out as soberly and steadily as it had lived.  The select few who composed it died like gentlemen, and were as polite as Lord Chesterfield in the article of death.  Some of them turned Whigs, and have held office under Lord Palmerston; and others are Tories, and expect to hold office under Lord Derby, when he shall form his third ministry.  Young America, the worst of these youths, and the latest born, was never above an assassin in courage, or in energy equal to more than the plundering of a hen-roost.  The fruits of his exertions are to be seen in some of the incidents of the Secession War, and they were not worth the gathering.

The world had settled down into the belief, that, after all, a man was not much to be blamed for growing old, and liberal-minded people were fast coming to the conclusion, that years, on the whole, were not dishonorable, when the breaking out of a great war led to the return of youth to consideration.  The English found themselves at war with Russia, much to their surprise; and, still more to their surprise, their part in that war was made subordinate to that of the French, who acted with them, in the world’s estimate of the deeds of the members of the new Grand Alliance.  This is not the place to discuss the question whether that estimate was a just one.  We have to do only with the facts that England was made to stand in the background and that she seemed at first disposed to accept the general verdict.  There was, too, much mismanagement in the conduct of the war, some of which might easily have been avoided; and there was not a little suffering, as the consequence of that mismanagement.  John Bull must have his scape-goat, like the rest of us; and, looking over the field, he discovered that all his leaders were old men, and forthwith, though the oldest of old fellows himself, he laid all his mishaps to the account of the years of his upper servants.  Sir Charles Napier, who never got into St. Petersburg, was old, and had been a dashing sailor forty years before.  Admiral Dundas, who did not destroy Sweaborg, but only burned a lot of corded wood there in summer time, was another old sailor.  Lord Raglan, who never saw the inside of Sebastopol, was well stricken in years, having served in Wellington’s military family during the Peninsular War.  General Simpson, Sir C. Campbell, General Codrington, Sir G. Brown, Sir G. Cathcart, and others of the leaders of the English army in the Crimea, were of the class of gentlemen who might, upon meeting, furnish matter for a paragraph on “united ages.”  What more natural than to attribute all that was unpleasant in the war to the stagnated blood of men who had heard the music of that musketry before which Napoleon I.’s empire had gone down?  The world went mad on the subject, and it was voted that old generals were nuisances, and that no man had any business in active war who was old enough to have much experience.  Age might be venerable, but it was necessarily weak; and the last place in which it should show itself was the field.