from his estate to die in disgrace, disease, exile. When we talk
to-day with cultivated Frenchmen of that half-forgotten epoch, and
of the book which bared its horrors, we are met by their response
of ardent gratitude to the man who joined to passionate hatred of
iniquity surpassing capacity for denouncing it; their avowal that
with all its frequent exposure of their military shortcomings and
depreciation of their national character, no English chronicle of
the century stands higher in their esteem than the history of the
war in the Crimea.

The close of the book is grim and tragic in the main, the stir of
gallant fights exchanged for the dreary course of siege,
intrenchment, mine and countermine. We have the awful winter on
the heights, the November hurricane, the foiled bombardments, the
cruel blunder of the Karabelnaya assault, the bitter natural
discontent at home, the weak subservience of our government to
misdirected clamour, the touching help-fraught advent of the Lady
Nurses: then, just as better prospects dawn, the Chief's collapse
and death. From the morrow of Inkerman to the end, through no
fault of his, the historian's chariot wheels drag. More and more
one sees how from the nature of the task, except for the flush of
contemporary interest then, except by military students now, it is
not a work to be popularly read; the exhausted interest of its
subject swamps the genius of its narrator. Scattered through its
more serious matter are gems with the old "Eothen" sparkle, of
periphrasis, aphorism, felicitous phrase and pregnant epithet.
Such is the fine analogy between the worship of holy shrines and
the lover's homage to the spot which his mistress's feet have trod;
such France's tolerance of the Elysee brethren compared to the Arab
laying his verminous burnous upon an ant-hill; the apt quotation