The noble spirit which originated the volunteer movement is one of which the nation may justly feel proud; it exhibits and fosters a patriotic and military spirit in the country, which will render us more fit than any other people to cope with a powerful enemy. The moral effect of this national movement will influence other countries; it will dissipate the erroneous idea that the English are only a trading, and not a warlike people, and make them more cautious of attacking us.
In actual service, the volunteers will be valuable behind works; thus releasing a corresponding number of the regular troops from garrison service: but it cannot be too strongly impressed upon them, that unless they will submit to the necessary training as soldiers, and are complete in organization as infantry, no general in the world will have any confidence in them as a field force. The occasional embodiment of our volunteers at some of the great camps, as before recommended, would appear the most available means of training them for general service. It would also have another good effect, by demonstrating to many who are now carried away by their enthusiasm, how far they may be really calculated or prepared for the necessary trials and sacrifices incidental upon taking the field in the emergency. It will then be perceived by many that their age, want of physical stamina, or inability to dispense with habitual comforts which may be absolutely necessary to them, would render them totally unequal to the task they would willingly undertake. It would be far better that these should be weeded from the field corps of volunteers, and not remain to give a false appearance of their strength for actual service.
Lastly, there may be some who, on reflection, must be aware that certain family ties, or private concerns, may imperatively forbid their joining the service at the last moment, and it would be far better that they should withdraw betimes from the engagement. For it should be borne in mind that these bodies are volunteers, in the strictest sense of the term; their presence or continuance in the field cannot be constrained. The effort to bear all the trials and hardships of a campaign requires a patience and endurance which will yield, even where there is thorough ardour in the cause, and great personal courage, unless supported by physical strength. The Volunteer Corps is a service in which the country must trust entirely to the honour of the individuals composing it; and certainly, those who shall stand the test will be peculiarly entitled to the gratitude of the nation.
But while deprecating the employment in the field of any volunteers who are not hardy and trained soldiers, or who have households to protect and business to attend to, we must not be supposed to recommend the withdrawal from the ranks of all who are not available for actual service with regular troops: far from it. There is not a man who has been drilled as a volunteer but may be serviceable to the community in a variety of ways at home, by supplying the place of regular soldiers in mounting guard as sentries, acting as “orderlies” for transmitting orders between the government officers and head-quarters, as assistants in the hospital service, as extra clerks in the commissariat and other departments, and in serving as a military police. Indeed good service might be rendered to the country by gentlemen of character, ability, and intelligence, sufficiently au fait to the business of a soldier to execute with military precision and promptitude such duties as would not involve any greater amount of fatigue and exposure than a man of average health and strength could sustain without injury: they would form a bodyguard, composed of fathers of families and the younger and less robust of the volunteers, for the protection of their homes and maintaining the peace of cities and towns; and competent to fill offices of trust in connection with the military and civil authorities. The country would thus derive the full benefit of the services of every volunteer in the kingdom; and no man who had entered the ranks but would have the satisfaction of knowing that he was serving his Queen and Country in the most effective way.
A Man of Letters of the Last Generation.
There are fashions in books, as there are in the cut of clothes, or the building of houses; and if from the great library of our race we take down the representative volumes, we shall find that successive ages differ almost as much as the several countries of the world. The one half of the century scarcely knows what the other half has done, save through its lasting works, among which books alone possess the gift of speech. Yet the guild of literature properly knows no bounds of space or time. If the tricks of craft like those of society belong to the passing day, literature has been, beyond all other human influences, enduring and continuous in the main current of its spirit; and each period has been the stronger if it has recognized so much of its possessions as was inherited from its predecessor, including the power to conquer more. A powerful sense of brotherhood clings to all the veritable members of the fraternity, whose highest diploma is posthumous; and we cannot see the lingering representatives of a past day depart, without feeling that one of the great family has gone. A writer whom we have lost in the year just closed peculiarly associated past and present, by his own hopeful work for “progress” towards the future, and his affectionate lingering with the past, and above all by the strong personal feeling which he brought to his work. Leigh Hunt belonged essentially to the earlier portion of the nineteenth century; but, born in the year when Samuel Johnson died, living among the old poets, and labouring to draw forth the spirit which the first half has breathed into the latter half of the century, he may be said to have been one of those true servitors of the library who unite all ages with the one we live in. The representative man of a school gone by, in his history we read the introduction to our own.
Isaac, the father of Leigh Hunt, was the descendant of one of the oldest settlers in luxurious Barbadoes. He was sent to develop better fortunes by studying at college in Philadelphia, where he unsettled in life; for, having obtained some repute as an advocate, and married the daughter of the stern merchant, Stephen Shewell, against her father’s pleasure, Isaac contumaciously opposed the sovereign people by espousing the side of royalty, and fled with broken fortunes to England. Here he found not much royal gratitude, much popularity as a preacher in holy orders—taken as a refuge from want,—but no preferment. With tutorships, and help from relatives, he managed to rub on; he sent Leigh, the first of his sons born in England, to the school of Christ Hospital, and he lived long enough to see him an established writer. Isaac was a man rather under than above the middle stature, fair in complexion, smoothly handsome, so engaging in address as to be readily and undeservedly suspected of insincerity, and in most things utterly unlike his son. His wife, Mary Shewell, a tall, slender woman, with Quaker breeding, a dark thoughtful complexion, a heart tender beyond the wont of the world, and a conscience tenderer still, contributed more than the father to mould the habits and feelings of the son. School and books did the rest. His earlier days, save during the long semi-monastic confinement of the Blue-coat School, were passed in uncertain alternations between the care-stricken home and the more luxurious houses of wealthier relatives and friends. In his time Christ Hospital was the very nursery for a scholarly scholar. It was divided into the commercial, the nautical, and the grammar schools; in all, the scholars had hard fare, and much church service; and in the grammar school plenty of Greek and Latin. Leigh’s antecedents and school training destined him for the church; a habit of stammering, which disappeared as he grew up, was among the adverse accidents which reserved him for the vocation to which he was born—Literature. But before he left the unsettled roof of his parents, the youth had been to other schools besides Christ Hospital. His father had been a royalist flying from infuriated republicans, and doomed to learn in the metropolitan country the common mistrust of kings. He left America a lawyer, to become a clergyman here; and entered the pulpit a Church of England-man, to become, after the mild example of his wife, a Universalist. Born after his mother had suffered from the terrors of the revolution, and a severe attack of jaundice, Leigh inherited an anxious, speculative temperament; to be the sport of unimaginative brothers, who terrified him by personating the hideous “Mantichora,” about which he had tremblingly read and talked, and of schoolfellows, with their ghostly traditions and rough, summary, practical satire. He had been made acquainted with poverty, yet familiarized to the sight of ease and refined luxury. His father, if “socially” inclined, yet read eloquently and critically; his mother read earnestly, piously, and charitably; reading was the business of his school, reading was his recreation; and at the age of fifteen, he threw off his blue coat, a tall stripling, with West Indian blood, a Quaker conscience, and a fancy excited rather than disciplined by his scholastic studies, to put on the lax costume of the day, and be tried in the dubious ordeal of its laxer customs.
His severest trial arose from the vanities, rather than the vices to which such a youth would be exposed. He had already been sufficiently “in love,”—now with the anonymous sister of a schoolfellow, next with his fair cousin Fanny, then with the enchanting Almeria,—to be shielded from the worst seductions that can beset a youth; and he was early engaged to the lady whom he married in 1809. But the vanities beset him in a shape of unwonted power. The stripling, whose essays the terrible Boyer, of the Blue-coat School, had crumpled up, became the popular young author of published poems, and not much later the stern critic of the News, whose castigations made actors wince and playwrights launch prologues at him. Thenceforward the vicissitudes of his life, save in the inevitable vicissitudes of mortality, were professional rather than personal; though he always threw his personality into his profession. He tried a clerkship under his brother Stephen, an attorney; and a clerkship in the War Office, under the patronage of the dignified Mr. Addington; but finally he left the desk, legal or official, for the desk literary, to devote himself to the Examiner, set up in 1808 with his brother John. He went to prison for two years in 1813, rather than forfeit his consistency as a political writer. It was as a vindicator of liberal principles in politics, sociology (word then unused), and art, that he attracted the friendship of Byron and Shelley; it was to accomplish the literary speculation of the Liberal that he set out for Italy in 1821; it was to study Italy and the Italians, with a view to “improve” that and other “subjects,” that he stopped in Italy till the autumn of 1825. He returned to England to try his fortune with books in prose and verse, in periodicals of his own or others’; and it was in the midst of unrelinquished work that he placidly laid himself down to sleep in August, 1859,—his last words of anxiety being for Italy and her enlarging hopes, his latest breath uttering inquiries and messages of affection. This is essentially a literary life; but it is given to a literature in which there is life,—for Leigh Hunt, although he dwelled and passed his days in the library, was no “book-worm,” divorced from human existence, its natural instincts and affections. On the contrary, he carried into his study a large heart and a strong pulse; to him the books spoke in the voice of his fellow-men, audible from the earliest ages, and he loved to be followed into his retreat by friends from the outer world.