to the port, as the "Caradoc," steaming away with her honoured
freight, flies out her "Farewell" signal, the narrative abruptly
ends. The months of the siege which still remained might be left
to other hands or lapse untold. Troy had still to be taken when
Hector died; but with his funeral dirge the Iliad closed, the blind
bard's task was over:


"Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade."


If the framework of the narrative is epic, its treatment is
frequently dramatic. The "Usage of Europe" in the opening pages is
not so much a record as a personification of unwritten Law: the
Great Eltchi tramps the stage with a majesty sometimes bordering on
fustian. Dramatic is the story of the sleeping Cabinet. "It was
evening--a summer evening"--one thinks of a world-famous passage in
the "De Corona"--when the Duke of Newcastle carried to Richmond
Lodge the fateful despatch committing England to the war. "Before
the reading of the Paper had long continued, all the members of the
Cabinet except a small minority were overcome with sleep"; the few
who remained awake were in a quiet, assenting frame of mind, and
the despatch "received from the Cabinet the kind of approval which
is awarded to an unobjectionable Sermon." Not less dramatic is
Nolan's death; the unearthly shriek of the slain corpse erect in
saddle with sword arm high in air, as the dead horseman rode still
seated through the 13th Light Dragoons; the "Minden Yell" of the
20th driving down upon the Iakoutsk battalion; the sustained and
scathing satire on the Notre Dame Te Deum for the Boulevard