Greys after the Balaclava charge; Clarke losing his helmet in the same charge, and creating amongst the Russians, as he plunged in bareheaded amongst their ranks, the belief that he was sheltered by some Satanic charm.  He notes on the Alma the singular pause of sound maintained by both armies just before the cannonade began; the first death—­of an artilleryman riding before his gun—­a new sight to nine-tenths of those who witnessed it; {18} the weird scream of exploding shells as they rent the air around.  He crossed the Alma close behind Lord Raglan, cantering after him to the summit of a conspicuous hillock in the heart of the enemy’s position, whence the mere sight of plumed English officers scared the Russian generals, and, followed soon by guns and troops, governed the issue of the fight.  The general’s manner was “the manner of a man enlivened by the progress of a great undertaking without being robbed of his leisure.  He spoke to me, I remember, about his horse.  He seemed like a man who had a clue of his own and knew his way through the battle.”  When the last gun was fired Kinglake followed the Chief back, witnessed the wild burst of cheering accorded to him by the whole British army, a manifestation, Lord Burghersh tells us, which greatly distressed his modesty—­and dined alone with him in his tent on the evening of the eventful day.

If Lord Raglan was the Hector of the Crimean Iliad, its Agamemnon was Lord Stratford:  “king of men,” as Stanley called him in his funeral sermon at Westminster; king of distrustful home Cabinets, nominally his masters, of scheming European embassies, of insulting Russian opponents, of presumptuous French generals, of false and fleeting Pashas (Le Sultan, c’est Lord Stratford, said St. Arnaud), of all men, whatever their degree, who entered his ambassadorial presence.  Ascendency was native to the man; while yet in his teens we find Etonian and Cambridge friends writing to him deferentially as to a critic and superior.  At four and twenty he became Minister to a Court manageable only by high-handed authority and menace.  He owned, and for the most part controlled, a violent temper; it broke bounds sometimes, to our great amusement as we read to-day, to the occasional discomfiture of attaches or of dependents, {19} to the abject terror of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his patience.  But he knew when to be angry; he could pulverize by fiery outbreaks the Reis Effendi and his master, Abdu-l-Mejid; but as Plenipotentiary to the United States he could “quench the terror of his beak, the lightning of his eye,” disarming by his formal courtesy and winning by his obvious sincerity the suspicious and irritable John Quincy Adams.  When Menschikoff once insulted him, seeing that a quarrel at that moment would be fatal to his purpose, he pretended to be deaf, and left the Russian in the belief that his rude speech had not been heard.  Enthroned for the sixth time in Constantinople, at the dangerous epoch of 1853, he could point to an unequalled diplomatic record in the past; to the Treaty of Bucharest, to reunion of the Helvetic Confederacy shattered by Napoleon’s fall, to the Convention which ratified Greek independence, to the rescue from Austrian malignity of the Hungarian refugees.