of too subtle intellect and too lively conscience, “a good man in the worst sense of the term”; Palmerston, above both in keenness of instinct and in strength of will, meaning war from the first, and biding his time to insure it; Newcastle, sanguine to the verge of rashness, loyally adherent to Lord Raglan while governed by his own judgment, distrustful under stress of popular clamour; Panmure, ungenerous, rough-tongued, violent, churlish, yet not malevolent—­“a rhinoceros rather than a tiger”—­hurried by subservience to the newspaper Press into injustice which he afterwards recognized, yet did but sullenly repair.  We see finally that dominant Press itself, personified in the all-powerful Delane, a potentate with convictions at once flexible and vehement; forceful without spite and merciless without malignity; writing no articles, but evoking, shaping, revising all.  The French commanders were not hampered by the muzzled Paris Press, which had long since ceased to utter any but dictated sentiments; they suffered even more disastrously from the imperious interference of the Tuileries.  Canrobert’s inaction, mutability, sudden alarms, flagrant breaches of faith, were inexplicable until long afterwards, when the fall of the Empire disclosed the secret instructions—­disloyal to his allies and ruinous to the campaign—­ by which Louis Napoleon shackled his unhappy General.  In Canrobert’s successor, Pelissier, he met his match.  For the first time a strong man headed the French army.  Short of stature, bull-necked and massive in build, with grey hair, long dark moustache, keen fiery eyes, his coarse rough speech masking tested brain power and high intellectual culture, he brought new life to the benumbed French army, new hope to Lord Raglan.  The duel between the resolute general and the enraged Emperor is narrated with a touch comedy.  All that Lord Raglan desired, all that the Emperor forbade, Pelissier was stubbornly determined to accomplish; the siege should be pressed at once, the city taken at any cost, the expedition to Kertch resumed.  Once only, under torment of the Emperor’s reproaches and the Minister at War’s remonstrances, his resolution and his nerve gave way; eight days of failing judgment issued in the Karabelnaya defeat, the severest repulse which the two armies had sustained; but the paralysis passed away, he showed himself once more eager to act in concert with the English general;—­when the long-borne strain of disappointment and anxiety sapped at last Lord Raglan’s vital forces, and the hard fierce Frenchman stood for upwards of an hour beside his dead colleague’s bedside, “crying like a child.”