had regarded the autocrat, whose great power made him so lonely, with an interest not untouched with compassion at the remote period when he had visited her Court and had talked with her statesmen about the imminent decay of Turkey.  At that time the austere majesty of his aspect, seen amid the finer and softer lineaments of British courtiers, had been likened to the half-savage grandeur of an emperor of old Rome who should have been born a Thracian peasant.  It proved that the contrast had gone much deeper than outward appearance, and that his views and principles had been as opposed to those of the English leaders, and as impossible of participation by such men as though he had been an imperfectly civilised contemporary of Constantine the Great.  Since then he had succeeded in making himself more heartily hated, by the bulk of the English nation, than any sovereign since Napoleon I; for the war, into which the Government had entered reluctantly, was regarded by the people with great enthusiasm, and the foe was proportionately detested.

Many anticipated that the death of the Czar would herald in a triumphant peace; but in point of fact, peace was not signed until the March of 1856.  Its terms satisfied the diplomatists both of France and England; they would probably have been less complacent could they have foreseen the day when this hard-won treaty would be torn up by the Power they seemed to be binding hand and foot with sworn obligations of perdurable toughness; least of all would that foresight have been agreeable to Lord Palmerston, Premier of England when the peace was signed, and quite at one with the mass of the people of England in their deep dislike and distrust of Russia and its rulers.

The political advantages which can be clearly traced to this war are not many.  Privateers are no longer allowed to prey on the commerce of belligerent nations, and neutral commerce in all articles not contraband of war must be respected, while no blockade must be regarded unless efficiently and thoroughly maintained.  Such were the principles with which the plenipotentiaries who signed the Treaty of Paris in 1856 enriched the code of international law; and these principles, which are in force still, alone remain of the advantages supposed to have been secured by all the misery and all the expenditure of the Crimean enterprise.

[Illustration:  Florence Nightingale.]

But other benefits, not of a political nature, arose out of the hideous mismanagement which had disgraced the earlier stages of the war.  It is a very lamentable fact that of the 24,000 good Englishmen who left their bones in the Crimea, scarce 5,000 had fallen in fair fight or died of wounds received therein.  Bad and deficient food, insufficient shelter and clothing, utter disorganisation and confusion in the hospital department, accounted for the rest.  These evils, when exposed in the English newspapers, called forth a cry of shame and wrath from all the nation, and