ERRATUM IN THE SECOND VOLUME. Page 391, line 24, for "the first Earl of Sefton" read "the second". 36 ESSAY S. THE CRIMEAN CAMPAIGN.* (From the North British Review, July, 1856.) 1. Lettres du Maréchal St. Arnaud. 2 vols. Paris, 1855. 2. L'Expédition de Crimée jusqu'à la Prise de Sebastopol. Chroniques de la Guerre d'Orient. PAR LE BARON DE 3. Opening Address of MAJOR-GENERAL SIR RICHARD AIREY, K.C.B., Quartermaster-General of the Forces, before the Board of General Officers assembled at the Royal Hospital Chelsea; together with his Summing up Address, &c. &c. 1 vol. 8vo. London: 1856. WHAT may be called the domestic bearing of Great Britain during the late war will not read well in history. It was too confident at the beginning, too exulting towards the middle, and too desponding towards the end. The banquet to Sir Charles Napier at the Reform Club, the premature triumph over the supposed fall of Sebastopol immediately after the battle of the Alma, and the sudden frenzy of indigna *A French translation of this article appeared at Brussels in January, 1857, under the title of "Quelques Eclaircissements relatifs à l'Armée Anglaise." It was also republished in a German dress in successive numbers of "Der Wanderer" at Vienna; and the more important passages were transferred to other foreign journals. The statements rest on the highest English authorities, civil, naval, and military. tion and despair which made scapegoats of Lord Aberdeen and the Duke of Newcastle, may serve to mark and illustrate the startling transitions which a nation, usually noted for firmness and steadfastness, underwent within a year. As is almost necessarily the case, the disappointment of extravagant hopes led to the temporary prevalence of an equally extravagant spirit of selfdepreciation. We started with the persuasion that everything must go right of its own accord; and the first reverse brought us to the conviction that everything had gone wrong through ignorance, negligence, incapacity, or mismanagement of some sort. Neither in anticipation nor retrospection was due allowance made for circumstances-for the reduced state of our military establishments for the limited and conflicting powers of the war departments-for the many adverse chances in the most perilous of games nor for that chapter of accidents by which human events are more frequently controlled than by the wisest contrivance or the most inventive foresight. When the news arrived that our gallant army was undergoing a fearful amount of suffering from cold, hunger and overwork, it was at once taken for granted by the most influential portion of the press, that some high functionary, or class of functionaries, must be offered up as a holocaust. The Secretary of War was naturally the first victim. A fierce onslaught was next made on Lord Raglan, who, we were assured, after leading his soldiers into unprecedented difficulties and privations, coolly left them to their own resources, and from his own comfortable quarters looked on complacently, whilst they were perishing from disease and exposure, at the rapidly accelerating ratio of two hundred a day. When newspaper-readers were getting tired of daily tirades against the Commander-in-Chief, it was dis |