no hospital, no chaplain, no champagne, no siege-train, no means of transport, no tea, no porter, no Minié rifles ;-the newspaper correspondents are to be expelled the camp; the names of the streets are not painted in the Zouave's fashion;-the engineers' tools are blunt and useless;-Lord Raglan won't allow the Duke of Cambridge to have a day's work with the pontoons, for fear they should get wet, and Sir George Brown flatly refused this morning to tell me the destination of the expedition.' If half these harrowing revelations have any reference to facts, we shall of course be soundly thrashed by the Russians. But it is just possible that they are only the very natural grumblings of individuals who miss their cutlets and claret, get laughed at for not knowing a gabion from a gun-boat, and give endless trouble to no end of people, by asking all manner of silly questions, whereby they entail on themselves a considerable amount of snobbing. At the same time, we do not deny that there may be points in which there is much room for improvement, and we therefore think that the publication of all this gossip performs a function of considerable utility. It may have slight influence in compelling red tapists to adopt reforms, but it warns the authorities both at home and abroad that their proceedings are narrowly watched, and that abuses will not be perpetrated with impunity.

We are thus naturally led to that vexed subject which has been so loudly and vehemently argued upon by the parties personally interested, in the reversal of a decision reported to have been taken by Marshal St. Arnaud and Lord Raglan. The commandersin-chief of the French and British armies have, we are told, determined to refuse to newspaper correspondents the permission to accompany the allied forces to the scenes of active operations, and further informed such officers as are presumed to be in connection with the public press, that they must renounce either the sword or the pen. In the adoption of this rule, Omar Pasha has, it is added, been invited to concur. The motives for the exercise and evasion of the prohibition are so strong that one hardly expects either generals or writers to yield without a struggle. The soldier takes the reasonable ground that what is news to the public is also information to the enemy, and that so much of the success in war as depends on the due preservation of the secrets of an intended campaign, must be completely compromised by the presence of a number of friendly spies, each eager to outdo his neighbor in transmitting

information to Paris and London-that is, to Petersburg and Warsaw-of the details of the operations resolved on. It is also probable that there are, in the Ottoman, French, and British armies, many military men to whom a newspaper is an abomination, and that amongst our own officers in particular, many of those wise centurions who, to judge of the efficiency of a grenadier, inspect his dressing-case, and not his cartouch-box,many of those learned tribunes who teach how sweet and decorous a thing it is for a man to be choked in the embrace of a leathern stock, and dressed with a head-piece which will insure him a hug of welcome from the bears of the northern woods,many of them, we say, probably consider that the base public has no other function but that of handing over the cash required by the piper for the payment of that wellknown officer's current expenses.

On the side, again, of this "base public," it is maintained that Government never receives despatches from the seat of war, and is itself indebted to the newspapers for the information it requires, and that if private enterprise be forbidden to remedy the deficiency, the result will be, that the said "base public" must petition that exact reporter, General-Adjutant Baron Osten Sacken the First, to furnish them with special bulletins of the operations of Admirals Hamelin and Dundas, and Generals Raglan and Canrobert, while Lt.-General Rassakowsky will be requested to supply the corresponding data as to the Baltic fleet and army. To which "Our Own Correspondent" adds, that by his assistance the tax-payer who has paid a good price, is enabled to judge whether the Government is supplying him with a good article, in return for money advancedthat implicit reliance may be placed on his accounts that if he is gagged, the liberty of the press is destroyed, and a "sheetanchor" of the British constitution tampered with.

We must confess that we can see very little force in any of these arguments. Whoever has taken the trouble to compare newspaper statements as regards intended operations, with the actual course of events, will have convinced himself that Prince Paskievitch and the Emperor Nicholas must be worse than demented if they pay the smallest attention to the avalanche of speculations daily printed for the amusement of us all. That a large army is brought to Varna from England and France, that it looks in, en route, at Gibraltar, Malta, Gallipoli, and

cause to be executed. Nicholas the Great, as is known from the yearly experience of the manoeuvres of Krasnoe Selo, is mighty in war. His army allows itself to be surprised, for the purpose of inflicting a severer correction on the foe; his cavalry does not pursue a beaten corps, that it may rest after its fatigues; his artillery roams about in perilous positions, that the antagonist may capture it without a blow. Against such astute devices St. Arnaud and Raglan might, we own, struggle in vain. Let us pray, then, that the Sclavonian Mars may not draw the sword in person; but, basking in the reputa tion he has gained for truth, for moderation, for magnanimity, content himself with telescopic scrutinies of hostile fleets, and musical thanksgivings for the favors rained by Heaven upon his hordes of Orthodoxy.

Apart, then, from the possible personal interference of the great Tartar strategist, we may be permitted to anticipate, and that without incurring the charge of presumption, a favorable issue to our first campaign. Some may say, too, that the justice of our cause is an additional guaranty of success. But theological illustrations of political transactions should be received with great caution; and the sceptical remark of Marshal Saxe, that his adversary might take Providence if he himself might only have one hundred thousand men, expresses an historic fact. The fortune of war has often run against the right between Leonidas and Kossuth, the victims of lawless aggression are neither few nor far between.

Our enemy has in some sort forestalled us, by monopolizing, for the benefit of his orthodox warriors, the soldier's text, In te, Domine, speravi; non confundar in æternum! We must needs, then, rely upon the good sword of St. Denis and St. George, who, as we pray, shall shortly leave such an imprint of their footsteps on the rocks of Sevastopol, as may be viewed by future generations with the veneration with which the ancient Romans looked on the hoofmarks of the great twin brethren who fought for

Rome against Tarquin the Tyrant, by the shores of the Lake Regillus. Often have England and France poured forth their blood and treasure for a paltry and a personal end; and sometimes they have been punished with well-deserved defeat, We now march to battle, not to crush the freedom of nations, not to set up or pull down some miserable royal race, not to repair the diminished dignity of a quibbling protocol; these were the meaner aims of the kings and statesmen by whose ambition we are warned. We go to punish falsehood and crime-to avenge the violation of the laws which bind the states of Europe-to fulfil our functions as the high police of civilization: these are the grander resolves of an age in which the power of the rulers is checked by the might of the people.

That this resolve will be at length attained -come what will, cost what it may-is guaranteed by the unanimous voice with which the people of England and France call for vengeance on the marauder who has intruded upon the civilized world; by the splendid talents and fixed purpose of the Third Napoleon; by the presence in our councils of men who hate barbarism and oppression, with the noble scorn of Palmerston and Russell. How strange that a position of such unwonted grandeur should have been almost powerless to rouse a single spark of enthusiasm, to inspire one little word of eloquence to a generation of legisla tors brought up at the feet of Pitt and Peel. Stranger still it is that the care of drains and dungeons should still waste the energies of the man whose ardor would quickly inflame every soldier and sailor of the Triple Alliance with a double determination to conquer or die; the sound of whose dreaded name would alone shake the battlements of Cronstadt and Sevastopol. But England has this one consolation against an evil day-that she has yet as many in reserve who can enable her to realize the latest and noble boast, worthy the lips of Chatham and of Cromwell, "I care not who stands aloof."

Or all human attributes, genius is the most truly imperial. In whatever combinations it may be found-to the illumination of whatever topic and the celebration of whatever pursuit it may be dedicated-whether it impart splendor to the humble, or absorb in its vaster glory the pride of the exalted, it is clothed in royal robes, and carries with it the evidences of that absolute authority with which it has been by Heaven invested. Imparted, rather than created, by God, it is too self-conscious to conceal itself, and too noble to make itself ridiculous by ostentation. The circumstances of life, however tragical, can never break, they can only illustrate its power. In every sphere it is its divine province to command, not to obey. Its majesty, being neither borrowed nor assumed, but self-contained, is essential, supreme, and everlasting. If any laws exist to which it owes its homage, they are unseen, and are too subtle in their essence, and too sublime in their workings, to be confounded with those forces by which human experience and human action are ordinarily controlled-they rule in the subject rather than over it. Should genius, therefore, be encumbered by no practical responsibilities, other than those which it owes itself to the Great Spirit, it will, nevertheless, accomplish a mission more sacred than any which mere conscientiousness could enable a man to sustain, and far more glorious than any to which mere ambition would prompt a man to aspire; whilst, if its possessor should have immediate professional duties to discharge, it at once relieves the labor, and magnifies the virtue of their performance.

The most striking instance of the unlimited dominion of genius over the life and character of the man by whom it is possessed, may, perhaps, be found in the fact that it has been seen in fellowship with every form of religious opinion. Nothing is so enthralling over the imagination, the reason, the heart, the actions of a man, as the religious convictions VOL. XXXIII.—NO. III.

which he entertains. The prime characteristic of his faith gives a tinge and a texture to his whole being. Nothing would so soon ruin an empire as the prevalence of a system of religion adverse to its main interests and inclinations. A theology of gloomy dread would sap the courage of any people; or, by breeding an impious and defiant recklessness, convert its courage into the ferocity of despair. A religion of soft sentimentalisms and unmitigated amiability (such as some modern preachers would have us believe Christianity to be) would, in time, enervate, enfeeble, and degrade a race even of heroes. A brave nation cannot live on solutions of sugar. But it is the peculiar office of genius to make a baneful dogma innocent by virtue of its own excellence, or else, by the energy of its higher revelations, utterly to explode it. Not only has it made poverty illustrious, and opulence, by comparison, contemptible; not only has it made weakness mighty, and power generous; not only has it inspired the warrior in battle, and given majesty to the repose of the victor; not only has it "soothed the savage breast" by its charms of song, and made the haunts of affliction radiant with its heavenly light, (thus sowing the elements of a noble equality among men, as members of society,) but it has triumphed over the bondage of sacred creeds, and, by relieving the conscience from terror, or the understanding from folly, has given to the world its immutable pledge of the equality of men, as the children of God. No sect has been barren of its immunities. Like an angel sent to bless mankind, it has gone from community to community, smiling an ineffable benediction on all in turn. It has proved its superiority over superstition; for what iconoclastic exploit may not be ascribed to its prowess? It has proclaimed its empire over prejudice; for what doctrine of confirmed orthodoxy has it not sometime attacked, and what heresy that synods and traditions have pronounced damnable, has it not sometime defended?

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