the Hell it probably deserved.  She was the incarnation of the Scarlet Woman; she was worse, she was a Puseyite, a traitor in the camp of England’s decent Church.  “No,” cried the others, “she is worse even than a Puseyite.  She is a Unitarian; it is doubtful whether her father’s belief in the Athanasian Creed is intelligent and sincere.”  Finally, the climax in her iniquities of mind and conduct reached its height and she was publicly denounced as a Supralapsarian.  I doubt whether, at the present day, the coward’s horror at the sight of courage, the politician’s alarm at the sound of principle, or envy’s utmost malignity would go so far as to call a woman that.

I dwell on the opposition and abuse that beset Florence Nightingale’s undertaking, because they are pleasanter and more instructive than the sentimentality into which her detractors converted their abuse when her achievement was publicly glorified.  It is significant that, in its minute account of the Crimean War, the Annual Register of the time appears to have made no mention of her till the war was over and she had received a jewel from the Queen.  Then it uttered its little complaint that “the gentler sex seems altogether excluded from public reward.”  Well, it is matter for small regret that a great woman should not be offered such titles as are bestowed upon the failures in Cabinets, the contributors to party funds, and the party traitors whom it is hoped to restrain from treachery.  But whether a peerage would have honoured her or not, there is no question of the disservice done to the truth of her character by those whose sentimental titles of “Lady with the Lamp,” “Leader of the Angel Band,” “Queen of the Gracious Dynasty,” “Ministering angel, thou!” and all the rest of it have created an ideal as false as it is mawkish.  Did the sentimentalists, at first so horrified at her action, really suppose that the service which in the end they were compelled to admire could ever have been accomplished by a soft and maudlin being such as their imagination created, all brimming eyes and heartfelt sighs, angelic draperies and white-winged shadows that hairy soldiers turned to kiss?

To those who have read her books and the letters written to her by one of the sanest and least ecstatic men of her day, or have conversed with people who knew her well, it is evident that Florence Nightingale was at no point like that.  Her temptations led to love of mastery and impatience with fools.  Like all great organisers, quick and practical in determination, she found extreme difficulty in suffering fools gladly.  To relieve her irritation at their folly, she used to write her private opinions of their value on the blotting-paper while they chattered.  It was not for angelic sympathy or enthusiasm that Sidney Herbert chose her in his famous invitation, but for “administrative capacity and experience.”  Those were the real secrets of her great accomplishment, and one remembers her own scorn of “the commonly received