed with perfect order, and obedience to rules of practice which, derived from the custom of the old States-General of France, were rendered pliant and adaptable by such a long series of practical adaptations as the country of their nativity was not permitted to witness.

There was a very distinct adaptation of another French institution of later origin, when the Court of Session was established in 1533. Before that, the king’s justices administered the law somewhat as in England, but there was an appeal to Parliament; and as that body did its judicial work by committees, these became virtually the supreme courts of the realm. If the reader wants to have assurance that there is something really sound in this information, by receiving it in the current coin of its appropriate technicalities, let him commit to memory that the chief standing committee was named that of the Domini auditorii ad querelas. When he uses that term, nobody will question the accuracy of what he says. The Court of Session, established to supersede this kind of tribunal, was exactly a French parliament—a body exercising appellate judicial functions, along with a few others of a legislative character—few in this country, but in France sufficiently extensive to render the assembling of the proper Parliament of the land and the States-General unnecessary for all regal purposes.

In other institutions—the universities, for instance—we find not merely the influence of French example, but an absolute importation of the whole French structure and discipline. The University of King’s College in Aberdeen was constructed on the model of the great University of Paris. Its founder, Bishop Elphinston, had taught there for many years; so had its first principal, Hector Boece, the most garrulous and credulous of historians. The transition from the Paris to the Aberdeen of that day, must have been a descent not to be estimated by the present relative condition of the two places; and one cannot be surprised to find Hector saying that he was seduced northwards by gifts and promises. It is probable that we would find fewer actual living remnants of the old institution in Paris itself than in the northern imitation. There may be yet found the offices of regent and censor, for the qualities of which one must search in the mighty folios of Bullæus. There survives the division into nations—the type of the unlimited hospitality of the university as a place where people of all nations assembled to drink at the fountain of knowledge. There also the youth who flashes forth, for the first time, in his scarlet plumage, is called a bejeant, not conscious, perhaps, that the term was used to the first-session students of the French universities hundreds of years ago, and that it is derived by the learned from bec jaune, or yellow nib. If the reader is of a sentimentally domestic turn, he may find in the term the conception of an alma mater, shielding the innocent brood from surrounding dangers; and if he be knowing and sarcastic, he may suppose it to refer to a rawness and amenability to be trotted out, expressed in the present day by the synonymous freshman and greenhorn.

There is a still more distinct stamp of a French type, in the architecture of our country, so entirely separate from the English style, in the flamboyant Gothic of the churches, and the rocket-topped turrets of the castles; but on this specialty we shall not here enlarge, having, in some measure, examined it several years ago.[^[8]] It was not likely that all these, with many other practices, should be imported into the nation, however gradually, without the people having a consciousness that they were foreign. They were not established without the aid of men, showing, by their air and ways, that they and their practices were alike alien. He, however, who gave the first flagrant offence, in that way, to the national feeling, was a descendant of one of the emigrant Scots of the fifteenth century, and by blood and rank closely allied to the Scottish throne, although every inch a Frenchman.

To watch in history the action and counteraction of opposing forces which have developed some grand result, yet by a slight and not improbable impulse the other way might have borne towards an opposite conclusion equally momentous, is an interesting task, with something in it of the excitement of the chase. In pursuing the traces which bring Scotland back to her English kindred, and saved her from a permanent annexation to France, the arrival of John Duke of Albany in Scotland, in 1515, is a critical turning-point. Already had the seed of the union with England been planted when James IV. got for a wife the daughter of Henry VII. Under the portrait of this sagacious king, Bacon wrote the mysterious motto—Cor regis inscrutabile. It would serve pleasantly to lighten up and relieve a hard and selfish reputation, if one could figure him, in the depths of his own heart, assuring himself of having entered in the books of fate a stroke of policy that at some date, however distant, was destined to appease the long bloody contest of two rival nations, and unite them into a compact and mighty empire. The prospects of such a consummation were at first anything but encouraging. The old love broke in counteracting the prudential policy; and, indeed, never did besotted lover abandon himself to wilder folly than James IV., when, at the bidding of Anne of France as the lady of his chivalrous worship, he resolved to be her true knight, and take three steps into English ground. When a chivalrous freak, backed by a few political irritations scarce less important, strewed the moor of Flodden with the flower of the land, it was time for Scotland to think over the rationality of this distant alliance, which deepened and perpetuated her feud with her close neighbour of kindred blood. Well for him, the good, easy, frank, chivalrous monarch, that he was buried in the ruin he had made, and saw not the misery of a desolated nation. Of the totally alien object for which all the mischief had been done, there was immediate evidence in various shapes. One curious little item of it is brought out by certain researches of M. Michel, which have also a significant bearing on the conflict between the secular and the papal power in the disposal of benefices. The Pope, Julius II., was anxious to gain over to his interest Mathew Lang, bishop of Gorz, and secretary to the Emperor Maximilian, who was called to Rome and blessed by the vision of a cardinal’s hat, and the papal influence in the first high promotion that might open. The archbishopric of Bourges became vacant. The chapter elected one of our old friends of the Scots emigrant families, Guillaume de Monypeny, brother of the Lord of Concressault; but the King, Louis XII., at first stood out for Brillac, bishop of Orleans, resisted by the chapter. The bishop of Gorz then came forward with a force sufficient to sweep away both candidates. He was favoured of the Pope: his own master, Maximilian, desired for his secretary this foreign benefice, which would cost himself nothing; and Louis found somehow that the bishop was as much his own humble servant as the Emperor’s. No effect of causes sufficient seemed in this world more assured than that Mathew Lang, bishop of Gorz, should also be archbishop of Bourges; but the fortune of war rendered it before his collation less important to have the bishop of Gorz in the archiepiscopate than another person. The King laid his hand again on the chapter, and required them to postulate one whose name and condition must have seemed somewhat strange to them—Andrew Forman, bishop of Moray, in the north of Scotland. There are reasons for all things. Forman was ambassador from Scotland to France, and thus had opportunities of private communication with James IV. and Louis XII. This latter, in a letter to the Chapter of Bourges, explains his signal obligations to Forman for having seconded the allurements of the Queen, and instigated the King of Scots to make war against England, explaining how icelui, Roy d’Escosse s’est ouvertement declaré vouloir tenir nostre party et faire la guerre actuellement contre le Roy d’Angleterre. Lest the chapter should doubt the accuracy of this statement of the services performed to France by Forman, the King sent them le double des lectres que le dict Roy d’Escosse nous a escriptes et aussi de la defiance q’il a fait au dict Roy d’Angleterre. The King pleaded hard with the chapter to postulate Forman, representing that they could not find a better means of securing his own countenance and protection. The Scotsman backed this royal appeal by a persuasive letter, which he signed Andrè, Arcevesque de Bourges et Evesque de Morray. Influence was brought to bear on the Pope himself, and he declared his leaning in favour of Forman. The members of the chapter, who had been knocked about past endurance in the affair of the archbishopric from first to last, threatened resistance and martyrdom; but the pressure of the powers combined against them brought them to reason, and Forman entered Bourges in archiepiscopal triumph. But the ups and downs of the affair were as yet by no means at an end. That great pontiff, who never forgot that the head of the Church was a temporal prince, Leo X., had just ascended the throne, and found that it would be convenient to have this archbishopric of Bourges for his nephew, Cardinal Abo. By good luck the see of St Andrews, the primacy of Scotland, was then vacant, and was given as an equivalent for the French dignity. Such a promotion was a symbolically appropriate reward for the services of Forman; his predecessor fell at Flodden, and thus, in his services to the King of France, he had made a vacancy for himself. He had for some time in his pocket, afraid to show it, the Pope’s bull appointing him Archbishop of St Andrews and Primate of Scotland. This was a direct act of interference contrary to law and custom, since the function of the Pope was only to collate or confirm, as ecclesiastical superior, the choice made by the local authorities. These had their favourite for the appointment, Prior Hepburn, who showed his earnestness in his own cause by taking and holding the Castle of St Andrews. A contest of mingled ecclesiastical and civil elements, too complex to be disentangled, followed; but in the end Forman triumphed, having on his side the efforts of the King of France and his servant Albany, with the Pope’s sense of justice. The rewards of this highly endowed divine were the measure alike of his services to France and of his injuries to Scotland. He held, by the way, in commendam, a benefice in England; and as he had a good deal of diplomatic business with Henry VIII., it may not uncharitably be supposed that he sought to feather his hat with English as well as French plumage. It was in the midst of these affairs, which were bringing out the dangerous and disastrous elements in the French alliance, that Albany arrived.

Albany’s father, the younger brother of James III., had lived long in France, got great lordships there, and thoroughly assimilated himself to the Continental system. He married Anne de la Tour, daughter of the Count of Auvergne and Boulogne, of a half princely family, which became afterwards conspicuous by producing Marshal Turenne, and at a later period the eccentric grenadier, Latour d’Auvergne, who, in homage to republican principles, would not leave the subaltern ranks in Napoleon’s army, and became more conspicuous by remaining there than many who escaped from that level to acquire wealth and power. The sister of Anne de la Tour married Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino. From this connection Albany was the uncle of Catherine de Medici, the renowned Queen of France, and, in fact, was the nearest relative, who, as folks used to say in this country, “gave her away” to Henry II. On this occasion he got a cardinal’s hat for Philip de la Chambre, his mother’s son by a second marriage. He lived thoroughly in the midst of the Continental royalties of the day, and had the sort of repute among them that may be acquired by a man of great influence and connection, whose capacity has never been tried by any piece of critical business—a repute that comes to persons in a certain position by a sort of process of gravitation. Brave he seems to have been, like all his race, and he sometimes held even important commands. He accompanied his friend, Francis I., in his unfortunate raid into Italy in 1525, and was fortunately and honourably clear of that bad business, the battle of Pavia, by being then in command of a detachment sent against Naples.

There are men who, when they shift their place and function, can assimilate themselves to the changed conditions around them—who can find themselves surrounded by unwonted customs and ways, and yet accept the condition that the men who follow these are pursuing the normal condition of their being, and must be left to do so in peace, otherwise harm will come of it; and in this faculty consists the instinct which enables men to govern races alien to their own. Albany did not possess it. He appears to have been ignorant of the language of Scotland, and to have thought or rather felt that, wherever he was, all should be the same as in the midst of Italian and French courtiers; and if it were not so, something was wrong, and should be put right. It was then the commencement of a very luxurious age in France—an age of rich and showy costumes, of curls, perfumes, cosmetics, and pet spaniels—and Albany was the leader of fashion in all such things. It is needless to say how powerfully all this contrasted with rough Scotland—what a shocking set of barbarians he found himself thrown among—how contemptible to the rugged Scots nobles was the effeminate Oriental luxury of the little court he imported from Paris, shifted northwards as some wealthy luxurious sportsman takes a detachment from his stable, kennel, and servants’ hall, to a bothy in the Highlands.

He arrived, however, in a sort of sunshine. At that calamitous moment the nearest relation of the infant king, a practised statesman, was heartily welcome. He brought a small rather brilliant fleet with him, which was dignified by his high office as Admiral of France; he brought also some money and valuable trifles, which were not inacceptable. Wood, in his ‘Peerage,’ tells us that “The peers and chiefs crowded to his presence: his exotic elegance of manners, his condescension, affability, and courtesy of demeanour, won all hearts.” If so, these were not long retained. He came, indeed, just before some tangible object was wanted against which to direct the first sulky feelings of the country towards France; and he served the purpose exactly, for his own handiwork was the cause of that feeling. In a new treaty between France and England, in which he bore a great if not the chief part, Scotland was for the first time treated as a needy and troublesome hanger-on of France. Instead of the old courtesy, which made Scotland, nominally at least, an independent party to the treaty, it was made directly by France, but Scotland was comprehended in it, with a warning that if there were any of the old raids across the Border, giving trouble as they had so often done, the Scots should forfeit their part in the treaty. This patronage during good behaviour roused the old pride, and was one of many symptoms that Albany had come to them less as the representative of their own independent line of kings, than as the administrator of a distant province of the French empire. The humiliation was all the more bitter from the deep resentments that burned in the people’s hearts after the defeat of Flodden, and it was with difficulty that the Estates brought themselves to say that, though Scotland believed herself able single-handed to avenge her losses, yet, out of respect for the old friendship of France, the country would consent to peace with England.

Setting to work after the manner of one possessed of the same supreme authority as the King of France, Albany began his government with an air of rigour, insomuch that the common historians speak of him as having resolved to suppress the turbulent spirit of the age, and assert the supremacy of law and order. He thus incurred the reputation of a grasping tyrant. The infant brother of the king died suddenly; his mother said Albany had poisoned the child, and people shuddered for his brother, now standing alone between the Regent and the throne, and talked ominously of the manner in which Richard III. of England was popularly believed to have achieved the crown by murdering his nephews. It is from this period that we may date the rise of a really English party in Scotland—a party who feared the designs of the French, and who thought that, after having for two hundred years maintained her independence, Scotland might with fair honour be combined with the country nearest to her and likest in blood, should the succession to both fall to one prince, and that it would be judicious to adjust the royal alliances in such a manner as to bring that to pass. Such thoughts were in the mean time somewhat counteracted by the lightheaded doings of her who was the nation’s present tie to England—the Queen-Dowager—whose grotesque and flagrant love-affairs are an amusing episode, especially to those who love the flavour of ancient scandal; while all gracious thoughts that turned themselves towards England were met in the teeth by the insults and injuries which her savage brother, Henry VIII., continued to pile upon the country.

Up to this point it does not happen to us to have noted instances of offices of emolument in Scotland given to Frenchmen, and the fuss made about one instance of the kind leads to the supposition that they must have been rare. Dunbar the poet, who was in priest’s orders, was exceedingly clamorous in prose and in verse—in the serious and in the comic vein—for preferment. Perhaps he was the kind of person whom it is as difficult to prefer in the Church as it was to make either Swift or Sydney Smith a bishop. His indignation was greatly roused by the appointment of a foreigner whom he deemed beset by his own special failings, but in far greater intensity, to the abbacy of Tungland; and he committed his griefs to a satirical poem, called ‘The fenyet Freir of Tungland.’ The object of this poem has been set down by historians as an Italian, but M. Michel indicates him as a countryman of his own, by the name of Jean Damien. He is called a charlatan, quack, and mountebank, and might, perhaps, with equal accuracy, be called a devotee of natural science, who speculated ingeniously and experimented boldly. He was in search of the philosopher’s stone, and believed himself to be so close on its discovery that he ventured to embark the money of King James IV., and such other persons as participated in his own faith, in the adventure to realise the discovery, and saturate all the partners in riches indefinite. This was a speculation of a kind in which many men of that age indulged; and they were men not differing from others except in their scientific attainments, adventurous propensities, and sanguine temperaments. The class still exists among us, though dealing rather in iron than gold; as if we had in the history of speculation, from the alchemists down to Capel Court, something that has been prophesied in that beautiful mythological sequence liked so much at all schools, beginning—

“Aurea prima sata est ætas, quæ vindice nullo

Sponte sua sine lege fidem rectumque colebat.”

It might be a fair question whether the stranger’s science is so obsolete as the style of literature in which he is attacked, since Dunbar’s satirical poem, among other minor indications of a character unsuited to the higher offices in the Christian ministry, insinuates that the adventurer committed several murders; and although, the charge is made in a sort of rough jocularity, the force of it does not by any means rest on its absurdity and incredibility. He was accused of a mad project for extracting gold from the Wanlockhead Hills, in Dumfriesshire, which cannot be utterly scorned in the present day, since gold has actually been extracted from them, though, the process has not returned twenty shillings to the pound. This curious creature completed his absurdities by the construction of a pair of wings, with which he was to take a delightful aerial excursion to his native country. He proved his sincerity by starting in full feather from Stirling Castle. In such affairs it is, as Madame du Deffaud said about that walk taken by St Denis round Paris with his own head for a burden, le premier pas qui coute. The poor adventurer tumbled at once, and was picked up with a broken thigh-bone. Such is the only Frenchman who became conspicuous before Albany’s time as holding rank and office in Scotland.

Albany had not long rubbed on with the Scots Estates when he found that he really must go to Paris, and as there seems to have been no business concerning Scotland that he could transact there, an uncontrollable yearning to be once more in his own gay world is the only motive we can find for his trip. The Estates of Scotland were in a surly humour, and not much inclined to allow him his holidays. They appointed a council of regency to act for him. He, however, as if he knew nothing about the constitutional arrangements in Scotland, appointed a sort of representative, who cannot have known more about the condition and constitution of Scotland than his constituent, though he had been one of the illustrious guests present at the marriage of James IV. He was called by Pitscottie ‘Monsieur Tilliebattie,’ but his full name was Antoine d’Arces de la Bastie, and he had been nicknamed or distinguished, as the case might be, as the Chevalier Blanc, or White Knight, like the celebrated Joannes Corvinus, the Knight of Wallachia, whose son became king of Hungary. M. Michel calls him the “chivalresque et brillant La Bastie, chez qui le guerrier et l’homme d’état etaient encore supérieurs au champion des tournois.” He was a sort of fanatic for the old principle of chivalry, then beginning to disappear before the breath of free inquiry, and the active useful pursuits it was inspiring. M. Michel quotes from a contemporary writer, who describes him as perambulating Spain, Portugal, England, and France, and proclaiming himself ready to meet all comers of sufficient rank, not merely to break a lance in chivalrous courtesy, but à combattre à l’outrance—an affair which even at that time was too important to be entered on as a frolic, or to pass an idle hour, but really required some serious justification. No one, it is said, accepted the challenge but the cousin of James IV. of Scotland, who is said to have been conquered, but not killed, as from the nature of the challenge he should have been; but this story seems to be a mistake by the contemporary, and M. Michel merely quotes it without committing himself.

Such was the person left by the regent as his representative, though apparently with no specific office or powers acknowledged by the constitution of Scotland. Research might perhaps afford new light to clear up the affair, but at present the only acknowledgment of his existence, bearing anything like an official character, are entries in the Scots treasurer’s accounts referred to by M. Michel, one of them authorising a payment of fifteen shillings to a messenger to the warden of the middle march, “with my lord governor’s letters delivered by Monsr. Labawte;” another payment to his servant for summoning certain barons and gentlemen to repair to Edinburgh; and a payment of twenty shillings, for a service of more import, is thus entered:—“Item, deliverit be Monsieur Lawbawtez to Johne Langlandis, letters of our sovereign lords to summon and warn all the thieves and broken men out of Tweeddale and Eskdale in their own country—quhilk letters were proclaimed at market-cross of Roxburgh, Selkirk, and Jedwood.”

This proclamation seems to have been the deadly insult which sealed his fate. The borders had hardly yet lost their character of an independent district, which might have merged into something like a German margravate. There had been always some family holding a preponderating and almost regal power there. At this time it was the Homes or Humes, a rough set, with their hands deeply dipped in blood, who little dreamed that their name would be known all over Europe by the fame of a fat philosopher sitting writing in a peaceful library with a goosequill, and totally innocent of the death of a fellow-being. It was one of Albany’s rigorous measures to get the leaders of this clan “untopped,” to use one of Queen Elizabeth’s amiable pleasantries. This was a thing to be avenged; and since La Bastie was taking on himself the responsibilities of Albany, it was thought as well that he should not evade this portion of them. To lure him within their reach, a sort of mock fight was got up by the borderers in the shape of the siege of one of their peel towers. Away went La Bastie in all his bravery, dreaming, simple soul, as if he were in Picardy or Tourain, that the mere name of royalty would at once secure peace and submission. His eye, practised in scenes of danger, at once saw murder in the gaze of those he had ventured among, and he set spurs to his good horse, hoping to reach his headquarters in the strong castle of Dunbar. The poor fellow, however, ignorant of the country, and entirely unaided, was overtaken in a bog. It is said that he tried cajoling, threats, and appeals to honour and chivalrous feeling. As well speak to a herd of hungry wolves as to those grim ministers of vengeance! The Laird of Wedderburn, a Home, enjoyed the distinction of riding with the Frenchman’s head, tied by its perfumed tresses at his saddle-bow, into the town of Dunse, where the trophy was nailed to the market-cross. As old Pitscottie has it, “his enemies came upon him, and slew and murdered him very unhonestly, and cutted off his head, and carried it with them; and it was said that he had long hair platt over his neck, whilk David Home of Wedderburn twust to his saddle-bow, and keeped it.”

This affair brought Scotland into difficulties both with England and France. Henry VIII. professed himself displeased that a French adventurer should have been set up as ruler in his nephew’s kingdom, and Francis I., who had just mounted the throne of France, demanded vengeance on the murderers of his distinguished subject, with whose chivalrous spirit he had a congenial sympathy. There is an exceedingly curious and suggestive correspondence between France and Scotland at the commencement of M. Teulet’s papers, which has been aptly compared to the papers that have been returned to Parliament by our Indian Government on the negotiations with some wily Affghan or Scinde chief, in which reparation is demanded for outrages on a British subject. There is much fussy desire to comply with the demands of the great power, but ever a difficulty, real or pretended, in getting anything done; and probably it often is in the East, as it then was in Scotland, that the difficulty in punishing a set of powerful culprits has a better foundation in their power of self-defence than the government is inclined to acknowledge. Evil days, however, for a time clouded the rising sun of France. The battle of Pavia seemed to set her prostrate for the time; and when Scotland, having then many inducements the other way, was reminded of the old alliance, she answered the appeal with her old zeal.

This article does not aspire to the dignity of history. It has dealt chiefly with the under current, as it were, of the events connected with the doings of the French in Scotland—the secondary incidents, which show how the two nations got on together in their familiar intercourse. Their intercourse, however, now developes itself in large historical features, to which it is thought fitting to offer, in conclusion, a general reference, merely hinting at their connection with the preceding details. Ostensibly, and as matter of state policy, the old alliance was so strong that it seemed as if Scotland were drifting under the lee of France to be a mere colony or dependency of that grand empire—though there were influences at work which, in reality, utterly defeated this expected consummation. There was a brilliant wedding when James V. went to bring home Madeleine of France; and was so honoured that, according to the documents given by M. Teulet, the officers charged with the traditions of state precedents grumbled about this prince of a northern island, who knew no civilised language, receiving honours which had heretofore been deemed sacred to the royal blood of France. The national policy that held by this marriage would have had but a frail tenure, for poor Madeleine soon drooped and died. She had said, as a girl, that she wanted to be a queen, be the realm she ruled what it might; and so she had a brief experience—this word seems preferable to enjoyment—of the throne of cold uncomfortable Scotland. There was speedily another wedding, bearing in the direction of the French alliance, for that was still uppermost with the governing powers, whatever it might be with the English and Protestant party daily acquiring strength among the district leaders, nobles or lairds. It may have seemed to these, that when the queen was no longer a daughter of France, but a young lady, the child of one feudatory and the widow of another, with no better claim to share the throne than her beautiful face, there was no further danger from France. But the young queen was a Guise—one of that wonderful race who seemed advancing onwards, not only to the supreme command of France, but to something still greater, for they have been known in their boasting to speak of their house being directly descended from Charlemagne. When the daughter was Queen of France, and the mother ruled Scotland, the time for the final annexation seemed close at hand; but, in reality, the climax had been reached, and the French interest was near to its downfall. While the queen-mother was taking possession of the feudal strongholds, and placing all the high offices of state in the hands of Frenchmen—D’Oysells, de Rubays, Villemores, and the like—in France the proper method of governing Scotland was considered in council as a matter of French policy; and the question was discussed whether Scotland should have the honour of belonging to the crown of France, or should be a provision for a younger son of the house of Valois.

Those busy politicians, called the Lords of the Congregation, knew these things, and were stimulated to exertion accordingly. Hence came it to pass that the Reformation was so sudden an event in Scotland. On the morning of the 1st of August 1560 the people of Scotland awakened under the spiritual dominion of the Pope—ere evening his hierarchy was abolished, and to own it was criminal. The work of that day was not a deliberative act of legislation, but the announcement of the triumph of a party. After a long deadly contest the English party had gained a complete and final victory. It almost enhanced the triumph over French principles that the Acts of this Parliament never received the royal assent. Legislation without the intervention of the crown, was flat rebellion in the eyes of France, and not very reconcilable even with English decorum. It was owing to this specialty that, when Queen Mary engaged to support the religion established by law in Scotland, she was suspected, and not without reason, of stowing away, among the secrets of her heart, the consideration likely to be some day available, that Protestantism, not having the sanction of the crown, was not the religion established by law. If we were to enter with any fulness on this great passage in history, and to view it through the rich new light poured upon it by the documents collected by M. Teulet, we would require more room than the quite sufficient space which this article occupies. We have opportunity only for this brief reference to them, as the winding-up and conclusion of that interesting episode in history—the old alliance between France and Scotland.

Before parting, let us say a word on the personal character and other merits of the volumes which have led us on this occasion to look into the connection of our ancestors with the French, and have furnished us with the greater portion of the material for our two articles. To see two men of learning, research, and various special abilities, devoting what must be no inconsiderable portion of a life’s labour to the connection of our country with the great French empire, is interesting and pleasant, to say the least of it. We are a nation disposed to court the light; we are never afraid of the effect that revelations of our antecedents may have; we are sure of coming well out in all inquiries into our history and connections; and the present elucidation has not stripped a leaf from the national laurels—indeed, we take it to have only removed some of the dust that covered them, and revealed their real freshness and brightness. To the labourers in such a task we should feel that we owe a debt of kindly gratitude, and this should not the less impress us that the work has been done by citizens of that great old European central power which befriended the poor children of our soil in the days of their poverty and danger. New interests and attachments, more suitable to the position of Scotland on the map of Europe, and to the origin of her people, afterwards arose. When centuries of cruel wrong and alienation and wrath had passed away, she became reconciled to that great relation which, let us suppose, in the usual misunderstanding which creates the quarrels in the romances, had treated her as an alien enemy. But while the reconciliation has been long consolidated, and has proved as natural a national adjustment as the restoration of an exiled child is a natural family adjustment, there is still a pleasing sentiment in recalling the friends found in the wide world when kindred were unkind; and the hospitable doors opened to our wandering countrymen, among those who stood at the head of European civilisation in the middle ages, must ever remain a memorable record of the generosity of the patrons, and of the merits of those who so well requited their generosity by faithful and powerful services. To the volumes which contain the record of this attachment something more is due than the mere recognition of their literary merits—they deserve at the hands of our countrymen an affectionate recognition as national memorials. The quantity of curious and interesting matter contained in them, but for the special zeal of the two men who have thus come forward, might have remained still buried under archæological rubbish—might have remained so for ever, even until oblivion overtook them. It is surely right to hope that the zeal and labour embarked by the adventurers will not be thrown away; and that our countrymen will take to the volumes, both of M. Michel and of M. Teulet, as works which it is becoming for them to possess and read as patriotic Scotsmen. If readers have found any interest in the casual glimpses of their contents supplied by the present sketch, they may be assured of finding much more matter of the same kind should they undertake an investigation of the volumes themselves.

Setting before one on the library table the two volumes of M. Michel, and the five of M. Teulet, is a good deal like receiving one guest in full court costume, prepared to meet distinguished company, while another comes to you in his lounging home vestment of serge, with slippers and smoking-cap, as if he had just stepped across the way from the scene of his laborious researches. In the collections in this country of some men who have given themselves to works illustrated by fine engravings, the Book of the Ceremonial of the Coronation of Louis XV. is conspicuous, not only by its finely engraved plates, but by the instruction they afford as representations of the costume and ways of the great hierarchy of state officers which clustered round the throne of the Bourbons before the great smash came. Among the most conspicuous of these are the Scots Guards, then no longer our countrymen, though the title was retained. The outfit must have appeared signally beautiful and chivalrous amid the ponderous state habiliments which the eighteenth century saw accumulate and fall to pieces. It is evidently a traditional type of the court or company dress of the man-at-arms of the fifteenth century—a sufficient amount of steel to betoken the warrior, richly damasked or inlaid with precious metals—a superfluity of lace and embroidered cloth of silk or velvet. Altogether, a more superbly and chivalrously accoutred person than your Scottish Guard it is difficult to idealise; and in the original engraving there is about him, both in countenance and attitude, the air of one devoted in enthusiasm and solemn sense of responsibility, to the duty wherewith he is intrusted. With a good eye to the appropriate, M. Michel—it is his own suggestion, we take it, not the binder’s—has transferred this striking figure to the outside of this book, where it glitters in gold on the true-blue background, which also relieves the lion, the thistle, and the fleur-de-lys. A glimpse we have just had at a quarto and illustrated copy of the book in the hands of a fortunate collector, wherein is a full engraved copy of the plate of the Scots Guard, along with many other appropriate artistical decorations; but in this shape the book is not put, so far as we are aware, at the disposal of the public; and any account of it is, in a manner, a digression into something like private affairs. Reverting to the common published impression of M. Michel’s book, let it suffice to say that it is well filled with blazons of the armorial achievements of our countrymen, assuredly valuable to workers in heraldry and genealogy, and interesting to those descendants of the stay-at-home portions of the several families which established themselves so comfortably and handsomely in the territory of our ancient ally.

Looking apart from matters of national interest to the literary nature of M. Michel’s volumes, we find in them specialties which we know will be deemed signally meritorious; but of the merits to be found in them we have some difficulty in speaking, since they are literary virtues of a kind rather out of the way of our appreciation—beyond it, if the reader prefers that way of expressing what is meant. There is throughout these two volumes the testimony to an extent of dreary reading and searching which would stimulate compassion, were it not that he who would be the victim, were that the proper feeling in which he should be approached, evidently exults and glories, and is really happy, in the conditions which those who know no better would set down as his hardships. There are some who, when they run the eye over arrêts and other formal documents, over pedigrees, local chronicles telling trifles, title-deeds, and such-like documents, carry with them a general impression of the political or social lesson taught by them, and discard from recollection all the details from which any such impression has been derived. M. Michel is of another kind; he has that sort of fondness for his work which induces him to show you it in all stages, from the rude block to the finished piece of art, so far as it is finished. You are entered in all the secrets of his workshop—you participate in all his disappointments and difficulties as well as his successes. The research which has had no available result is still reported, in order that you may see how useless it has been. We repeat that we have not much sympathy with this kind of literature, yet would not desire to speak profanely of it, since we know that some consider it the only perfect method of writing books on subjects connected with history or archæology. The “citation of authorities,” in fact, is deemed, in this department of intellectual labour, something equivalent to records of experiments in natural science, and to demonstrations in geometrical science. Our own sympathy being with the exhibition rather of results than of the means of reaching them, we have not, unfortunately, that high respect for footnotes filled with accurate transcripts of book-titles, which is due to the high authorities by whom the practice has been long sanctioned. We can afford it, however, the sort of distant unsympathising admiration which people bestow on accomplishments for which they have no turn or sympathy—as for those of the juggler, the acrobat, and the accountant. M. Michel’s way of citing the books he refers to is indeed, to all appearance, a miracle of perfection in this kind of work. Sometimes he is at the trouble of denoting where the passage stands in more than one, or even in every, edition of the work. He gives chapter or section as well as page and volume. In old books counted not by the page but the leaf, he will tell you which side he desires you to look at, right or left; and where, as is the way in some densely printed old folios, in addition to the arrangement of the pages by numeration, divisions on each page are separated by the letters A B C, he tells you which of these letters stands sentry on the paragraph he refers to. There is, at all events, a very meritorious kind of literary honesty in all this, and however disinclined to follow it, no one has a right to object to it.

And, after all, a man who has gone through so much hard forbidding reading as M. Michel has, is surely entitled to let us know something about the dreary wastes and rugged wildernesses through which he has sojourned—all for the purpose of laying before his readers these two gay attractive-looking volumes. Towards his foreign reading, we in the general instance lift the hat of respect, acknowledging its high merits, on the principle of the omne ignotum pro magnifico. Upon the diligent manner in which he has, in our own less luxuriant field of inquiry among Scots authorities, turned over every stone to see what is under it, we can speak with more distinct assurance. Take one instance. The young Earl of Haddington, the son of that crafty old statesman called Tam o’ the Cowgate, who scraped together a fortune in public office under James VI., was studying in France, when he met and fell in love with the beautiful Mademoiselle De Chatillon, grand-daughter of the Admiral Coligny. When only nineteen years old he went back to France, married her, and brought her home. He died within a year, however, and the countess, a rich beautiful widow, returned to her friends. She was, of course, beset by admirers, and in reference to these, M. Michel has turned up a curious passage in ‘Les Histoirettes de Fallemant des Réaux,’ which, if true, shows the persevering zeal with which our queen, Henrietta Maria, seized every opportunity to promote the cause of her religion. The countess, being Huguenot, and of a very Huguenot family, the queen was eager that she should be married to a Roman Catholic, and selected the son of her friend Lady Arundel. The dominion over her affections was, however, held by “un jeune Ecossois nommé Esbron, neveu du Colonel Esbron.” The name is French for the chevalier Hepburn, one of the most renowned soldiers in the French service in the early part of the seventeenth century. The mamma Chatillon was dead against either connection. She got a fright by hearing that her daughter had been carried off to the Fenêbres, or the services of Easter-week which inaugurate Good-Friday; she consequently gave her a maternal box on the ear, carried her off, and, to keep her out of harm’s way, forthwith married her to the Count de la Suze, tout borgne, tout ivrogne et tout indetté qu’il étoit. M. Michel’s purpose is not with this desirable husband, nor with his wife after she ceases to be connected with Scotland, but with the young Hepburn who comes casually across the scene. Following in his track entirely, the next quarter where, after appearing in the ‘Histoirettes,’ he turns up, is Durie’s ‘Decisions of the Court of Session.’ This is by no means one of the books which every well-informed man is presumed to know. So toughly is it stuffed with the technicalities and involutions of old Scots law, and so confused and involved is every sentence of it by the natural haziness of its author, that probably no living English writer would dare to meddle with it. No Scotsman would, unless he be lawyer—nor, indeed, would any lawyer, unless of a very old school—welcome the appearance of the grim folio. In citing from it the decision of Hepburn contra Hepburn, 14th March 1639, even the courageous M. Michel subjoins: “Si j’ai bien compris le text de cet arrêt conçu dans un langue particulière.” This peculiar arrêt begins as follows:—“The brethren and sisters of umquhile Colonel Sir John Hepburn having submitted all questions and rights which they might pretend to the goods, gear, and means of the said umquhile Sir John, to the laird Wauchton and some other friends, wherein the submitters were bound and did refer to the said friends to determine what proportion of the said goods should be given to George Hepburn, the son of the eldest brother to the said Sir John, which George was then in France at the time of the making of the said submission and bond, and did not subscribe the same, nor none taking the burden for him; upon the which submission, the said friends had given their decreet arbitral. The living brethren and sisters of the said Sir John being confirmed executors to him, pursues one Beaton, factor in Paris, for payment of 20,000 pounds addebted by him to the said umquhile Sir John, who, suspending upon double poinding,” &c.

Perhaps we have said enough to exemplify the dauntless nature of M. Michel’s researches. It is impossible to withhold admiration from such achievements, and we know that, in some quarters, such are deemed the highest to which the human intellect can aspire. But we confess that, to our taste, the results of M. Teulet’s labours are more acceptable. True, he does not profess to give the world an original book. He comes forward as the transcriber and editor of certain documents; but in the gathering of these documents from different quarters, through all the difficulties of various languages and alphabets, in their arrangement so as to bring out momentous historical truths in their due series, and in the helps he has afforded to those who consult his volumes, he has shown a skill and scholarship which deserve to be ranked with the higher attainments of science. We had formerly an opportunity of paying our small tribute to M. Teulet’s merits when we referred to his supplemental volume to Labanoff’s Correspondence of Queen Mary.[^[9]] Among not the least valued of the contents of our book-shelves, are six octavo volumes containing the correspondence of La Mothe Fénélon, and the other French ambassadors to England and Scotland during the latter years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, for which the world is indebted to M. Teulet’s researches. The immediate merit of the book, the title of which is referred to at the beginning of this article, is, that it is now at the command of the public. It is indeed a reprint, with some additions, of the papers—at least all that are worth having—which were previously an exclusive luxury of the Bannatyne Club, having been printed in three quarto volumes, as a gift to their brethren, by certain liberal members of the Club. These papers go into the special affairs of this country as connected with France and Spain from the beginning of our disputes with our old ally down to the accession of James VI. In the hands of the first historian who has the fortune to make ample use of them, these documents will disperse the secluded and parochial atmosphere that hangs about the history of Scotland, and show how the fate of Europe in general turned upon the pivot of the destinies of our country. It is here that, along with many minor secrets, we have revealed to us the narrow escape made by the cause of Protestantism, when the project on the cards was the union of the widowed Queen Mary to the heir of Spain, and the political combinations still centring round the interests and the fate of the Queen of Scots, which led to the more signal and renowned escape realised in the defeat of the Armada.

KINGLAKE’S INVASION OF THE CRIMEA.[^[10]]

Seven years ago, when the war with Russia was about to end—was, in fact, already virtually ended—and when the war-fever of the English had been abated by copious blood-letting, and by the absence of further stimulant to hostility since Sebastopol had ceased to resist, people were already talking about the future history of the strife. It seemed to be agreed that the public, which had so eagerly swallowed all the information it could get, and snapped at all the opinions which floated so thickly on the stream of current history, was for the present glutted with the subject, and that to offer it any more Crimean information, however cunningly dressed, would be like fishing with a May-fly for a July trout. On the other hand, the subject seemed to be essentially one of contemporary importance. It had not the elements which gave lasting interest to the Peninsular war. It had developed no great reputations in which the nation could for the future undoubtingly confide. It had left us victorious over no great conqueror. Its memorials were not such as we should choose to dwell on; for though the nation was very proud of the early triumphs of the Alma and Inkermann, still the later course of the struggle had been, though successful in its end, yet disastrous and gloomy in its progress, and had left, partly through the more brilliant share which our allies took in the final action, but principally through the forebodings of our own press, a sense of comparative failure. Mr Kinglake comes upon the stage at a fortunate time. The weariness of the subject, once felt, has disappeared, while the strong contemporary interest in the actors remains. That interest is national in the sense of being fixed, not on a few great objects, but on a great number of inferior objects connected with the war. It is not so much patriotic as domestic. The graves of Cathcart’s Hill, the trenches filled with dead, the burial-grounds of Scutari, have a strong though softened hold on innumerable hearts. Everywhere in England—in remote parishes, in small communities, in humble households—remembrance of the great features of the struggle is kept alive by the presence of those who survived it. A strong conviction that French manœuvring was not entirely directed against the enemy, and that a fair scrutiny would leave us more reason for self-satisfaction than at first appeared, has long been afloat. And a succession of great conflicts in which we have been strongly interested has schooled us in military doctrines, and has rendered us better able to appreciate the operations of armies than we were either at the beginning or the end of the Crimean war.

If the time for the history is happily chosen, so is the historian. Few men who have written so little have so established their reputation as Mr Kinglake. His ‘Eothen,’ immensely popular at first, has settled into an English classic. It is full of interest, full of remarkably vivid descriptions, full of original writing; and though the style does not reject effects which a very pure taste would condemn, yet it possesses the eminent merits of vigour, condensation, and richness. In the fulness of the fame thus earned, Mr Kinglake accompanied the army to the Crimea. The scenes of the war consequently possessed for him a reality which no reading, no imagination, no second-hand description can impart. He had seen the Euxine covered with the vast flotilla of the Allies. He had set foot on the hostile coast at the same time as the combined armies. He had accompanied them in their compact advance, when their columns seemed but spots and patches in the vast circle of sea and plain. His own eyes had beheld the battle of the Alma, and the signs of death and suffering that remained next day to mark the phases of the struggle. And when afterwards he came to record the incidents of the war, though no individual observation could embrace all the details, there was always present with him the invaluable power which personal knowledge confers, to define, to affirm, or to reject. And as it was soon understood that he intended to write the history of the war, he, in his double capacity of approved author and actual spectator, became almost, as a matter of course, the depositary of a vast amount of information connected with the subject, oral and documentary, private and official. He had a large acquaintance with the political as well as the military actors in the drama. Few men, then, could have had so free access as he to the materials of which the history must be wrought.

Moreover, he had shown in his former work that he possessed another qualification for his task. History cannot be written at a heat. Patient inquiry, long meditation, the fortitude necessary for the abandonment of convenient conclusions too hastily come to, are all indispensable to success. But with this pursuit of the necessary details, unity of effect, as numberless failures have shown, is almost incompatible. Now, Mr Kinglake had given remarkable proof that he could bestow a microscopic attention on particulars without sacrifice of breadth. It is generally believed that he spent nine years in bringing the single volume of ‘Eothen’ up to the standard of his own fastidious taste. The sarcastic advice of Pope to an aspiring author—“Keep your piece nine years”—had been literally accepted, but with a result very different from that which the adviser anticipated. Instead of becoming dissatisfied with a work looked at after a long interval and with changed feelings, Mr Kinglake proved that he could not only “strike the second heat”—the process which Ben Jonson says is so necessary for the forging of ideas into happy forms of expression—but that he could bring his thoughts again and again to the intellectual smithy to be recast and shaped without finding the fire extinct. Here, then, was evidence of a quality most valuable to one who must long and patiently grope amid masses of evidence and details, sometimes conflicting, often worthless, and yet retain freshly the power of throwing the selected results into a form clear, harmonious, and striking.

We have thus broadly stated some of Mr Kinglake’s eminent qualifications for his task, and a detailed notice of his work will necessarily include others. And it is easy to believe that he might have selected a variety of subjects, his execution of which would have insured unqualified praise. But for the present task, as might have been seen before he commenced it, his fitness was marred by one circumstance. His political course had proved that his animosity towards the French Emperor amounted to a passion, or, as those who did not care to pick their words might say, a mania. It might be guessed beforehand, therefore, that the Emperor would scarcely meet with fair play at his hands. And considering the share taken by that personage in the events which Mr Kinglake had undertaken to record, to misrepresent his policy or his doings would be to distort the history. Any one who entertained such a misgiving must have found it strengthened when, on glancing over the table of contents, he perceived that nearly a quarter of the first volume, amidst what purports to be a record of the “transactions that brought on the war,” is occupied with an account of the coup d’état which substituted an empire for a republic in France. On reading the volume his suspicions would inevitably be converted into certainty. More than that, indeed, for he would find that his anticipations were far exceeded by a satire so studied, so polished, so remorseless, and withal so diabolically entertaining, that we know not where in modern literature to seek such another philippic. Had Mr Kinglake contrived in this chapter to have completely relieved his feelings and have been contented with flaying the Emperor and thus have done with him, leaving him to get through the rest of the book as naturally and comfortably as he could be expected to do without his skin, we might consider it as an episode which we should have been at liberty to set apart from the main purpose of the work. But like King Charles I., whom David Copperfield’s friend, Mr Dick, never could keep out of his memorial, this diabolical caricature of despotism haunts the narrative at every turn. The canvass is spread, the palette is laid, the artist is at his easel full of his subject—all the great personages of the time are to figure there, and great incidents are to form the background. The spectator is at first charmed with the progress of the design; but presently, amidst the nobly-drawn portraits, there is a sketch of a monarch with cloven feet appearing beneath his robes, and a tail curling under his throne; and whereas the rest of the picture is in true perspective, all that relates to this figure has a separate horizon and point of sight. The result is as if Gilray in his bitterest mood had got into Sir Joshua’s studio and persuaded him to let their fancies mingle in one incongruous work.

We have thus stated our one point of difference with the author of these fascinating volumes. With this exception we have little to do but to praise—and indeed, as a piece of writing, we have nothing to do but to praise the work from beginning to end. How materials in many respects so unpromising could be made so interesting, is marvellous. Many a reader who remembers what a tangled skein of politics it was that led to the war—many a soldier who has a confused recollection of a jumble of Holy Places, and the Four Powers, and Vienna Conferences, and who would be glad to know what it was he was fighting about, now that it is all over—will take up these volumes as a duty, and will be surprised to find that the narrative approached in so resolute a frame of mind, is more easy to read and more difficult to lay down than the most popular of the popular novels.

The dispute about the Holy Places, though not in itself in any appreciable degree the cause of the war, was the introduction to the events that led to hostilities. There is something almost ludicrous, something more befitting the times of Philip Augustus and of Cœur de Lion than those of Louis Napoleon and Lord Palmerston, in the idea of great European potentates appearing as the backers of two denominations of monks, who were quarrelling about the key of a church-door in Palestine. Nevertheless, the Czar, as the chief of a people whose passions were strongly aroused by the dispute, had a real and legitimate interest in the matter. To suppose that the President of the French Republic, or any section of the people over whom he presided, really cared whether the Greek or the Latin Church had the custody of this important key, would be absurd. But the President it was who opened the question by advocating the claims of the Latins. His object in doing so is by no means clear. Mr Kinglake accounts for it by saying, “The French President, in cold blood, and under no new motive for action, took up the forgotten cause of the Latin Church of Jerusalem, and began to apply it as a wedge for sundering the peace of the world.” Now, that Louis Napoleon was desirous of disturbing the peace of the world, is Mr Kinglake’s argument throughout. It is to his book what the wrath of Achilles is to the ‘Iliad;’ and he tells us that the reason for this truculent desire was to prop up the French Empire. But that reason, though it may plausibly explain the acts of the French Emperor, does not account in the least for the acts of the French President. We presume Mr Kinglake hardly wishes us to infer that Louis Napoleon sowed the seeds of war during his Presidency, as provision for the possible necessities of a possible Empire. Yet the historian’s theory would seem to demand the inference.

The poor Sultan, meanwhile, who might well exclaim ‘A plague o’ both your Churches!’ was the unwilling arbiter of this dispute between his Christian subjects, and was urged by the great champion on each side to decide in favour of his protégé. Who might have the key, or whether there was any key at all, or any sanctuary at all, or any Greek or Latin Church, was to this hapless potentate a matter of profound indifference. The French envoy put on the strongest pressure, and the Sultan inclined to the side of the Latins; the Russian minister thereupon squeezed from him a concession to their adversaries; and between the two he managed, as might be expected, to disgust both sects, and to anger the Czar without satisfying the Emperor. The displeasure of Nicholas was extreme, and he prepared to support his further arguments by marching a large army towards the Turkish frontier. And the first use of this force was to give momentum to the mission of Prince Mentschikoff, who was sent to Constantinople as the organ of his Imperial master’s displeasure. The selection of the envoy showed that the Czar wished to take the most direct and violent course to the fulfilment of his aim; for the Prince’s diplomacy was of that simple kind—the only kind he seemed capable of employing—which regards threats as the best means of persuasion.

These strong measures were the first indications that war was possibly impending. And as they appeared to spring from the religious fervour of the Czar, which had been roused to this pitch by the gratuitous intermeddling of Napoleon in the question of the Holy Places, it would at first seem as if it were indeed the French ruler who had first blown the coal which presently caused such a conflagration. But in the interval between the decision of the Sultan about the churches, and the appearance of Mentschikoff at Constantinople, Nicholas had held with Sir Hamilton Seymour the remarkable conversations which explain the real designs cloaked by the religious question. In these interviews he uttered his famous parable of “the sick man,” representing that the Turkish Empire was dying, and might fall to pieces any day, and proposing that the event should be provided for by an immediate arrangement for dividing the fragments. Provided he had the concurrence of England, the Czar would not, he said, care what any other Powers might do or say in the matter.

Here then was a foregone conclusion plainly revealed. The religious ire of the Czar, the movement of his troops, the mission of Mentschikoff, were all to be instruments for hastening the dissolution of the sick man, and appropriating his domains. It was no new idea; for Nicholas was but following the traditionary policy of his house. And if it could be believed that his expectations of the speedy collapse of the Turkish Empire were real, it would be unjust to blame him for wishing to profit by the event. We are too apt to judge of the policy of other Governments by the interests of England, and to condemn as unprincipled what is opposed to our advantage. Nevertheless, to a ruler of Russia, no object can appear more legitimate than the possession of that free outlet to the world, which alone is wanting to remove the spell that paralyses her gigantic energies. Looking from the shores of the Euxine, she is but mocked by the vision of naval glories and of commercial prosperity; but let her extend her limits to the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and no dreams of greatness can be too splendid for her to realise. But there is no proof that the Czar’s anticipations respecting Turkey were grounded on anything more solid than his strong desire to render them true. In fact, the forecast of the Czar is much the same as that of Mohammed Damoor, as described in ‘Eothen:’ who, having prophesied that the Jews of Damascus would be despoiled on a particular day, took steps to verify his prediction by first exciting and then heading the mob of plunderers.

The reply of England to his overtures satisfied him that he could not hope for her complicity in his design upon Turkey. Had it been otherwise, the sick man would, no doubt, have been so cared for that, sick or well, there would soon have been an end of him. But the Czar perceived he must for the present forego his desire for the vineyard of Naboth. Yet there were several reasons why he should still draw what profit he could from the present opportunity. He had a pretext—an indifferent one it is true, but still it was more convenient to use it than to look for another. He had been at the trouble of military preparations, and was naturally desirous that they should not be barren of result. And, in the matter of Montenegro, Turkey had just succumbed to him so readily on a threat of war, that it seemed very unlikely he should ever find her in a better frame of mind for his purpose. Therefore, though the sick man was reprieved, yet he was not to go scot-free; and Mentschikoff was charged, while ostensibly urging the Sultan to reconsider the question of the Holy Places, to keep in reserve a demand of much deeper significance.

Scornful in demeanour and imperious in language, Mentschikoff entered Constantinople more like the bearer of a gage of defiance than a messenger of peace. His deportment startled the Divan out of its habitual calm; and the British Chargé d’Affaires, at the instance of the Turkish Ministers, requested our Admiral at Malta to move his squadron into the Levant. This demand was not complied with; but the French fleet was ordered to Salamis. And this movement is condemned by Mr Kinglake as most impolitic; for it happened, he says, at a time when “the anger of the Emperor Nicholas had grown cool,” and it “gave deep umbrage to Russia.” From which he means us to infer that Louis Napoleon, following his deep design of fanning the flame of discord when it should seem to languish, was so timing the advance of his fleet as to neutralise the pacific influences which had begun to have their sway.

Now what are the circumstances of the case? The French Emperor knew nothing of the conversation with Sir Hamilton Seymour, which did not transpire till long afterwards. Neither he nor the British Government were aware of the Czar’s real demands. Ostensibly the matter of controversy was still the original question between him and the Czar concerning the Holy Places. And while one of the disputants, France, had urged her views in the ordinary way by the mouth of her ambassador, her opponent was preparing to coerce the arbiter by a menacing mission backed by an army and a fleet. The army already touched the frontier, the fleet was prepared to sail for the Bosphorus. Will anybody except Mr Kinglake blame the French Emperor for sending his fleet to Salamis? or say that he was bound, before taking such a step, to consider whether it might not give deep umbrage to Russia?

Mentschikoff then proceeded to urge his demands. These were, that, in addition to the concessions required respecting the Holy Places, the Sultan should, by treaty with the Czar, engage to confirm the Christian subjects of the Porte in certain privileges and immunities. Though the Sultan was very willing to confirm them in these privileges, he was by no means willing to bind himself by treaty with the Czar to do so; for by so doing he would give the Czar a right, as a party to the treaty, to see that it was fulfilled; and hence those who were to benefit by the privileges would naturally regard most, not him who granted them, but him who could compel their observance. In fact, it was virtually conferring on the Czar the protectorate of the Sultan’s Christian subjects.

It was while the Turkish Ministers were in the deepest embarrassment between the consequences of listening to such a proposition on the one hand, and the fear of offending the Czar by refusing to entertain it on the other, that Lord Stratford appeared on the scene. The coming of the British Ambassador, and the diplomatic duel that ensued between him and Mentschikoff, where predominant influence in the Sultan’s counsels was to be the prize of the victor, forms one of the most brilliant passages in this brilliant book. The mere presence of the Ambassador of England restores the Sultan and his Ministers to complete self-possession. When Mentschikoff blusters, they refresh themselves by a view of Lord Stratford’s commanding aspect; when the Russian menaces war, they are comforted by a hint from the Englishman respecting the English squadron. Of such dramatic excellence is this portion of the story, that the enthralled reader forgets to inquire how it was that in a dispute between France and Russia respecting the subjects of Turkey, the Ambassador of England should be the foremost champion. But we see him throughout as the power that moves the Mussulman puppets, and from whose calm opposition the menaces of Mentschikoff recoil harmless; and we see in distant St Petersburg the great Czar himself lashed to fury at feeling himself foiled by one whom he has long, we are told, considered as a personal foe. We cannot but feel proud in these circumstances of the position of our representative, though it would be difficult to say, perhaps, what advantage besides this feeling of pride we, as a nation, derived from it. But it is clear that, while the Czar was dreaming, as of something possible to be realised by a great display of power, of a protectorate over the Christian subjects of the Porte, here was a British protectorate of the most absolute character already established over the Porte and its subjects, Christian and Mussulman; and we might almost infer that nothing further was requisite on Lord Stratford’s part but to humour Mohammedan prejudices by submitting to a few insignificant religious rites, in order to qualify him for at once taking his place as Chief of the Ottoman Empire, and the true Commander of the Faithful.

In the diplomatic encounter, Mentschikoff had no more chance than the fiend in a moral tale of diablerie, who urges weak man to sign his soul away after the good angel has come to the rescue. Baffled at all points, he departs with all the diplomatic train, muttering vengeance. And here ends the first act of the drama, when the pretexts of the Czar have vanished, and he shows his true design. The next begins with the crossing of the Pruth by the Russian forces, in order to secure the material guarantee of the Danubian provinces. But the menacing position of Russia was not the only change in the situation. England, who in the earlier dispute had no more interest than the other Western Powers in opposing Russia, had in the progress of the controversy made herself so prominent that she was, in the judgment of Lord Clarendon, bound to defend the provinces of the Sultan against an unprovoked attack by Russia. That she had laid herself under this obligation was entirely owing to the lofty part which Lord Stratford had played in the drama. On the other hand, had Lord Stratford not been so ready and conspicuous in his championship, the Divan, feeling itself unsupported, might have yielded to the demands of Russia.

For a great part of the narrative, then, the principal positions have been occupied by England, Russia, and Turkey; and the interest imparted to scenes which, from an ordinary hand, would have been eminently tedious, is wonderful. But at this juncture, King Charles I., who has long been impending, can no longer be kept out of the memorial. The iniquitous machinations of the French Emperor are brought into the foreground. The occasion for enlarging on them is that which we shall presently state. But first we must say that it is from no wish to dilate on what we think the blemish of the book that we expatiate on this theme. It is because it is mixed up with all the main parts of a work which we are bound to treat as an authentic history. But it happens that, for a reason to be noted hereafter, we can, without injury to the texture, separate this portion from the rest; and we therefore propose to follow this thread of the narrative to its end, and so, having done with it, to be at liberty, for the rest of these volumes, to approve no less warmly than we admire.

Austria naturally felt considerable interest in the movements of a formidable neighbour, whose troops were now winding round her frontier, who, by overrunning Turkey, would enclose some of her provinces, and who, at the next step in advance, would control the Lower Danube. She therefore, in conjunction with Prussia, made common cause with the Western Powers, so far as to offer a strong remonstrance against the occupation of the Danubian provinces, and to join in their efforts to preserve peace. Mr Kinglake contends that this kind of pacific pressure would have secured its object, and that if it had not, Austria would have joined France and England in having recourse to sterner measures. But he says that, without waiting for the result of this joint coercion, England was persuaded to join France in a separate course of action, which, without necessity, involved us in a war desired only by the French Emperor. “In order to see how it came to be possible,” says the historian, “that the vast interests of Europe should be set aside in favour of mere personal objects, it will presently be necessary to contract the field of vision, and, going back to the winter of 1851, to glance at the operations of a small knot of middle-aged men who were pushing their fortunes in Paris.”

And here is interpolated—for as an interpolation we regard it—that curious episode which has for its subject the coup d’état and the establishment of the second French Empire. Standing apart from the purpose of the book, its isolation gives it peculiar distinctness. But its inherent character is such that it needs no art or accident to bring it into strongest relief. It is a singularly clever and singularly acrimonious attack upon the foremost statesman and most powerful potentate of these times. And it makes demands on our credulity which are too heavy for anything short of absolute proof to maintain. For we are asked to believe that a set of men with no more character or consideration than Falstaff and his associates, were able to call on the French nation to stand and deliver, and that the nation thereupon submitted to be knocked down, to have its throat cut, and to be plundered by these minions of the moon. Now, does anybody think that diadems, such as that of France, are to be stolen from a shelf by any cutpurse who wants to put them in his pocket? Or does anybody think that a mere cutpurse, having succeeded in the theft, could so have worn his stolen diadem as to enhance its splendour and renown? That which made the Empire possible, and that which maintains it now, was the conviction that the choice of the nation lay between it and Red Republicanism. And to establish, in any degree, his case, Mr Kinglake should have proved that no such conviction existed. But if it be true that France found in the Empire a refuge from anarchy, then reasonable men will not be ready to scrutinise, in too severe a spirit, the means taken to consolidate the throne. Granted that the army, the instrument employed by the President, disgraced itself by an indiscriminate and unprovoked slaughter—that the opposition of political adversaries was silenced in a very arbitrary fashion—that a foreign war would probably be necessary for the security of the new dynasty,—yet will it be said that a result which has tranquillised France, which has developed her resources and exalted her reputation, leaves in the establishment of the Empire nothing except what the world must regret and condemn? And looking at the portrait which Mr Kinglake has drawn, with so bold and incisive a touch, of this potentate of wooden face, base soul, and feeble resolve, who turns green in moments of danger—who, with the aid of swindlers and bravoes, has yoked France to his chariot, and drives it in a career of blood with the great Powers of Europe bound to its wheels—we ask, not only is it brilliant as a work of art, but is it like the original? We do not profess to believe that the Empire is the perfection of government. We do not maintain that Louis Napoleon is a model of virtue and disinterested policy. But if his place in Europe were suddenly vacant, will Mr Kinglake tell us how it would be better filled, or what precious things might not be thrown into the gulf before it could be closed? And if no answer can be given to the question, we may well doubt the expediency of contributing to bring so important a personage and so powerful an ally into contempt.

“After the 2d December in the year 1851,” says Mr Kinglake, in concluding the portion of his work relating to the coup d’état, “the foreign policy of France was used for a prop to prop the throne which Morny and his friends had built up.... Therefore, although I have dwelt awhile upon a singular passage in the domestic history of France, I have not digressed.” Now, even if he could prove the necessities of the French Empire to have been the main motive of the part England took in the war, we should still dispute this. No doubt it is the business of the historian of an important series of events to trace them to their sources, and the more clearly he can show the connection hidden from ordinary minds, the more sagacious and ingenious he will appear. But if there were no limit to this, the history of any event might spread to an extent altogether boundless; and therefore, to justify digression, it is necessary for the historian to show that the incidents which led to the result had a necessary and not an accidental influence in procuring it. For instance, in the case of a popular uprising against a despotism or a superstition, it would be expected that the historian should trace all the successive steps by which the national feelings were roused from suffering to resistance, because those steps led inevitably and naturally to that particular result, and not to any other. In such a case history is performing her proper function of explaining, for the guidance of posterity, the obscure process by which certain conditions produce certain effects. But where a war has been caused by the caprice and unreasoning anger of a potentate, it is beside the purpose to trace up to his very cradle the effect of early mismanagement or neglect in rendering him passionate or capricious, for no political lesson can be taught where results cannot be calculated. In such a case it will be sufficient to state the fact, that the war originated in the irascible temper and unaccountable impulse of one who had the power to give his anger such tremendous vent. It would be absurd to pause in the history, and to introduce his biography, merely to prove that it is a bad thing when great power is lodged in the hands of a person who is the slave of violent caprice. And in the present instance, if it had been stated in two sentences that the conditions under which the French Empire had started into existence were such as to render a foreign war, or a commanding position in Europe, necessary to its stability, the statement would have fully satisfied the requirements of history, and would have received general assent.

However, having considered it necessary to prove this proposition by a separate history of the transition which France underwent from a republic to an empire, Mr Kinglake undertakes to show how we were dragged into war by this necessitous Emperor. He asserts many times that the operations of the French and English fleets caused the war.

“The English Government,” he says, “consented to engage in naval movements which affected—nay governed—the war.” And again, “The French Emperor had no sooner engaged the English Government in a separate understanding, than he began to insist upon the necessity of using the naval power of France and England in the way which he proposed—a way bitterly offensive to Russia. Having at length succeeded in forcing this measure upon England, he after a while pressed upon her another movement of the fleets still more hostile than the first, and again he succeeded in bringing the English Government to yield to him. Again, and still once again, he did the like, always in the end bringing England to adopt his hostile measures; and he never desisted from this course of action, until at last it had effected a virtual rupture between the Czar and the Western Powers.”

And in this way throughout these transactions the Emperor plays a part much the same as that which Satan took in the scenes in Paradise; and at every turn we see him moving deviously, quite serpentine in craft and baseness, or squatting toad-like at the ear of the slumbering British Government, till now, at the Ithuriel touch of history, he starts up in his true form of malignant demon.

The various items of the present charge against him are collected by Mr Kinglake in a compendious form:—

“Not yet as part of this narrative, but by way of anticipation, and in order to gather into one page the grounds of the statement just made, the following instances are given of the way in which the English Government was, from time to time, driven to join with the French Emperor in making a quarrelsome use of the two fleets:—On the 13th of July 1853, the French Emperor, through his Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared to the English Government that if the occupation of the Principalities continued, the French fleet could not longer remain at Besica Bay. On the 19th of August he declared it to be absolutely necessary that the combined fleets should enter the Dardanelles, and he pressed the English Government to adopt a resolution to this effect. On the 21st of September he insisted that the English Government, at the same moment as the French, should immediately order up the combined squadrons to Constantinople. On the 15th of December he pressed the English Government to agree that the Allied fleets should enter the Euxine, take possession of it, and interdict the passage of every Russian vessel. It will be seen that, with more or less reluctance and after more or less delay, these demands were always acceded to by England: and the course thus taken by the maritime Powers was fatal to the pending negotiations; for, besides that in the way already shown the Czar’s wholesome fears were converted into bursts of rage, the Turks at the same time were deriving a dangerous encouragement from the sight of the French and English war-flags; and the result was, that the negotiators, with all their skill and all their patience, were never able to frame a Note in the exact words which would allay the anger of Nicholas, without encountering a steadfast resistance on the part of the Sultan.”

We have only, then, to take in their turn the items thus enumerated to ascertain the justice of the charge. The first of the naval movements was the advance of the fleets to Besica Bay. This made the Czar very angry. But it was in itself a perfectly lawful operation, and quite consistent with friendliness and desire for peace. It by no means balanced the aggressive advance of the Czar into the Principalities and the orders to the Sebastopol fleet. Moreover, however irritating to Nicholas, he condoned it, for we find him long afterwards accepting the Vienna Note framed by the four Powers, the acceptance of which by Turkey would have settled the dispute. That it was not accepted by Turkey was due entirely to Lord Stratford and the Turkish Ministers. “The French Emperor,” says Mr Kinglake, “did nothing whatever to thwart the restoration of tranquillity.” It is evident, then, that the movements of the fleets thus far had produced no effect which was not completely neutralised, and that the Emperor’s desire for war did not prevent him from contributing to the general effort for peace.

The next movement of the fleets was into the Dardanelles. The Sultan was engaged by treaty to forbid the entrance of the fleets of any Power so long as he should be at peace. What, then, were the reasons for entering the Straits? Were they purely provocative? Now, we find that the demand for war on the part of the Turkish people had at this time become so urgent, that the Ambassadors to the Porte regarded it as almost irresistible. The French Ambassador viewed it, Mr Kinglake says, “with sincere alarm.” He wrote a despatch to his Government, imparting to it what we must admit to have been also “sincere alarm,” for there is no evidence or insinuation of the contrary; and that alarm being shared by our Government, the fleets were ordered to enter the Dardanelles that they might be ready, if wanted, to support the Turkish Government against the belligerent wishes of its own subjects.

But another important circumstance had occurred before the entry of the fleets. In invading the Principalities, the Czar had announced that this was not meant as an act of war. And the Sultan’s hold on these provinces was of such an anomalous kind that his advisers held him to be at liberty to construe the invasion as an act of war, or not, at his own pleasure. He had now given notice to the Czar that unless the Russian troops should quit the Principalities in fifteen days he would declare war. Fourteen of the fifteen days had elapsed when the fleets entered. Except for observing the strict letter of the treaty, it was not of the least importance whether they entered a day sooner or later. Yet Mr Kinglake tells us the Czar was very indignant at the violation of the treaty, and he laments that another day was not suffered to elapse before the movement. Now, considering all the circumstances—that the fleets had already been for a long time at the disposal of the Ambassadors, who might summon them to Constantinople whenever they judged necessary, and that the Czar knew it—that war steamers had already been called up to the Bosphorus by both the Ambassadors, French and English, and the treaty thus broken as completely as by the passage of a hundred fleets—that the Czar had himself, by the invasion of the Principalities, deprived himself of the right to complain of the violation of the treaty—that fifteen days’ notice of a declaration of war had been given, and that the full term must have expired before the fleets could arrive at Constantinople—considering all this, the provocation is reduced to such an infinitesimal quantity, that it is barely worth a passing mention. There is no evidence whatever that the prospects of peace were in any way affected by the advance of the fleets. Yet a hasty reader of Mr Kinglake’s narrative might easily imagine that it produced the direst consequences. “When the tidings of this hostile measure,” he says, “reached St Petersburg, they put an end for the time to all prospect of peace.” And again—

“The Czar received tidings of the hostile decision of the maritime Powers in a spirit which, this time at least, was almost justified by the provocation given. In retaliation for what he would naturally look upon as a bitter affront, and even as a breach of treaty, he determined, it would seem, to have vengeance at sea whilst vengeance at sea was still possible; and it was under the spur of the anger thus kindled that orders for active operations were given to the fleet at Sebastopol. The vengeance he meditated he could only wreak upon the body of the Turks, for the great offenders of the West were beyond the bounds of his power.”

Would not the reader imagine from this that the attack of Sinope had been proved by full evidence to be the immediate result of the exasperation of the Czar at the advance of the combined fleets? But Mr Kinglake acquaints us in a note with the real grounds on which he makes this confident assertion:—

“This conclusion is drawn from dates. The hostile resolution of the Western Powers was known to the Czar a little before the 14th of October, and about the middle of the following month the Black Sea fleet was at sea. If allowance be made for distance and preparation, it will be seen that the sequence of one event upon the other is close enough to warrant the statement contained in the text. In the absence, however, of any knowledge to the contrary, it is fair to suppose that the Czar remembered his promise, and did not sanction any actual attack upon the enemy unless his commanders should be previously apprised that the Turks had commenced active warfare.”

We read this note with surprise. It proves that Mr Kinglake can, when in hot pursuit of the foe, step to a conclusion over grounds where few can follow. The fleets entered the Dardanelles on the 22d October. The attack of Sinope took place on the 30th November. The Turks and Russians had been at war for six weeks; and though the Russian Minister had announced in a circular some time before, that the Czar, in hopes still of a peaceful solution, would remain on the defensive as long as his dignity and interests would allow, yet, as Mr Kinglake himself says, “After the issue of the circular, the Government of St Petersburg had received intelligence not only that active warfare was going on in the valley of the Lower Danube, but that the Turks had seized the Russian fort of St Nicholas on the eastern coast of the Euxine, and were attacking Russia upon her Armenian frontier;” and he fully absolves the Czar from any breach of faith in this matter. Yet he would gravely have us believe that the attack of the ships of one Power upon those of another with which it is at open war requires explanation, and that the most natural explanation possible is to be found in attributing it to a slow retaliation for an imaginary injury inflicted by two other Powers. It is as if we should be told that, in the early rounds of a celebrated pugilistic encounter, Mr Sayers had hit Mr Heenan very hard in the eye, not because they were fighting, but because one of the bystanders had previously trodden on the champion’s coat.

As the reader will probably decline to follow Mr Kinglake over his slender bridge of inference, we must look beyond Sinope for the naval movement instigated by the French Emperor and turning the scale in favour of war; and, as only one remains to be accounted for, we have not far to look. The next orders sent to the fleets were intended to obviate another disaster and disgrace such as that of Sinope. They provided that Russian ships met with in the Euxine should be requested, and, if necessary, constrained, to return to Sebastopol. This, Mr Kinglake terms “a harsh and insulting course of action.” He says the English Cabinet during their deliberations “were made acquainted with the will of the French Emperor; ... the pressure of the French Emperor was the cogent motive which governed the result; ... the result was that now, for the second time, France dictated to England the use that she should make of her fleet, and by this time, perhaps, submission had become more easy than it was at first.” But Lord Clarendon has been quoted by Mr Kinglake as saying, months before, that it had become the duty of England to defend Turkey. According to Mr Kinglake, when independent Powers are acting together, to propose is to dictate, and to acquiesce is to submit. To make a suggestion is imperious, and to adopt it is ignominious. But what kind of an alliance would this be? or how would concert be possible under such circumstances? The proposal of the French Emperor was so offered as to show that he was thoroughly convinced of its expediency. If he was so convinced, he was right so to offer it. And why did the English Ministry adopt it? Because the English people more than kept pace with the wishes of the Emperor. “A huge obstacle,” says the historian, “to the maintenance of peace in Europe was raised up by the temper of the English people; ... the English desired war.” It is strange doctrine then, that an English Ministry which, by assenting to the proposition of an ally, expresses the temper of the English people, thereby submits to foreign dictation.

But the strangest part of the French part of the story is behind. We have seen how Mr Kinglake traces from the first the devious wiles of the French Emperor—how it was his craft that first made the question of the Holy Places important—how his “subtle and dangerous counsels” hurried England into war, and all because war was necessary to the stability of his throne. The complicated texture of his intrigue is followed and traced with immense patience and ingenuity; and yet, when the work is complete, and his imperial victim stands fully detected and exposed as the incendiary of Europe, the detective suddenly destroys his own finely-spun web at a blow. England was the tool of the French Emperor, but the French Emperor was the tool of a still more astute and potent personage. “When the Czar began to encroach upon the Sultan, there was nothing that could so completely meet Lord Palmerston’s every wish as an alliance between the two Western Powers, which should toss France headlong into the English policy of upholding the Ottoman Empire.... As he (Lord Palmerston) from the first had willed it, so moved the two great nations of the West.” The elaborated structure of French intrigue falls, and our gay perennial Premier is discovered smiling amid the ruins. Thus Punch murders his wife and infant, hangs the executioner, and shines as the dexterous and successful villain, till, at the close of the piece, Mr Codlin, the real wire-puller, draws aside the curtain and appears at the bottom of the show, while the great criminal and his victims revert to their proper condition of sawdust and tinsel.

The terms of the alliance between France and England are surely not difficult to understand. The policy of upholding the Ottoman Empire was, as Mr Kinglake says, “an English policy.” The object for which the Governments of France and England were actively united was an English object. Naturally we inquire what inducement the Emperor had then to form the alliance? Mr Kinglake furnishes us with the correct response. It seemed, he says, to the Emperor “that, by offering to thrust France into an English policy, he might purchase for himself an alliance with the Queen, and win for his new throne a sanction of more lasting worth than Morny’s well-warranted return of his eight millions of approving Frenchmen. Above all, if he could be united with England, he might be able to enter upon that conspicuous action in Europe which was needful for his safety at home, and might do this without bringing upon himself any war of a dangerous kind.” The advantages of the alliance were to be reciprocal. The Emperor was to gain in position and reputation, in return for aiding with his fleets and armies the attainment of an English object. Mutual interest and mutual compromise were the basis of this, as of most alliances. We had not to accuse the Emperor of any breach of faith in executing his part of the compact. Being already, as Lord Clarendon said, committed to the defence of Turkey, it made a vast difference to us whether we should enter on a war with Russia alone, or should be aided by the immense power of France. And it was only fair that the Emperor should be allowed to occupy, in the transactions which ensued, that position, the attainment of which was his grand object in seeking the alliance. Yet Mr Kinglake blames this necessitous potentate because he did not sacrifice his position and himself to our interests—because he did not chivalrously place his army and navy at our service for the promotion of English policy, and remain quietly in the background, with his generous feelings for his reward; and he blames our own Government for making those compromises which alone could render the alliance possible.

And here, we rejoice to say, our serious differences with Mr Kinglake end. After so much entertainment and instruction as we have derived from his book, it seems almost ungrateful to make to it so many exceptions. But if we have occupied much of our space thus, he must remember that it takes longer to argue than to acquiesce. Moreover, it is partly owing to his own excellences that we have been able to find matter for dispute. Many a writer would have so muddled his facts and his prejudices that we should have found it hard to do more than suspect the presence of error in the cloudy medium. But his style is so clear, so precise, that the reasoning everywhere shines through, and a fallacy or an inconsistency has no more chance of escaping detection than a gold fish in a crystal aquarium. And besides, Mr Kinglake himself most honestly and liberally furnishes us with the facts, and even the inferences, necessary to rectify his theory. Thus the effect, in his history, of his hostility to the Emperor is not that of a false proportion in a rule of three, which extends and vitiates the whole process. It is only like a series of erroneous items introduced in a sum in addition, which may be separated and deducted, leaving the total right.

The course of the transactions that led to the war may then be traced as clearly as diplomacy, dealing with many great interests and many unseen motives, generally permits. The squabble about the Holy Places was not the origin but only the pretext of the dispute with Turkey. The conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour and the mission of Mentschikoff prove that the Czar was already seeking to dislocate the fabric of the Turkish Empire, and only took that lever because it lay readiest to his hand. “A crowd of monks,” says Mr Kinglake, in his picturesque way, “with bare foreheads, stood quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in Palestine, but beyond and above, towering high in the misty North, men saw the ambition of the Czars.” But the real design could not long be hidden by the pretext. And the execution of that design would be subversive of that balance which it was the duty and interest of the other Powers to maintain. It was for the Czar, then, to choose a time for his project when he might find each of the other Powers restrained by some counteracting motive from opposing his ambition. Looking over Europe, he thought that he perceived the favourable moment. Austria, the Power most interested from her contiguity, and from the importance to her of free use of the great waterway of Southern Germany, if she had much reason to resist, had also much reason to acquiesce. She still felt too keenly, financially and politically, the effects of the heavy blows dealt her in 1848–9 to be ready or willing for war. She was under a huge debt of gratitude to Nicholas, who, in the hour of her direst necessity, had advanced to save her, without condition and without reward. He possessed, too, a great personal ascendancy over the young Emperor of Austria. And, lastly, at this time Austria had a hostile altercation with Turkey, which would render it more than ever difficult for her to take part with the Sultan.

It might be calculated that Prussia would follow the lead of Austria. Her interests were the same in kind, but far less in degree. Once satisfied that full guarantees for the freedom of the Danube would be given, she would no longer have special interest in the subject.

As to France, there seemed to be no special reason why she should interfere. And if she should interfere, the Czar’s sentiments towards the new Empire were such as would rather lead him to disdainful defiance than conciliation.

At first he anticipated no difficulty in persuading the English Government to join in his designs. Finding, however, by the rejection of his overtures, that he could not hope for the support of England, he probably postponed the extreme measures of aggression. But, for the reasons we have stated in a former paragraph, he was unwilling to let the opportunity pass totally unimproved; and hence the demands of Mentschikoff for granting the protectorate of the Greek Church in Turkey to the Czar.

It was Lord Stratford’s share in the diplomatic contest that ensued, which first gave England prominence in the dispute. And whether the part he took was in accordance with instructions from his Government, or was due to the influence of his personal character, the result was to assure England that the predominance of her Ambassador in the councils of the Porte, whatever advantage it might confer, carried with it grave responsibility. When Mentschikoff withdrew in anger from the scene, England was, in the opinion of her own Ministers, committed to the defence of Turkey.

We have seen that the Czar’s original design was made dependent on the concurrence of England. When he found that this was unattainable, the design was modified. He now found that even in this modified form England would not only not concur, but would oppose it. Why then did he persist? It was because he did not believe that the opposition of England would go the length of war.

Lord Aberdeen, the English Premier, besides being the personal friend of Nicholas, and therefore disposed to view Russian policy with comparative indulgence, was the open and professed friend of peace at any price. He had that horror of war which in a statesman is an unpardonable and fatal weakness. And in this particular he was believed only to represent the feeling of the English people. The Czar, in common with most of the world, was convinced that they were entirely absorbed in the pursuit of commerce. He took the Exhibition of 1851 for the national confession of faith. He believed that England had no god but gold, and that Mr Cobden was her prophet.

This fallacy Mr Kinglake exposes in his happiest style:—

“All England had been brought to the opinion that it was a wickedness to incur war without necessity or justice; but when the leading spirits of the Peace Party had the happiness of beholding this wholesome result, they were far from stopping short. They went on to make light of the very principles by which peace is best maintained, and although they were conscientious men, meaning to say and do what was right, yet, being unacquainted with the causes which bring about the fall of empires, they deliberately inculcated that habit of setting comfort against honour which historians call ‘corruption.’ They made it plain, as they imagined, that no war which was not engaged in for the actual defence of the country could ever be right; but even there they took no rest, for they went on and on, and still on, until their foremost thinker reached the conclusion that, in the event of an attack upon our shores, the invaders ought to be received with such an effusion of hospitality and brotherly love as could not fail to disarm them of their enmity, and convert the once dangerous Zouave into the valued friend of the family. Then, with great merriment, the whole English people turned round, and although they might still be willing to go to the brink of other precipices, they refused to go further towards that one. The doctrine had struck no root. It was ill suited to the race to whom it was addressed. The male cheered it, and forgot it until there came a time for testing it, and then discarded it; and the woman, from the very first, with her true and simple instinct, was quick to understand its value. She would subscribe, if her husband required it, to have the doctrine taught to charity children, but she would not suffer it to be taught to her own boy. So it proved barren.”

Caustic as this is, it is only too indulgent to the Peace Party. Not that it is of special importance now to crush what is already so depressed and abased as to have lost its power of mischief. The course of the leaders of the party has been such that they could not continue to enjoy any large measure of popularity, except upon the anomalous condition that a great number of Englishmen should join in hating England. For years past no petulant despotism, no drunken republic, could shake its coarse fist in the face of this country, without finding its warmest supporters in those men of the olive branch, who were never weary of urging us to offer both cheeks to the smiter. Their mode of interference in a quarrel is like that of the affectionate friends, who, if a man were attacked, would cling round him and hamper him, reviling him for his pugnacity, while his adversary ran him through the body. Long fallen from their position as oracles, they lie at the base of their tall pedestals, and “none so poor as do them reverence.” But, in granting them honesty of purpose, Mr Kinglake falls, we think, into the now common error of pushing candour to excess. A man’s mistakes are honest when he is led into them by motives irrespective of his interests. The fanatic who sacrifices his own advantage along with that of other people cannot be accused of baseness. But these men had a direct interest in preaching the doctrine of the necessity of national poltroonery. The substitution of a purely commercial policy for that which the nation had hitherto followed, was intimately blended with their own personal advantage. The motive, therefore, that inspired the error renders it inexcusable.

Blind, then, to consequences, the Czar continued his course of aggression. He marched his troops into the Principalities. Thereupon, no longer opposed only by England, he finds himself met by the concerted action of the four great Powers. And the question of interest at this particular stage is, Whether the primary object of defending Turkey was to be best attained by the action of the four Powers, or by the increased decision in action of England and France. Now it is to be observed, that the Czar knew long before he occupied the Principalities that Austria would resist the step. Yet the united remonstrance of the four Powers had failed to induce him to abandon it. And it also failed afterwards to induce him to retract it. Through remonstrance, opposition, and the earlier stages of the war, he continued to hold the provinces. It becomes then a question, when we are considering the statement that the peaceful pressure of the four Powers would have attained our object in the most desirable way, whether a course of action so slow was consistent with our engagement to defend Turkey. It is a matter at least open to doubt.

But granting that either the slow action of Austria, or the more decisive policy of France, would have equally availed, if adopted by common consent, was that unanimity possible? Austria had many reasons for limiting her interference to diplomatic pressure. Moreover, her ground of complaint against Russia was the occupation of the Principalities, not the threatening of Turkey. Should Russia adopt some other method of coercing Turkey, such as sending her fleet into the Bosphorus, and withdrawing her troops from the provinces, the interest of Austria in the dispute would almost vanish, while that of the Western Powers would increase. And how would it suit France to adopt the course of Austria, and to aim at a settlement by united action? The French Emperor’s great inducement in joining in the dispute at all was the prospect of increased reputation. And when the figure representing the credit to be gained by joint diplomatic coercion came to be divided by four, would the quotient satisfy his expectations? It is not too much to say that England was compelled to choose between France and Austria, since it was unlikely they would long continue in a common course. And as the action of England in a war with Russia must be principally through her fleet, it became of immense importance that the French navy should act with us rather than be neutral or hostile. In such circumstances, then, it is by no means clear that we did wrong in holding with France.

From this period, then, it becomes apparent that, if Russia should persist in aggression, war was inevitable. And Russia did persist in aggression. And if it be considered as established that the Czar was led so to persist by a conviction that England would not resort to war—which is the general and probably correct opinion—we do not see how it can be denied that a course of action which must undeceive him would be the most likely to cause him to desist; and that the naval movements that ensued were only such as would convince him of our intention without driving him to extremity. It is plain that the two theories—one of which is that the pacific disposition of our Government allowed us to drift into war, and the other that our menacing action irritated the Czar beyond control, and therefore caused the war—are incompatible.

The fleets then moved to the entrance of the Dardanelles; and, while the Czar was recovering from the anger produced by that step, the representatives of the four Powers in conference at Vienna produced their Note, a mediatory document which would, it was hoped, settle all difficulties. It was readily accepted by Russia, the reason for which became apparent when it was offered to Turkey; for the Turkish Government at once rejected it, on the ground that it might be so interpreted as to secure to the Czar the protectorate he aimed at. They proposed alterations, with the concurrence of the mediatory Powers, which the Czar in his turn rejected; and the Sultan thereupon declared that, if the provinces were not evacuated in fifteen days, Turkey would be at war with Russia. The fleets moved through the Dardanelles. The next step was the attack on the Turkish squadron at Sinope by the Russian admiral. The English people were now thoroughly roused. They were indignant, not so much at the breach of faith imputed to the Czar in making the attack, as at the ruthless destruction and slaughter of the Turkish force by its far more powerful enemy. The attack, too, had taken place almost under the guns of the combined fleets, and it was evident that, if their presence at Constantinople meant anything, and if we really were engaged to defend Turkey, the repetition of such a disaster to our ally must be prevented. A measure to this effect, but by no means strong enough to express the feeling of England, was adopted; the combined fleets were ordered by their respective governments to keep the peace by force, if necessary, in the Euxine. But as there had been as yet no actual collision between their forces and those of the Czar, a door to peace was still left open. Of this he did not choose to avail himself, but declared war against France and England on the 11th April 1854.

Such is an outline of the successive events preceding the war which, unpromising as such a record of futile diplomacy may seem, Mr Kinglake has wrought into one of the most brilliant of historical pictures. ‘Eothen’ itself is not more entertaining, more rich in colour, more happy in quaint and humorous turns of expression; while, from the false effects that are sometimes seen in the earlier work, the present narrative is entirely free. The style is indeed a model of ease, strength, clearness, and simplicity. Nor has labour been spared; and the reader who has so often been expected by historians to be already familiar with political and diplomatic lore, and has been left to repair his deficiencies as he may, will be grateful to Mr Kinglake for some of the elementary instruction which he has conveyed in such a delightful form, as, for instance, the chapter on “the usage which forms the safeguard of Europe.” And remembering what animation and vigour personal feeling, even when so strongly biased, cannot fail to infuse, and seeing that, in the present case, it has not prevented the writer from fully stating the facts and deductions which most contradict his favourite theories, we cease to lament the absence of that judicial calmness which would have deprived his history of half its charm.

The first glowing scenes now shift to one still more splendid. Diplomacy has played out its part; its subtlest essays seem but mere babble to the ear that is listening for the impending clang of arms. Statesmen and ambassadors gather up their futile documents, and retire to the side scenes, to make way for the sterner disputants who throng the stage.

If Mr Kinglake was unsparing in his denunciations of French intrigue, he is no less bold and outspoken in criticising the military merits of our allies. But we no longer find the same reasons for dissenting from his conclusions. Many, no doubt, will say that it would have been politic to suppress some of those revelations which will jar most on the sensitive ears of our neighbours. But, if history is to be written at all, it must be written with all the truth attainable. History, which conceals and glosses, is but historical romance. Moreover, a plain English statement was wanting to redress the balance between us and the French. It must not be forgotten that the example of writing a narrative apportioning to both parties in the alliance the sum of glory gained was set in France, and that a share, ridiculously small, was awarded to the English. We remonstrated at the time, in these pages, against the unfairness and impolicy of allowing such a book as De Bazancourt’s to go forth to the world with the seeming sanction of the Emperor, at a time when the war was yet unfinished. A man of no reputation or ability to justify the selection had been accredited to the French generals in the Crimea. Furnished thus with information, which might be presumed to be reliable, he produced a narrative in which the entire credit for the planning and execution of the successful operations of the war was assigned to the French with impudent mendacity. As might naturally be expected from a nation that believes in Thiers, his account was accepted by the French as veritable history. In England it was but little read. Contemptible as a composition, its representations of facts were not such as to give it a claim to which nothing else entitled it. But, so far as it was read here, it gave just offence. That the Emperor did not disapprove is shown by the fact that the same valuable chronicler was taken to Italy as historiographer of the war in 1859, when another compound of bombastic glorification and misrepresentation was given to the world under imperial auspices. No Englishman or candid Frenchman who reads the account of the Crimean Campaign by the Baron De Bazancourt will deny that it was incumbent on us to tell our own tale; and we rejoice that it is told by one who, with such remarkable faculty for charming an audience and imparting to it his own impressions, trusts, nevertheless, to facts and proofs derived from the documents intrusted to him, for supporting his claim for justice.

The long European peace had left the armies of the Great Powers with little except a traditional knowledge of civilised war. It is true that part of the English army had seen service in India; a large portion of the French troops had made campaigns in Algeria; and the Russians had for years carried on a desultory warfare in Circassia. But none of these theatres of operations had been of a kind to serve as schools of training for encounters with a disciplined foe. Nor had they developed amidst the officers that high talent for superior commands to which either country could turn with confidence. Accordingly, the English fell back upon their traditions of the old wars of Wellington, as embodied in his friend Lord Raglan. Whether he was likely to make a great general or not, it was impossible for anybody to say, for his career had not been such as to offer any field for the display of the talents requisite in a commander. Sixty-six is not perhaps the most favourable age for a first essay in any walk in life. But it was known that he was accustomed to military business; that his conciliatory and courteous manners would be of great service in an allied army, and that his rank and dignity would ensure the respect necessary for the maintenance of our proper position in the alliance; while, if he had not commanded armies himself, he had been intimate with him whom we regarded as the commander without a peer. The French had no available relics of the wars of the First Empire; and if any such had existed, there were other claimants to be considered, namely, those soldiers of fortune to whom the Emperor was under obligations for their share in the coup d’état. The claims of St Arnaud surpassed all others. He was a frothy, vainglorious, gallant man, who had never shown capacity for any operation more considerable than a raid against the Arabs. His published letters breathe a high ambition and spirit of enterprise, but do not reveal any rare military quality. Lord Russell himself could not be more ready to take the lead in any description of onerous undertaking. But his self-confidence seems to have had no deeper root than vanity; for, whereas his letters to his relations are full of the great part he is playing, or means to play, neither his acts, nor the official records of his doings as Commander of the French army, corroborate the views of his own pre-eminence which he imparted to his family. Mr Kinglake drily accounts for the selection of this commander by saying that he was ambitious of leading the enterprise, and that “the French Emperor took him at his word, consenting, as was very natural, that his dangerous, insatiate friend, should have a command which would take him into the country of the Lower Danube.” If it is by this intended we should infer that the wily potentate expected the climate to disagree with him, the anticipation was fulfilled; for a frame already weakened by long disease broke up entirely under the assault of the fever of Varna. The Russians possessed a fine old remnant of antiquity in Prince Paskiewitch, which was furbished up, and did very well till, meeting with a mischance before Silistria, at the outset of the war, he vanished, and the effort to supply his place with a creditable general was not successful. As regards military talent, then, it would not seem that either belligerent possessed an advantage which would preclude Fortune from exercising her proverbial function of favouring the brave.

While the English and French troops were on the way to Turkey, the Russians had opened an offensive campaign. The method of doing this was prescribed to them by the features of the theatre of war. The Danube, flowing round Wallachia, turns northward and meets the Pruth, so as to include between the two rivers and the sea a narrow strip; the part of which, north of the Danube, is a Russian province, Bessarabia, and that south of the Danube a Turkish province, the Dobrudja. Should the Russians seek to pass into Turkey through Wallachia, they would lend a flank to an attack from Austria, if she were to carry her hostility to the point of war, and their troops would be very critically placed between Austrian and Turkish foes. But by advancing along the strip the Russians passed at once from Russian to Turkish territory; while the Danube covered their right flank from Austria. Still, in order to proceed beyond the Dobrudja in the direction of the Balkan, and thence towards Constantinople, as they had done with such signal success in 1829, it was indispensable that they should begin by taking Silistria—and more than ever indispensable now that the Allies had command of the Euxine. Accordingly, the opening of the campaign was marked by the siege of Silistria by the Russians.

Although it soon appeared that Silistria was bravely defended, it was not expected that the fortress could hold out long. And therefore, in anticipation of such decisive movements as those of 1829, the first intention of the Allies was to fortify Gallipoli, thus securing the Dardanelles as a channel of supply, and the Chersonese peninsula as a secure base from whence to operate in Turkey. But it soon appeared that Russia was stumbling at the first obstacle. Gallipoli, therefore, ceased to be of present importance; and the next idea was to transport the armies to that point from whence they could most speedily meet the enemy. And that point was evidently Varna.

Mr Kinglake chronicles two facts relating to this period, not hitherto published, and the knowledge of both of which he probably derived (certainly of one) from Lord Raglan’s papers. The first is the project of St Arnaud to obtain command of the Turkish forces. How this was defeated is recorded in one of Mr Kinglake’s most characteristic passages, where the lively, pushing, aspiring Marshal finds his confidence in his own scheme suddenly evaporating before the grave dignified courtesy of Lord Stratford, and the mildly implied disapproval of Lord Raglan. The other is, that, after the embarkation was agreed on, St Arnaud suddenly announced, that he should move his army by land to the south of the Balkan; and that, according to his plan, the English should take the left of the proposed strategical line, and therefore be farthest from their supplies coming from sea. This scheme, also, he relinquished; but the fact is notable, first, as showing the propensity to take what advantage he could at the expense of his ally; and secondly, as correcting the view of his own predominance and superior earnestness for action, conveyed in his private correspondence and in De Bazancourt’s narrative.

The armies landed at Varna, and a campaign in Bulgaria was expected. “My plan is,” quoth St Arnaud, “to save the fortress, and to push the Russians into the Danube.” He tells his brother in Paris, that the operation of moving to aid Silistria will be hazardous, for the Russians may come down on his right and rear, seize the road of Varna and Pravadi, and cut him off from the sea. “But, be easy,” he says consolingly, “I have taken my precautions against the manœuvre, and I will defeat it.” Not difficult to defeat, one might think, since the enemy who should attempt it must be commanded by a lunatic. However, while the Allies were still waiting in vain for the means of transport to take the field, their difficulties and projects were ended by an unlooked for incident. The Russians, finding the outermost barrier of Turkey impregnable, raised the siege, and withdrew across the Danube. The immense amount of military reputation which they thereby lost was placed with interest to the credit of the Turks. But the position in which the Allied Generals found themselves, thus hurrying to save a fortress which saved itself, and left without an enemy, was extremely bewildering. St Arnaud seems characteristically to have imagined that the Russians were frightened by his reputation into retreat. “They fly me,” he says, while lamenting the loss of a triumph for himself and his army, which he had contemplated as certain. Not only the Generals but their Governments were embarrassed and mortified at being thus baulked. The Emperor’s object could not be attained by mere success without glory. The British people, already impatient of delays, the causes of which, though inevitable, they could not understand, were clamorous for action. Nor did they content themselves with insisting that something should be done. They indicated the line of action. Urged, as Mr Kinglake contends, by the press, they shouted with one voice for an attack on Sebastopol, and this measure the Government enjoined Lord Raglan to execute. The French Government did not urge St Arnaud to propose the step; but, if the English were willing for it, he was not at liberty to withhold his consent. Two questions occur here: was the Government right in thus ordering the commander of the army to take a step to which his own judgment might be opposed? and was the step thus indicated a wise one?

Now, Mr Kinglake seems to think, that if the Government was justified in controlling its General, it was only because its army was acting in concert with that of another power, and was dependent on the aid of the fleets.

“In common circumstances, and especially where the whole of the troops to be engaged are under one commander, it cannot be right for any Sovereign or any Minister to address such instructions as these to a General on a distant shore; for the General who is to be intrusted with the sole command of a great expedition must be, of all mankind, the best able to judge of its military prudence, and to give him orders thus cogent is to dispense with his counsel.”

We, on the other hand, think that the selection of the territory which is to be the scene of operations, should always rest with the Government, and for this reason, that the selection must depend even more on political than on military considerations. Suppose, for instance, that the Allied generals had desired to follow the enemy over the Danube, it is evident that it would be of vast importance in the campaign that would follow, whether Austria should be friendly, or neutral, or hostile. But which she would be was a matter of which the Generals could only be informed through their Governments, who must possess the best information attainable on the subject. And again, the effect of the invasion of the Crimea on Austrian counsels, on Russian designs, and on English and French interests, were all political considerations, to be decided by the Governments, and not by the Generals. But, the territory fixed on, the manner of operating therein should be left to the Commander—and this the British Government did.

With regard to the other question, Mr Kinglake appears to think that, after the Russians had evacuated the Principalities (as they did immediately on re-crossing the Danube), there was no further ground for continuing the war, and that a naval blockade would have forced her to conclude peace. But to have forced her to make peace, returning to the statu quo, would by no means have answered our ends, for it would have left her to repeat the aggression on a more favourable opportunity, with the advantage of better understanding the conditions of success. That she would have consented at that time to give any pledge for the security of Turkey, is incredible, if we consider the course taken by her diplomatists at the conferences in the following year, when she had suffered so severely. But to capture Sebastopol and its fleet, would give us the security we wanted, and the pressure of the blockade might then be depended on for ending the war. The question then, in our judgment, resolves itself into this: Was there a reasonable hope of at once succeeding in the object of the invasion; and was common foresight exercised in providing for the possibility of failure?

Events have answered the last question. Due provision was not made for the possibility of a first failure. The country was aghast at the position in which the army found itself; and we think that, in making the statement we are about to quote, Mr Kinglake is recording a state of opinion, which, though perfectly just, and always maintained to be just in these pages, both during and after the war, had no existence at the time he speaks of.

“Those who thought more warily than the multitude foresaw that the enterprise might take time; but they also perceived that even this result would not be one of unmixed evil; for if Russia should commit herself to a lengthened conflict in the neighbourhood of Sebastopol, she would be put to a great trial, and would see her wealth and strength ruinously consumed by the mere stress of the distance between the military centre of the empire and the south-westernmost angle of the Crimea.”

All this is true; so true that Russia would have done well to leave Sebastopol to its fate, rather than make those efforts to maintain it which were so ruinous. Moreover the Crimea is, from its geographical circumstances, always the most favourable point of Russian territory for the operations of an enemy who commands the sea. Its form of an extended peninsula renders it vulnerable at many points; it does not afford the means of supplying the force necessary for its defence; and the supplies and reinforcements, having to pass through a region that is always a desert and sometimes a swamp, must be despatched with vast expense and loss. The conditions of the theatre of operations selected were then all in our favour; it only remained to provide adequately for the chances of war, to render the enterprise judicious.

But there was no thought except of speedy success. Beyond a triumphant landing, battle, and assault, no man looked. It was a piece of national gambling where an army was staked upon the turn of the cards; inexcusable, therefore, even had the chances been still more in our favour.

Still the chances in our favour were great. The Russian force in the Crimea was inferior in numbers. Sebastopol might have been captured with the co-operation of the fleets. That co-operation was a main element of success. We were deprived of it by Mentschikoff’s stroke of sinking his ships, so as to block the harbour and exclude the fleets. Was this a step, the possibility of which the Government of a great maritime nation ought to have omitted from its calculations? It was not difficult—it was even obvious—to anticipate that a fleet otherwise useless might thus be turned to account.

That the invasion was politically a fortunate step, we have no doubt. All the sufferings, all the losses, all the expense, and all the discontent at home, could not prevent the course of affairs from turning ultimately to our advantage, because the distresses of the enemy were far greater. Russia at the end of the war was absolutely prostrate, while England was only beginning to handle her vast and increasing resources. But this, as it was never contemplated, is beside the purpose of estimating the wisdom of the people and the Government who committed the armies to the enterprise. The Government is obnoxious to the charge of not providing for a contingency that ought to have been foreseen, by furnishing the means for sustained operations. And the Government might, in great measure, exonerate itself at the expense of the nation. For years before, no Member of Parliament could have proposed an increase on the estimates in order to render the army an efficient engine of war, without being covered with obloquy. At that time, what troops we had were barely tolerated by the people. Considering all things, we cannot think the step wise. But we are very strongly of opinion that, as a means of coercing Russia, it was fortunate.

Many conferences between the Allied Generals took place at Varna, and on the voyage. No pictures can differ more widely than those of the attitude of St Arnaud on these occasions, as drawn on the one hand by himself and De Bazancourt, on the other by Mr Kinglake. In his own letters, and in the veracious French Chronicle, he is the moving spirit of the enterprise—he “dominates the discussion”—he infuses life into everybody—nothing checks him except the slowness of the English. He is feared by the Russians, admired by the British, adored by the French. Mr Kinglake, on the contrary, represents him as being in council without decision and without weight; glad to solve his own difficulties by deferring to Lord Raglan; forming plans merely to abandon them; and painfully conscious that he has not the hold on the respect of his own army necessary to enforce his authority. He had become strongly impressed with the idea that a landing would be best effected at the mouth of the Katcha. It would be nearer Sebastopol. The position on the Alma would thus be avoided; and the march over plains, where it might be difficult to find water, would be unnecessary. On the other hand a reconnoissance made by Lord Raglan and Sir John Burgoyne, with the French Generals, showed that the mouth of the valley was narrow, that the troops as they landed would be exposed to a flanking fire from guns which would be, by their position, secure from the counter-fire of the ships, and that the enterprise might be opposed by the whole Russian army. These objections seemed to Lord Raglan so strong that he decided on landing at Old Fort. The result showed the correctness of the decision, for the landing was unopposed, and the single action of the Alma cleared the way to Sebastopol. Nevertheless, St Arnaud, writing to his brother after the landing, contends that he was right. “Observe, brother,” he says, “I have a military instinct which never deceives me, and the English have not made war since 1815.”

Mr Kinglake’s account of the disembarkation which he witnessed, of the delay caused by the mysterious shifting, by the French, of the buoy that was to mark the spot for the operation—of the different modes of treating the villagers practised by the English and by the French troops, and of the march towards the Alma, are described with the particularity and vivacity which might be expected from so keen an observer, and so skilful a narrator. He rightly describes the movement as being of the nature of that proper to movable columns. It was, in fact, like the march of a convoy, where the escort was vast, and the conditions favourable. The conditions were favourable, because the open nature of the country permitted the waggons, instead of straggling along a great extent of road, on any part of which they might be attacked, to move in compact order near the entire army. But we quite agree with him in thinking that the Russian leader showed great incapacity and culpable want of enterprise in suffering the march to proceed unmolested. The country was particularly favourable to cavalry, in which arm he was greatly superior. By incessantly threatening the left flank he would have compelled us to show front in that direction, and the whole army would have been obliged to halt, under penalty of witnessing the defeat of a separated portion. We could not have closed with the force thus menacing us, because the effort to do so would have withdrawn us from our proper direction, and from the sea, and because, also, the enemy could always retire under cover of his cavalry, to a new position on our flank. If Mentschikoff could have felt secure of being able to file into position behind the Alma, in time to oppose us there, he might have employed his whole army in this menacing movement. He made only one effort of the kind, that on the Bulganak, where a skirmish took place; but the demonstration was feeble, not supported, and of no avail as a check, because the army had always designed to halt there for the night. Nevertheless, the precautions taken by Lord Raglan, in throwing back the left flank, before bivouacking, to meet a possible attack of the kind, and the consequent delay in resuming the march next morning, show how much was to be apprehended from such a mode of harassing us as was open to a skilful leader.

The ground on which the battle of the Alma was fought is not difficult to understand. The plain over which the Allies advanced slopes gently downward for a mile. At the bottom of the slope is a bank, and below the bank a flat valley, three or four hundred yards wide, in which flows the Alma. If, then, a person turning his back to the sea, at the mouth of the river, moves up the Allies’ bank, he has on his right, across the valley, for the first mile, a steep cliff, as if part of the coast-line had turned back along the course of the river. The cliff then begins to resolve itself into broken heights, still steep, but not impracticable. These continue for nearly two more miles, when, the heights receding still farther, the slope to the river becomes more gentle, and undulates in knolls, the general character of the ground, however, being an upper and lower line of heights, with an intermediate plateau. The ground continues of this nature far up the stream. Everywhere the last summits formed the edge of a plain which could not be seen from the Allies’ side of the stream.

The Russian cavalry prevented reconnoissances which would have given some assurance of the manner in which Mentschikoff occupied the position. In the absence of these, maps and plans, and a distant view, coupled with a rough estimate of the enemy’s force, were all that could be relied on. With such data as these afforded, Marshal St Arnaud came to confer with Lord Raglan the night before the battle; and we must say that we think Mr Kinglake is rather hard upon the Marshal in his description of the interview. He seems to think there was something presumptuous in the fact of his coming with a prepared plan, bringing with him, too, a rough sketch of it drawn on paper. Now, that such a conference was highly necessary between two commanders about to fight a battle in concert, nobody will deny. And it is a very good thing, on such occasions, to have a plan constructed on the probabilities, because it serves as a basis for discussion. The Marshal’s plan was founded on the conjecture, that, as the plain at the top of the cliff could be swept by the guns of the ships, a space would be left near the sea unoccupied by the Russians. Into that space he proposed to push two divisions (Bosquet and the Turks), by two roads that led to it up the cliff. The remaining divisions were to advance against the Russian front; and he calculated that they would occupy so much of that front that the movement of the British, forming the left of the Allies, would be against the right flank of the enemy.

Such was the plan that the Marshal brought to discuss with Lord Raglan. But it seems that if he came with the hope of getting any suggestions or ideas in exchange, he was disappointed. “Without either combating or accepting the suggestion addressed to him, he simply assured the Marshal that he might rely upon the vigorous co-operation of the British army. The French plan seems to have made little impression on Lord Raglan’s mind. He foresaw, perhaps, that the ingenuity of the evening would be brought to nothingness by the teachings of the morrow.” And when they came next day into presence of the enemy, Mr Kinglake says: “If Lord Raglan had not already rejected the French plan of a flank attack by our forces, it would now have fallen to the ground. It had never made any impression on his mind.” In a note he says: “It became a plan simply preposterous as soon as it was apparent that St Arnaud would not confront any part of the Russian army except their left wing; for to make two flank movements, one against the enemy’s left, and the other against his right, and to do this without having any force wherewith to confront the enemy’s centre, would have been a plan requiring no comment to show its absurdity.”

Now Lord Raglan’s part in the interview is meant, as recorded, to show to his advantage. Yet we cannot think that this way of conducting conferences can be considered as displaying talent. Anybody can appear to conceal an opinion—even if he hasn’t got one. The Marshal might, according to this account, justly feel himself aggrieved—first, for having no notice taken of his plan; and, secondly, for having no grounds afforded for acting in concert with his ally in the coming battle. Nor do we think the plan absurd in principle, though it was erroneous in details. If to turn one flank of an enemy is an advantage, to turn both flanks will, in general, increase the advantage: whether it is practicable depends on the relative length of the opposing lines. Now the Russians had 39,000 men; the Allies had 63,000. And the English order of battle enables our line to cover more ground than equal numbers of the enemy. Therefore, after forming on an equal front, there would still be at least 12,000 men disposable for the turning of each flank; and 12,000 men on your flank is a serious matter. We say then that the plan, which was, of course, a suggestion, to be modified according to circumstances, was not in itself absurd in principle.

The Marshal, therefore, with Lord Raglan’s concurrence, as the French say—but, according to Mr Kinglake, with such expectations as he might have derived from the foregoing not very explicit interview—proceeded to execute his part of the plan by making his right column pass close to the sea. This was an error, for it was founded on a false assumption; he supposed the Russian left to be nearer the sea than it really was. He could not ascertain the truth, because, as is not uncommon in battles, he could not make a close reconnoissance, and the plain behind the cliff, being invisible from below, might contain an unknown number of Russians. A computation of the forces visible would not give certain means of judging of this point, because troops had been joining Mentschikoff from various parts—a large detachment had come in that morning.

The consequence, then, of this error was that more of the French line than had been expected overlapped the Russians—so much so that those on the extreme right never joined in the action. Moreover, they were on a narrower front than their numbers warranted; for though three divisions were in front, and two following them, yet the three in front formed two lines. If the two in rear are to be considered as a reserve, it was twice as large as is common. Thus the English only completed the front necessary to correspond with the Russian front without overlapping it, and their attack, therefore, was almost entirely a direct attack. The right French column was thrown away. The next to it only engaged in a distant artillery fire: even the third and fourth found themselves opposed to a force inadequate to their numbers. As Mr Kinglake well observes, if all the army had been of one nation, the direct attack would not have been made till that on the flank had already shaken the enemy’s line. But circumstances rendered it difficult to hold back the English divisions. The French did nothing to be proud of in the battle. We perfectly agree with Mr Kinglake that the official accounts and that of De Bazancourt are mere bombastic inventions. We know that they were opposed by numbers small in proportion to their own. That some of their divisions showed but little elan and made small progress, was evident during the battle. And with regard to their losses, which St Arnaud places at 1200, we do not deny that they may have lost that number of men that day; but if they did, the cholera must have been unusually severe on the 20th September, for there were no signs of such mortality on the battle-field.

The English then advanced, because the French demanded support, and because it might not have been judicious to remain longer inactive when our allies were engaged. Our divisions therefore advanced across the river. In doing so their order was broken by several causes. First, the vineyards and enclosures between the troops and the river; then the river itself; and lastly, the fact that the divisions in deploying had, by mistaking distance, considerably overlapped. It is evident that if an inferior army about to be attacked in position could choose how the attack should be made, it would desire that a great part of the enemy’s force should be directed where it would be useless, and that the remainder should make a direct advance. This was what the Allies did. But though there was no great generalship, the soldiership of the English was admirable. The divisional, brigade, and regimental officers took advantage of a sheltering rim of ground on the opposite bank to restore some degree of order in the broken ranks, and then led them straight up the slope in the teeth of the Russian guns. Torn by cannon-shot at close range, and by a hail of musketry from the numerous infantry—for here Mentschikoff had placed his heaviest masses—they nevertheless went on in a line which, if irregular, was still irresistible, drove the Russians back, and captured a gun. Then, being without support, having lost heavily, and being assailed by fresh reserves, the front line gave way and retreated down the hill. But by this time the Duke of Cambridge’s division was across the stream and moving up. The broken masses passed through the ranks, which closed and advanced solidly, with the same success as the first line, and the success was more enduring. English guns, hitherto opposed to the Russian artillery, were now brought across the stream—they were set free to do so partly by the progress of the French on the flank, partly by the action of two guns that Lord Raglan had brought across the stream in the space between the armies, and which, taking the Russian line in reverse, caused it to fall back. The English divisions thus maintained themselves—the heavy columns that advanced against them were repulsed partly by artillery, partly by the fire of the line—the Russians fell back slowly to the top of the heights, and retreated along the plain, pursued by the fire of our horse-artillery. The English batteries then advanced. When they reached the plateau the enemy’s masses were already at some distance, moving towards Sebastopol. The French on the right were coming up so deliberately that it was evident they had no thought of molesting the enemy’s retreat, and on a proposition being made to them to join in a pursuit they declined it.

Whether it was or was not owing to the cause to which Mr Kinglake attributes it—namely, to the fact that the French leaders, selected as they almost all were for their share in the coup d’état, were men in whom the troops had no confidence—it is certain that the reputation of the French army was not augmented by this action. The report of St Arnaud paints their valour and skill in the most brilliant colours. He does not scruple largely to exaggerate the numbers of the enemy. There were, according to him, 40,000 Russian bayonets, 6000 cavalry, and 180 guns opposed to the Allies. The true numbers were, according to Mr Kinglake, 36,000 infantry, 3400 cavalry, and 108 guns. The advantages of the Russians consisted in their strong position, their superiority in cavalry, and their 14 heavy guns. The movement of the French was ineffective, partly from misdirection, partly from their slowness to close with the enemy. To the English, therefore, fell a task as difficult as that which would have fallen to them in ordinary cases had the Russians been equal in strength to the Allies—and the battle of the Alma is eminently an English victory.

It is evident that if the general of an inferior army can oppose one great mass of his enemy with a small number of his troops, and is thus at liberty to meet the remainder on equal terms, he has gained a great point in his favour; and this Mentschikoff did. Yet we perfectly agree with Mr Kinglake that Mentschikoff showed no talent, and did no justice to his troops. As we have seen, he allowed the march to be unmolested. He made no use of the time at his disposal to strengthen his position artificially. Mr Kinglake rightly asserts this in contradiction to official and other authorities. Fords might have been rendered impracticable, roads obstructed, field-works thrown up, and the advancing troops would thus have been detained under the heavy fire of the defenders, till on closing, if they should succeed in closing, it would be with numbers too much diminished for success. But there were no intrenchments nor obstacles worth mentioning on the field. And we regret to observe that Mr Kinglake, though he explains in a note that he knows the term to be inapplicable, and that he only follows an established precedent, talks of the position of the Russian battery as “the Great Redoubt.” We regret it, because the impression conveyed is false to those who do not know the truth, and irrelevant to those who do. The only work was a bank of earth not a yard high, which partially covered the Russian guns of position, and which was probably intended as much for preventing them from running down the hill as for anything else. There were no embrasures, for, as the guns looked over the bank, none were necessary; it had not even the additional impediment of a ditch in front, the earth which formed it being taken from spaces dug between the guns. It was no more like a “Great Redoubt,” than it was like the Great Wall of China. And this being the case, all such expressions as “storming” are quite inapplicable.

It is evident that, if an army superior in numbers wishes to bring its superiority to bear, it must outflank the enemy on one or both sides. Which flank, then, would it have been best in the present case to turn? The French turned the left. There was the natural temptation of advancing over ground where the turning columns were protected by the fire of the fleet. But they moved against an imaginary foe, and a large part of the force might have been as well on board ship for all the effect it had on the action. Moreover, though the turning movement was completed, yet it had none of its legitimate effects, for the Russians left only two guns and no prisoners. It is clear then that none of the advantages to be expected from a successful attack in flank followed here.

Now suppose—as there are but two flanks to an enemy, and no great things had been done by turning one—that the manœuvre had been effected against the other. The Allies would have moved away from the sea up the river. The road next the sea was closed to the Russians by the ships’ broadsides. Opposite the next road, that by which Bosquet led his second brigade, the Turks might have been left. The right of the French would then have been where the right of the English really was, that is, in the village of Bourliouk. And the English would have stretched so far beyond the enemy’s right, that at least three divisions would have been available for turning that flank. To the Russians, seeing this, only certain alternatives would be possible: either to try to thrust themselves between us and the sea—in which case the cliff would have restricted them to the one road guarded by the Turks, and where any part of their force that made the attempt would be lost if it should fail, as it certainly would fail; or, secondly, an extension of their already sufficiently extended line till its length corresponded with that of the Allies, by which extension it would be fatally weakened; or, thirdly, a movement of the entire army to the right, which would have uncovered the Sebastopol road, and was therefore not to be thought of. Therefore the Russians must have stood to fight on the ground they occupied, throwing back their right wing to meet the threatened attack on their flank. The Allied artillery should then have been massed—one portion to oppose the great battery, one to pour a storm of shot on the right wing, the object of attack; and the horse-artillery and one or two batteries, after flanking the advance from their own side of the river, should have been held ready to follow the flanking columns of attack as soon as they should be established on the other bank. The advance, instead of being in echelon from the right, would be in echelon from the left—the Light Division, followed by the First and Fourth, would make the turning movement and attack the right wing—the remaining English divisions would advance upon the centre, and upon the angle formed by the centre and right; and, as soon as the Russian line fronting the river should be shaken by the front and flank attack and the reverse fire, the French divisions advancing would find their share of the task easy. Two results would have followed, both important—the first, that the position would have been carried with much less loss of life—secondly, that the losses of the Russians would have been far greater. For it is to be observed that, by turning the left of the Russians, and interposing between them and the sea, they were driven back along their proper line of retreat; whereas, had the right been turned, the English left wing, pushing obliquely across the enemy’s rear, would have reached the Sebastopol road on the top of the plateau, and the result of that would have been to drive the beaten troops towards the sea, and to enclose all that part of the Russian left which should be last to retreat between our line and the cliffs, thus capturing many prisoners. And as the enemy were superior in cavalry, the English left must have carefully guarded itself, during its advance, from the Russian horse, first, by our artillery on our own side of the river, and afterwards by guns following in support, by battalions on the left echeloned in squares, and by our own cavalry. Many reasons, then, induce us to consider the French attack a mistake. And the more complete turning movement which Mr Kinglake seems, as if by authority, to ascribe to Marshal Pelissier, as what he would have done—namely, “to avoid all encounter with the enemy on his chosen stronghold by taking ample ground to their left, and boldly marching round him”—would have been objectionable, inasmuch as it would have left no option of retreating on Eupatoria, in case the attack should prove unsuccessful; and no plan can be sound that does not provide for the contingency of defeat.

Mr Kinglake modestly declines to give an opinion on the question of what plan might have been better. But he need not have scrupled to do so, as he deals extremely well with the technicalities of military art. His account of the manœuvres preceding and during the battle is remarkably clear. His discussion as to the respective merits of lines and columns shows that he thoroughly appreciates the philosophy of the subject. But it is not so much to the credit of his estimate of what constitutes generalship, that he implies so great approval of Lord Raglan’s solitary ride beyond the enemy’s front, and of his continued occupation of the knoll there throughout the stress of the battle. Of course it would be a great advantage to a general in every action to be able to see exactly what was passing in rear of the enemy’s line. But it would be an advantage only as it would give him the means of directing his own troops with greater certainty. To see the enemy’s rear, at the expense of losing the control of his own army, would be quite the reverse of an advantage. And imagine the state of things if two opposing generals in a battle should be absorbed in their efforts to pass, like two pawns at chess, behind the opposing lines. If it had appeared to the general that an opportunity existed for wedging a part of his force within a weak spot of the enemy’s line, staff officers might have been sent to ascertain the fact, while the guns and their escort required to effect the manœuvre might have been brought from the reserve, or the nearest available division, and posted in readiness to advance. We know that during this excursion of Lord Raglan the English divisions were confused for want of a controlling power to direct them. The action of the English artillery was without unity, at a time when a concentrated fire against the hill on which the attack was to be made would have had a most important influence on the result. Mr Kinglake tells us that Lord Raglan from his knoll witnessed the first advance of the troops of our first line, and saw that they would not be able to hold their ground because they were not supported; but adds, that he did not attempt to apply a remedy, because no order sent by him could possibly arrive in time to be of service. Surely this of itself might have convinced Mr Kinglake that the general’s place was elsewhere. And we will add, that, at the close of the struggle, our successful troops did not receive that impulsion which none but the supreme directing authority can give, and which was necessary to push the victory home.

But though we do not think the occasions for praising Lord Raglan are always judiciously chosen, we thoroughly agree in Mr Kinglake’s estimate of the character of that kind excellent gentleman and gallant soldier. His tact, temper, and bearing were all of a kind calculated to be of eminent service in an allied command, and secured to him at once the attachment of his own army and the respect of the French.

Mr Kinglake has scarcely accomplished half of that task which is so weighty, but which his qualities as a narrator have made to seem so light. And it is because so many events yet remain to receive his impress, that we would venture to remind him how the French army in the Crimea, though it did not by its first achievements enhance its reputation, yet performed many great and gallant actions. The aid which Bosquet brought us at Inkermann, though long in coming, was effectual. The part of the French in that battle, infantry and artillery, was highly honourable. They often maintained terrible conflicts in the trenches, where both sides fought well, but where the French were victors. Their arrangements for receiving the attack on the Tchernaya were such that the assailant never had a chance of penetrating their lines. And their terrible losses in the final assault prove the magnitude of the obstacles they encountered, and the ardour with which they overcame them. But while we do not forget this, neither can we regret that thus far Mr Kinglake has sought to redress the balance of history, by awarding to our army its share of credit. Reputation is the breath of its nostrils, and our allies have appeared but too desirous to monopolise what was gained in this war.

And we also venture to observe that Mr Kinglake’s enemies—and he has scattered in these volumes dragon’s teeth enough to produce a plentiful crop—may find occasion to say that in praising his friends he is equally uncompromising as in censuring his foes. Small traits of character receive undue prominence, small merits, undue laudation; as, for instance, when the way in which the Highland Brigade was made to drink at the Bulganak is praised as if it were a stroke of military genius, and where a paragraph is devoted to describing how its commander pronounced the not very remarkable words, “Forward, 42d!” and when it is further added, “‘As a steed that knows his rider,’ the great heart of the battalion bounded proudly to his touch,” Mr Kinglake lets himself slip into a style much beneath his own. But what no enemy can deny is the extraordinary animation, clearness, sustained interest, and dramatic as well as descriptive excellence of the work. A vast field for these qualities yet remains—the flank march, the commencement of the siege, the hurricane, the action of Balaklava (fine soil for dragon’s teeth), the battle of Inkermann, the long calamities and glories of the trenches, the death of the Czar, and of the English commander, the final assault, and the destruction of the stronghold—into all these scenes we shall follow Mr Kinglake, confident of seeing them treated by a great artist.

As a concluding remark, we will say that we think no history of this war can be complete which does not devote a chapter to the discussion of the causes which made the British army of 1854 so different, in all except fighting power, from the British army of 1814, as a machine of war. The long peace, the growth of the commercial spirit, the Peace Party, the administration of the army by the Duke of Wellington, and the influence of the long-continued public demand for economy, must all be taken into account before the breaking down of that machine, as to be recorded hereafter, can be fairly and fully accounted for, and a true comparison drawn between our military system and that of the French.