it

or would simply prevent his stockings falling over his shoes. Be that as may, he does not fail to remind France that the Order of the Garter was founded to commemorate Crécy, where 30,000 English battirent à plate couture 68,000 French, commanded by Philippe de Valois.

The little electioneering tiff with our Transatlantic cousins was puffed up into enormous proportions by the same party. Mr. Soulé had treated the Duke of Alba and his sister with democratic indifference; Mr. Mason had resented Mr. Drouyn de Lhuys's impertinences; if France and England were going to occupy the Crimea, the United States would do the same with Cuba. But this was not all, the Muscovite duck took a higher flight.

"War between England and France on the one side, and the United States on the other," wrote the bird with red caruncles, "would be a happy event for the constitutional states and the free countries of the Dominated by its commercial interests, England, in allying itself with Bonapartised France, has deserted the cause of liberty of thought and of human dignity, and has sacrificed the security of the smaller states of the west. Who knows but that America may not take up the noble and glorious mission, and put an end to that Anglo-French preponderance, which is far more threatening to Europe than Russian preponderance!"

What a grandiose anticipation, clothed in still more grandiose and mystified language! Who will explain what is meant by deserting human dignity?

In the mean time, we are told, waiting for Jonathan's off-hand castigation of France and England, that the Cossacks of the theatres of the Boulevards were so cruelly whopped every night that no one could be found to take the part of Russian, except at an increase of salary. The Parisians could not be brought to see any difference between the Russian of the boards of the Gaîté and the Russian at Sebastopol; the imperial lyrists delighted in picturing to the public a French grenadier surrounding three hundred Cossacks, and taking them all prisoners. And yet le peuple le plus spirituel du monde has a little dramatic sarcasm to the following effect:

Captain, I have caught a Bedouin !"

"Well, bring him here."

Captain! he won't come."

"Well, then, stupid, let him go!"

"But, Captain, he won't let loose his hold of me!"

The sincerity of the alliance of France and England these professional embroilers of nations proclaim to be a falsehood, and what are their proofs? Why, that if a Frenchman is heard to speak his native tongue in the populous quarters of London, he will be called a French dog. The statement is a falsehood, not the alliance. In the theatres and in the puppet-shows, say they, the Frenchman is as in the time of King George, a barber living upon frog soup, adorned with a frill, but having no shirt! France, with whom to think otherwise than is ordained by the consigne de l'empereur, is a journey to Cayenne, fraternises with England as a dog or a cat whom we force to receive our caresses, to avoid the stick. To fire upon a German or a Russian the French are obliged to pull the trigger of their guns, but turned upon the English they would go off by themselves!

The anti-veracious historians of the war who swarm in Brussels-the modern Athens, as far as national, moral, and political turpitude are concerned-tell a tale of a certain parrot, much in favour with Admiral Suffren-a name of renown in the seventeenth century-for speaking many languages, but who, after being present at a great naval engagement, could repeat nothing but "Boom, boom, boom." The same thing they tell us has been the case with a prince of royal English blood, who since the battle of Inkerman has never been able to answer any question proposed to him but by "Boom, pan, pan, cling, clang, krasch !"

Piedmont-the only free and constitutional state in Italy, the hope of all who have the progress of that once happy land at heart, and the dread of its priest-ridden neighbours-is, in the eyes of the same truculent writers, "a nest of dupes, who will at the best be found useful to fill up the ditches of Sebastopol with their bodies." Germany cannot be made to understand that its honour is concerned in going forth to die either to protect English manufactures or to consolidate the throne of Napoleon III.! Nor can it be made to understand that the Danube is a German river, forcibly and unjustifiably taken possession of by Russia; that Poland and Finland were once as independent as Turkey; and that without the heroic and generous devotion of France and England the German and Scandinavian states would have been the first after Turkey to fall prostrate beneath the yoke of the Muscovite. A war to protect India indeed! If others had the candour and the honesty to avow it-if their princes were not Russian at heart, while their people are German by name-they would acknowledge that the sufferings and the triumphs of the Allies cannot but ultimately tell more for their benefit than for that of the parties immediately engaged. But such is national and political gratitude! It has been made one of the boasts of modern times that the morality of private life had found its way into that of politics; that duplicity, Punic faith, and disloyalty had disappeared for ever from the cabinets of Europe. Never was there a greater mistake;-never was there a time when the simple political relations of people, and the causes of a just war, have been more shamefully misrepresented, or that more falsehoods have been so industriously circulated by those in power concerning the acts and motives of the Allies. Of fair argument there is none. "Only declare," Napoleon III. asked, in the presence of the enlightened representatives of the science, art, and industry of Europe assembled at the Paris Exhibition, "who is in the right and who is in the wrong ?" No, it would not suit the political tactics of Russia, or of Austria, or of Prussia to answer that question. They supplant fair argument by shameless misrepresentations, and distort facts and the sources of facts in the mirror of their own evil and designing consciences.

The English army, we are told, is no longer aught but a phantom that Russia would cast into the sea to-morrow if France did not protect with its sword her historical enemy. While two hundred Anglo-Francs sleep every night in the sleep that knows no waking, their masters are dancing in the palaces of the Tuileries and of Windsor! People are still what they ever were, vile and stupid cattle, whom dogs with golden collars drive to the slaughter-house....

And what a remorse to gouty generals and an incapable ministry must that phantom be! To think that the Highland regiments are now com

posed of Moors and Egyptians; the Coldstream Guards come from Asia Minor; and on the hybrid flags St. George is seen embracing the Prophet of Mecca! Yet such is the kind of information seriously and soberly propagated on the Continent by the philo-Russian party. As to the French army, the historian of Notre Dame has also set himself up as its historian. And what does the veracious Victor Hugo tell us, from those hospitable shores where the very waves rise up in remonstrance at such unblushing falsity. "France had an army, the first in the world, admirable, incomparable, téte de colonne du genre humain, which had only to sound its bugles to make all the old sceptres and all the antique chains of the Continent fall to dust, that army Monsieur Bonaparte (democratic style) took it, wrapped it in the shroud of the 2nd of December, and then went about in search of a tomb. He found it in the Crimea." If big words could blow the monstrous alliance of France and England to the windsif Munchausen blasts could hurl sceptres in the dust-if prodigious lies could annihilate two armies, all no doubt would be as those who wish it. Fortunately it is not so: the furious bombast of the disappointed demagogue, and the more measured and ingenious misrepresentation of the political hireling, may have an effect with a few for a day, but it vanishes swift as fog before the sun. Some must wonder, if with the progress of events that come to belie the prophecies of evil, and the better knowledge that sweeps away the cobwebs spun by such unclean hands, there does not come sometimes a blush to tingle their faces of bronze. Not in the least; failure only hardens them; like the oft-convicted, they feel themselves to be the self-constituted pariahs of society, they have no other course left open to them but that to which their own ignoble tastes have elected them, and they go on undaunted, wondering, perchance, if they could tell the truth once-they know it could only be by chance that such a consummation could be arrived at-for they never conscientiously seek for it, they never, for the sake even of the great brotherhood of humanity, hope for it.

The French, they tell us, installed at Constantinople, will not withdraw thence, even if peace was signed to-morrow. England could not demur; as a military power she now stands second to Piedmont and Holland. The Life Guards have already no better chargers than Uncle Toby's hobby-horse. She is no more than a humble vassal of France, a pashalik in which the mind of the Tuileries dominates every will. She is only a dead body attached to the car of her enemy. Napoleon is enthroned at Windsor. The nephew of the conquered of Saint Helena has at his feet England enervated and humiliated. To gratify the new arbiter of the destinies of Great Britain, the lord mayor and aldermen (uniformly believed on the Continent to be only inferior in power to the Queen) issued their commands that for the future Waterloo Bridge shall be called the Bridge of the 2nd of December. The Waterloo Column (where does it stand?) is to be called Colonne de la Foi du Serment. Trafalgarsquare is to be called Cayenne-place. The statue of Wellington in Hyde Park is veiled with crape, and the monuments of Nelson and Pitt are covered with canopies upon which glitter in golden letters Vive Napoléon III.!

The prophecies for the future are not less amusing than these veracious accounts of the past. Millions of Mongolian, Tartar, Turkman, and

Cossack horsemen, we are told, are mounting their war-steeds as in the time of Attila. A mysterious hand points out to them the West. It is vain that we seek for the Etius who shall have the power to stay this flood which will sweep away the French Low Empire. They forget that other countries, in whose ungrateful cause England and France are allied, lie between these barbarian hordes and the latter people. Is it there that we are to witness the gigantic battles also prophesied, in which sixteen hundred thousand corpses shall strew the ground?

Truly the passions engendered by the various political phases through which France has had to pass during a very brief space of time have attained a virulence seldom witnessed in the bygone history of any people. So intense is the hatred of some of the exiles to the existing government, that they would rather see the Russians in Paris than the dynasty of Napoleon. They stop at no misrepresentation or falsehood that will throw distrust between England and France. They are so savagely inconsistent in their political hatred, that in one page they speak of Waterloo as destroying a sanguinary despotism and assuring the liberties of the West, and in another they denounce the pilgrimage of the English to the field of battle as the greatest insult that can be offered to the empire, and they call upon France to revenge it by the destruction of the modern Carthage. To bring about this happy state of universal war, and to make of all mankind a mere race of cut-throats, they show, as we think we have made manifest by some of our quotations, that they think so little of human nature and human intelligence as to believe that there is not a lie so gross that it may not be thrown out as a bait to human folly, and human ignorance and stupidity.

How different are the feelings excited by perusing the realities of war as depicted by an English lady-a soldier's wife-Mrs. Henry Duberly. The meek confidence in what is right, the unaffected sympathy for all that is good, the pure love of nature, of man and beast, breathing affection for all around, from the flower of the plain to the kind-eyed horse, and, above all, to a gallant husband, only tempered by that true English spirit of piety which is so totally wanting to calm the throbbing temples of exciters of discord and revolution-the apologists of assassination. "God dear husband and me from dying in the midst of the din of life! The very angels must stand aloof. God is our hope and strength, and without Him we should utterly fail." Such is the beautiful and pathetic language of an English soldier's wife, death in its most inexorable gripe at the time carrying off soldiers and sailors alike on the first grand transit from Varna to the Crimea, and when during one of the officers' deathstruggles his brother-officers were dining in the saloon, only separated from the ghastly wrangle by a screen.

save my

And then, again, when landed at Eupatoria, the first faint news came of a battle at Alma. "Was awoke from a restless sleep by the entrance of my maid—a soldier's wife with her apron over her eyes. I naturally asked what was the matter. 'Oh! ma'am! Captain Tatham has sent to say he has received despatches, which will oblige him to leave Eupatoria to-day. And there has been a dreadful battle-500 English killed and 3000 Russians; and our poor cavalry fellows are all killed; and the Lord be good to us, we're all widows.'

"God, and he only, knows how the next hour was passed-until the blessed words, O thou of little faith' rang in my heart."

"The guns which we had heard,” adds the noble and generous-hearted woman, a little further on, "as we were breasting our swift way from Kalamita to Eupatoria, were merely messengers to us of the heavy firing inland, causing wounds, blood, and sudden death-lives, for which we would gladly give our own, extinguished in a moment; hands flung out in agony, faces calm and still in death; all our prayers unavailing now: no more speech, no more life, no more love." When day after day passed by without any decisive intelligence, "Captain Fraser," she relates, "caught a magnificent death's-head moth, and gave it to me. I shivered as I accepted it. This life of absence and suspense becomes at times intolerable. Oh, when shall I rejoin the army, from which I never ought to have been separated! Any hardship, any action, is better than passive anxiety."

The wish was not far from its accomplishment. The Pride of the Ocean was towed into Balaklava harbour by the Simla on the 3rd of October with Mrs. Duberly on board, and the same afternoon she was joined by her husband. It was, however, impossible for a lady to live in the camp, so our heroine had to live on board ship, contenting herself with almost daily rides to the camp and lines. At this time, says Mrs. Duberly, "we thought Sebastopol was to stand, perhaps, a three days' siege more likely a single day's; while some, more arrogant still, allowed it eight hours to resist the fury of the Allies!"

They were, however, soon "disillusionised." Time soon showed that the damage done to the town by the first bombardment had been much less than was fancied. As to the ships, "they were a great deal too much mauled to be able to go in again for some time." Indeed, they never tried it again. Then came the oft-told battle of Balaklava, but it will bear being viewed in a new light-as pictured forth by a lady often spoken of in the French correspondence as one who, by the positions she occupied on the occasion of most of the great encounters, would, young and fair as she was, be able to give her own experiences of the horrors of war.

Wednesday, 25th.-Feeling very far from well, I decided on remaining quietly on board ship to-day; but on looking through my stern cabin windows, at eight o'clock, I saw my horse saddled and waiting on the beach, in charge of our soldier-servant on the pony. A note was put into my hands from Henry, a moment after. It ran thus: "The battle of Balaklava has begun, and promises to be a hot one. I send you the horse. Lose no time, but come up as quickly as you can do not wait for breakfast."

Words full of meaning! I dressed in haste, went ashore without delay, and, mounting my horse "Bob," started as fast as the narrow and crowded streets would permit. I was hardly clear of the town, before I met a commissariat officer, who told me that the Turks had abandoned all their batteries, and were running towards the town. He begged me to keep as much to the left as possible, and, of all things, to lose no time in getting amongst our own men, as the Russian force was pouring on us; adding, "For God's sake, ride fast, or you may not reach the camp alive." Captain Howard, whom I met a moment after, assured me that I might proceed; but added, "Lose no time."

Turning off into a short cut of grass, and stretching into his stride, the old horse laid himself out to his work, and soon reaching the main road, we clattered on towards the camp. The road was almost blocked up with flying Turks, some running hard, vociferating, "Ship Johnny! Ship Johnny!" while others came along laden with pots, kettles, arms, and plunder of every description, chiefly