hoped to be the sick man’s principal heir.  He had confidently reckoned on English co-operation when the Turkish empire should at last be dismembered; he was now to find, not only that co-operation would be withheld, but that strong opposition would be offered to the execution of the plan, for which it had seemed that a favourable moment was presenting itself.  The delusion under which he had acted was one that should have been dispelled by plain English speech long before; but now that he found it to be a delusion, he did not recede from his demands upon the Porte:  he rather multiplied them.  The upshot of all this was war, in spite of protracted diplomatic endeavours to the contrary; and into that war French and English went side by side.  Once before they had done so, when Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion united their forces to wrest the Holy Places from the Saracens; that enterprise had been disgraced by particularly ugly scandals from which this was free; but in respect to glory of generalship, or permanent results secured, the Crimean campaign has little pre-eminence over the Fourth Crusade.

Recent disclosures, which have shown that Lord Aberdeen’s Ministry was not rightly reproached with “drifting” idly and recklessly into this disastrous contest, have also helped to clear the English commander’s memory from the slur of inefficiency so liberally flung on him at the time, while it has been shown that his action was seriously hampered by the French generals with whom he had to co-operate.  From whatever cause, such glory as was gained in the Crimea belongs more to the rank and file of the allied armies than to those highest in command.  The first success won on the heights of the Alma was not followed up; the Charge of the Six Hundred, which has made memorable for ever the Russian repulse at Balaklava, was a splendid mistake, valuable chiefly for the spirit-stirring example it has bequeathed to future generations of English soldiers, for its illustration of death-defying, disciplined courage; the great fight at Inkerman was only converted from a calamitous surprise into a victory by sheer obstinate valour, not by able strategy; and the operations that after Lord Raglan’s death brought the unreasonably protracted siege of Sebastopol to a close did but evince afresh how grand were the soldierly qualities of both French and English, and how indifferently they were generalled.

If the allies came out of the conflict with no great glory, they had such satisfaction as could be derived from the severer losses and the discomfiture at all points of the foe.  The disasters of the war had been fatal to the Czar Nicholas, who died on March 2nd, 1855, from pulmonary apoplexy—­an attack to which he had laid himself open, it was said, in melancholy recklessness of his health.  His was a striking personality, which had much more impressed English imaginations than that of Czar or Czarina since the time of Peter the Great; and the Queen herself