LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES
Byron
Documents Biography Criticism
Passages of a Working Life during Half a Century
Chapter VII
INTRODUCTION & INDEXES
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Preface
Contents Vol. I
Prelude 1
Prelude 2
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Contents Vol. II
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Note to Chapter XV
Contents Vol. III
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
‣ Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Note to Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Note to Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Note to Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Index of Persons
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CHAPTER VII.

IN common with thousands of others, I look back upon the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851, and upon all its associations, with pleasurable feelings that never before or since have been called up, in an equal degree, by any public display of national power and wealth. The unique character of the building, which, after a long period of suspense and doubt, was finally agreed upon for the purposes of the Exhibition; its magnitude; its novelty of form; its application of glass and iron as the two principal materials of the structure, combined to produce an effect which was beyond the reach of regular architecture. When Sir Robert Peel abolished the duties upon glass, he could scarcely have contemplated that the rapid development of our national industry, under that system of Free Trade and fiscal reform to which he had pointed the way, would have been celebrated in a palace of untaxed glass, to be filled with domestic manufactures no longer vexed by excise; and with foreign products no longer denied to us by laws of protection, which were little more than premiums to the smuggler. The crystal fabric of Hyde Park was a true symbol of what had been accomplished, and what was to be accomplished, by wise legislation. Two great elm-trees that were covered in by the roof seemed as it were to interpret the wishes of Industry, and say,
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“Let us alone. Let us grow.” The conception of this glass palace was really a grand one in its vastness and its simplicity. Sir Charles Fox, the contractor for the building, told me that it was altogether so different in its dimensions from any building he had ever seen or heard of, that he could not get the idea of it, as a reality, into his head, until one moonlight night walking up Portland Place, it suddenly occurred to him that from one end to the other, and from one side to the other, the area of this fine street was as near as possible that of the ground which he was to cover with his work.

To enter into any of the statistical details of this memorable Exhibition is not within the purpose of these “Passages.” I was not a Juror, and, although I was frequently there, from May to October, and had carefully watched the progress of the building for three or four months before, I had no actual duties to perform beyond that of careful observation. This was essential, for, as was the case with other publishers, I was availing myself of the impulse given to this species of knowledge, to issue several works in illustration of the Industry of all Nations. In my case, and I believe in that of others, success was not proportioned to the expenditure upon literature and art involved in the production of such books. The six million persons who went to see the Exhibition were too much occupied with the immense variety of objects exciting their curiosity to have any time for reading about them. No doubt many thoughtful artisans and commercial men, of all countries, were here for improvement or for profit; but by far the greater number of visitors came for their enjoyment. The opportunities for the pleasure-seekers were such
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as had never before been within their reach. Explanatory lectures were given in some of the side rooms of the main building, but the attendance was very small. To lounge for hours in this vast hall, surrounded by treasures of greater magnificence than the barbaric pearl and gold which the gorgeous East showered on her kings,—to turn aside from the most exquisite productions of handicraft to look upon the grander wonders of machinery in motion,—to seek for familiar faces amongst the crowd of visitors, whose daily average was forty-two thousand,—to assist in consuming two million buns and cakes, and in drinking a million bottles of lemonade, soda-water, and ginger-beer,—such might appear to have been the chief pursuits of the gazers who came and who went. But even to the most incurious and the most apathetic, there must have been some enlargement of the mind when they saw the various fabrics of their own country arranged under an intelligible system of classification, and the manifold productions of other lands placed together in the order of their respective countries. It was the first Industrial Exhibition upon a large scale that had been attempted. It was the first truly International Exhibition that had excited the emulation of foreigners. But it had scarcely been expected that the Governments of almost every State should have appointed Commissioners to superintend the operations of their subjects; that, from almost every country of Europe, and the various States of the North American Union; from the Republics of South America; from each of our own Colonies; from India, Egypt, Persia, and even from the Society Islands, there should have been got together the most useful and the most costly, the rarest and the most
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common objects of Industrial and Productive Art. A comprehensive mind, that of Prince Albert, which had matured the idea of this great undertaking, regulated the labours of the Commissioners. There was a consequent harmony and completeness in the organization which has not been surpassed in any subsequent Exhibition in foreign countries, and was certainly not so fully attained in a later Exhibition in our own country, when the presiding genius of that of 1851 was lost. The official publications, especially the Illustrated Catalogue, which were undertaken by private enterprise, are worthy records of the successful carrying-out of a great design. The Reports of the Juries contain a great body of valuable information, which contributed to banish from every branch of trade and manufacture the pretence to be a mystery. When I undertook in the Penny Magazine to publish descriptions of the factories of Great Britain, there were a few manufacturers who, in the belief that they could retain possession of the markets of the world by exclusiveness, refused to my reporter a sight even of their commonest operations. Ten years were sufficient to put an end to all these absurd pretences, individual or national, which had for their object to uphold monopolies by secresy. In 1851 we were not afraid to show all the world, and to tell all the world, how we worked. If foreigners learned something from us, we learned as much from foreigners, there can be no doubt. For, although our own advance had been great in all manufactures in which taste was concerned—and much of this advance was to be attributed to Schools of Design,—our progress was much greater after we had this opportunity of comparing our porcelain, our silks, our printed calicoes
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and muslins, our upholstery, with those of France and other nations, where elegance imparts a new value to utility. I have said that Prince Albert matured the idea of the Exhibition. In 1845, a Committee of Members of the Society of Arts had been formed to carry out an Exhibition of National Industry. Those who remembered what that Society was in the days of George IV. might have been surprised that any successful attempt had been made to awaken it from its long torpor, or to imbue it with a higher spirit than that which had marked its transactions in the first decades of the present century. There was a handsome building in John Street, Adelphi, which had been erected in 1772, and which possessed a real interest from the paintings of James Barry in the Council-room. Persons denominated “respectable” were admitted to see these pictures, and to inspect the Model-room of the Society, where a number of very obsolete inventions were exhibited in glass-cases. The Council met every Wednesday, to decide upon trifles which really occupied no portion of public consideration, in an age fruitful of great discoveries in science, and great improvements in arts and manufactures. There was a very clever and energetic young man of the Record Office, Mr. Henry Cole, for whom I published a little Manual on Colour. Without any pretensions to be an artist, he very clearly saw how much the manufactures of this country might be improved by a diffused knowledge of form and decoration. He took a great interest in the Society of Arts; and persuaded some manufacturers of porcelain and earthenware to send specimens of useful articles of superior design, calculated to form a little Exhibition in the Rooms of the Society, This
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attempt was a successful one, and naturally induced a higher ambition. It was a fortunate circumstance for the Society of Arts when Prince Albert consented to become its President. Out of that presidency grew the Great Exhibition of 1851, and many other plans connected with Industrial Art, which made the Society a real power, instead of a lifeless memorial of misdirected efforts. It became identified with the principle that the consumers are more to be regarded than the producers—the principle of Free Trade. Its early efforts during the war, and some time after, were directed to the vain endeavour to produce a worse article and a dearer article at home than could be obtained by exchange with the foreigner. If I am not mistaken, it was constantly offering a premium for the cultivation of rhubarb in England, so that something like the valuable root of Turkey might be raised in our own climate with prodigious pains, to be quite unworthy of finding a place in the pharmacopœia. The attempt, however, might have had some indirect good in leading to the cultivation of rhubarb, not for physic but for food.

The Society of Arts being once in prosperous activity, applied itself to effect an organization of Mechanics’ Institutes throughout the kingdom. The presence at an Annual Meeting, followed by a dinner, of delegates from such societies afforded me the opportunity, on several occasions, of coming into contact with men well acquainted with the state of adult education in their several districts. In 1853-4, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham was in course of erection. The fabric in Hyde Park had been sold to an engineer, who, with one or two speculative friends, saw the feasibility of rearing a counterpart, with
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improvements, of the first palace of glass, and of there establishing a permanent Exhibition of Art, if not of Manufactures, and of surrounding the building with grounds fitted for all out-door enjoyment. A Company was formed; directors were appointed; and a noble site was at last obtained, though somewhat too far from London. The building was nearly completed, and many models of the finest objects of sculpture in all countries were being collected, when I went thither with many delegates of Provincial Societies to the Society of Arts. I mention this unimportant event because it brought me acquainted with Mr. Samuel Phillips, who had turned aside from the accustomed course of his distinguished literary career to take an active part in the formation of the Crystal Palace Company, and to render the most valuable services as its Secretary. He was a man of a singularly fertile and suggestive mind; unsparing of labour, though suffering under the disease which terminated in his premature death. I have passed some improving hours with him in this building, and have seen with admiration how readily a man of versatile powers could turn from essay-writing and reviewing—from exposing passing follies, and satirising dull authors, to obtain such a practical knowledge of ancient and modern art as would enable him to fill the numerous courts of the Palace at Sydenham with the great works of every age and every country, invaluable as a collection, although only plaster copies.

Towards the end of May, 1855, Dr. Lyon Playfair called upon me to signify the wish of the authorities connected with the Board of Trade that I would act as a Juror in the Paris Universal Exhibition. The
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opening of the Exhibition had been postponed from the 1st of May to the 15th; but it was well understood that another month must elapse before the articles exhibited would be in sufficient order for the inspection of the Jurors. Having accepted the office, with the understanding that my duties would probably not detain me in Paris more than a month, I arrived there with my wife and daughters on the 23rd of June. On the 25th, I attended a Meeting of English Jurors in the rooms appointed for their use. It was proposed that they should often meet here, and confer together upon the general character of the Exhibition and the more remarkable specimens of foreign industry which it contained. A day in each week was appointed for the meetings of our little Industrial Parliament. The statements and discussions were really interesting, whether the Duke of Hamilton spoke of Furniture, Mr. Evelyn Denison of Agricultural Instruments, or Professor Willis of Machinery. Several of the communications thus made were embodied in “Notes of some remarkable objects exhibited in the French, Foreign, and British Colonial Departments.” These notes were furnished to the Board of Trade, and Part I. was published “for the information of Merchants, Manufacturers, Workmen, &c.” But the actual business of the Jurors in making their awards was too onerous and pressing to allow of this generalization. In 1856, “Reports on the Paris Universal Exhibition,” in three parts, were presented to Parliament. One of these was written by me, as a Juror for Class XXVI.—Drawing and Modelling, Letter-Press and Copper-Plate Printing, and Photography.

Great as may be the French power of organization
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in military affairs, it certainly was not displayed to much, advantage in the arrangements for this Exhibition. When I entered the building at 9 o’clock in the morning, on the 26th of June, and had to find my way to the temporary erections in which there were separate rooms for the Meetings of Jurors, I saw something like order in the comparatively small Palais d’Industrie, but beyond its walls, in the space leading to the Annexe, all seemed in hopeless confusion. Carpenters were at work all around. Heavy packages blocked up the way. Other packages were in course of arrival. Nothing could be more evident than that Paris, the great emporium of luxury, was not a city of commerce. It was observed, as a remarkable fact, by Mr. Thompson, the British Superintendent of Industrial Arrangements, that there was a total absence of all the usual mechanical appliances for moving large and heavy packages, not a single crane being provided for that purpose. For a week or two matters seemed to be very little mending, when, at my usual hour of nine, waiting in the Palais d’Industrie for my fellow-jurors, a buzz went forth that the Emperor was coming. He did come, at a very rapid pace, with a few gentlemen in his suite; went into the chaos outside; expressed himself angrily, as I afterwards understood, at the supineness of those in office; and came back looking very unamiable. The eagle in the dovecote fluttered them into motion—those who were taking matters as quietly as the guards and engine-drivers of a French railway-train when some accidental obstruction has to be removed out of its course. In such cases—one of which I had the misfortune to observe for two tedious hours—Jupiter, or some other deity, is invoked in a torrent
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of sacrés, but the waggoner never puts his shoulder to the wheel. I am speaking of nearly ten years ago. Working now upon commercial principles which have got rid of the lazy system of Protection, French labourers will learn to emulate the silent, untiring industry, which they used to despise in the English navvies who made their iron-ways.

If Frenchmen be deficient in the rougher operations of labour, there can be no doubt of their individual excellence and power of combination in the nicer manipulations of industrial art. Especially are they excellent in every process of a literary character, as may be traced in their elementary books, where a logical arrangement simplifies and makes clear subjects which in too many English books are obscure from the absence of method. When I entered my jury-room, I saw what pains had been bestowed upon the preparatory books, in which a Juror should note down his opinions upon the objects he would be called upon to inspect. To a practical man of business, or to a man of letters, these paraphernalia, which the Juror was supposed to carry about with him, would appear cumbrous and unnecessary. The French Jurors, who had ample time to bestow upon a careful examination of every article in their class, never stirred, as it appeared to me, till they had made a scrupulous entry, according to the prescribed form, of the most minute thing they were called upon to notice. My excellent friend, Mr. De la Rue, with whom I had the good fortune to be daily associated in the duties of a Juror, and from whose exquisite taste I learnt very much as to the due appreciation of works of industrial art, was contented, as I was too glad to be, with such a brief
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notation as would enable us to get through our work in a day of six or seven hours. Three or four weeks of such employment was really not child’s play. Mr. Henry Cole, in a very able Paper on the general management of the British portion of this Exhibition, arguing that the Jury system must be unsatisfactory, has described some of the laborious and irksome duties of a Juror. He says, “To begin work as early as eight in the morning—to wait for companion Jurors who are not punctual—to pace literally over miles of exhibiting ground—to examine stalls and cases, and meet with no exhibitor or agent present to show or explain them, or to find the glass-case locked and no key producible—to haunt committee-rooms and get no quorum for business,—and to do this day after day is what most of the British Jurors did scrupulously for many weeks.”

In the discharge of my office as a Juror, I had the opportunity of enlarging my knowledge of the Arts with which I had been associated as a Publisher. The commercial advantage of this experience to me was now trifling, for I had almost ceased to engage in publishing speculations, and was content to repose upon the honour, if not the profit, I had obtained. In the Great Exhibition of London, the Report of the Jury on Printing, &c., drawn up by A. Firmin Didot, C. Whittingham, and T. De la Rue, says “The Jury have strongly regretted that almost the whole of the Printers of England have refrained from exhibiting the beautiful productions of their presses, owing to the instructions given to the Local Commissioners, which stated that printed books were inadmissible.   *   *   *   *   The same principle which prevented the English printers from exhibiting their works has
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deprived the publishers of the opportunity of taking, at the Great Exhibition of all Nations, that high position to which their beautiful and carefully edited works would have justly entitled them. The names of Longman, Murray, Moxon, Bohn, Pickering, and of a great many others, are for ever inseparable from the history of English literature; and thousands would again have seen with satisfaction, and shown with pride to foreigners, the numerous, cheap, neatly printed, and beautifully illustrated productions of Mr. Charles Knight, who in ministering to the intellectual wants and pleasures of the people, has given in the right direction an impetus which is still felt in all branches of art and manufacture connected with this Class.” Almost in an equal degree in the Paris Exhibition the Printing of Great Britain was most imperfectly represented. I accounted for this by the fact that the printers of books are rarely the publishers. In France, on the contrary, the printers and publishers in numerous cases united the two characters. There was another remarkable peculiarity in the Book-trade of France and Belgium as compared with that of Great Britain. Paris was not, as London is, almost the exclusive seat of the book manufacture. In large towns of France, such as Tours, Chatillon, Limoges, and Lyons; of Belgium, such as Tournay, Malines, and Liege, the production of books resolved itself into a branch of the factory system, great numbers of workpeople being gathered under one roof, to perform all the operations necessary for the manufacture of a book, with the exception of paper-making. The late Lord Ashburton was exceedingly interested in a description I gave at the Jury Meeting of the specimens exhibited by Messrs.
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Mâme and Company, of Tours. We spent some time in conversing with the intelligent head of this large manufactory, where all the processes connected with printing and binding, including the arts of the designer and engraver, were carried through for the production of about eight hundred different volumes, varying from the small Prayer-book, bound, for thirty-five centimes—threepence-halfpenny—to the illustrated local history for a hundred francs. The extreme cheapness of their works was attained by the continued production of large impressions for a constant and universal demand. I pointed out in my report that the nearest parallel case in England was that of the productions of Bibles, Testaments, and Prayer-books by the Universities and the Queens Printer. Cheap as these privileged books with us were in 1855, they have been sold even at a cheaper rate since a Parliamentary Inquiry into the monopoly, which has unquestionably many advantages, and which requires only to be watched by public opinion to effect that combination of cheapness with accuracy which the consumers have a right to expect.

Even ten years ago the processes connected with those branches of Industry associated under the generic name of Printing, had derived such an extension that their variety had become embarrassing. The directors of the Imperial Printing Office of Austria had brought together in this Exhibition illustrations of every mode of multiplying copies which had become auxiliary to typography and engraving. The general character of these processes is now familiar to most persons as stereotype, electrotype, chromotypography, lithography, chromolithography, nature-printing, photography. It was
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to me a matter of some surprise that it became the duty of the Jurors of the Class to which I belonged to examine specimens of the wonderful art of copying forms by the action of light. There was a Photographic department in the separate Exhibition of the Fine Arts. Why they were not put together was a perplexity to some of us who wished conscientiously to give an opinion of the merits of these productions. We were told that we were not to consider their excellence as works of art, but look only to the perfection with which the process had been carried through. It was difficult, if not impossible, to separate the two characters. Photography could scarcely be considered to enter into the domain of printing; but I saw in this Exhibition the results of efforts to make photography a real printing process,—to make the sun an engraver as well as a painter. M. Niépce, the nephew of Daguerre, had many disciples labouring for this purpose. At his apartments as Governor of the Louvre, he showed several of us what he was aiming at, by producing through the action of a bright light an etching from which an impression could be taken.

The opportunities which I possessed of comparing the typography of various nations, enabled me to judge how far we exceeded, or fell short of, the average standard of excellence. I came to the conclusion, that, generally speaking, English books were more correctly printed than the French, especially when a quotation is introduced from another language. I knew that the English compositor was not better educated than the French. I had long lamented, not only that the race of scholarly compositors was almost extinct, but that every proof
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which I had to read exhibited tokens of ignorance or slovenliness, which I did not encounter in my earlier acquaintance with the London press. The comparative superiority in the correctness of English books was to be attributed to the fact that, with us, the reading of proof is charged in addition to the composition, whilst in most French printing-offices no such charge enters into the cost. The “reader” of a London office, though occasionally capricious and conceited, especially as regards punctuation, renders essential service even to an experienced writer; but he is invaluable to those who write illegibly, or with a magnificent contempt of points and other niceties, which ladies and gentlemen of genius affect to despise. The Belgian books in the Paris Exhibition, taken as a whole, were very indifferently printed, in comparison with those of France and the German States. Their manufacture of books, a few years before 1855, was based upon a system of piracy. Before France insisted upon international copyright, and there was some consideration to be paid for authorship, the Belgian books were lowered in every quality of typographical excellence by the ruinous competition of the publishers to produce non-copyright works. A Belgian printer pointed out the consequence of this system, under which, if a publisher issued a novel at 2 fr. 75 c., it was instantly published by another at 75 c. The literary labour having been common to every plunderer, the outward quality of the book was degraded to the lowest standard of unnatural cheapness. In England the competition has been less injurious, although something like the same process was going on, in the reprint of American novels. But, at the present time, the excessive mul-
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tiplication of newspapers, and other cheap periodicals, has called into existence a host of compositors, whose only notion of typography is to pick up as many thousand types in an hour as young and nimble fingers can accomplish. Some of these imperfectly instructed artisans find their way into the establishments for book-printing. Their operations may be readily traced. They systematically refuse to follow an author’s copy as to Capital Letters. Careful writers never use Capitals indiscriminately. They reserve them for proper names, official titles, and other matters which require this distinguishing mark. But the new race of compositors know no such vain distinctions. It is sufficient for them that it requires an additional muscular effort to lift the hand to the upper case in which the Capitals are placed. I am constrained to say that, whilst Printing in England has progressed as a Manufacture, it has deteriorated as an Art, in too many instances.

The Exhibition of London was to be the herald of universal peace. All nations were to beat their swords into ploughshares. A sort of political millennium was at hand. The prospect was a little clouded when, within two months of the close of our Temple of Concord, Louis Napoleon, by a coup d’état, swept away the Republic, and shortly after established the Empire. But the announcement that “The Empire is Peace” seemed to promise something better for the world than the devastating career of his uncle, which the French had so long called glory that even Englishmen were coming to be believers in Saint Napoleon. But another ruler, an autocrat, whose ambition had long been a matter of alarm to pacific statesmen, fancied that the integrity of the Ottoman
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Empire was a delusion out of which England might be cajoled, or bribed, even if the new government of France chose to hazard a war. So the territories of the Porte were invaded by Russian troops. But the two Western Powers had their own opinions of what was just and safe. The Czar was stubborn. The new Allies were firm. The combined English and French fleets entered the Black Sea, after the Turkish fleet had been destroyed by the Russian Admiral in the harbour of Sinope. At the end of March, 1854, England and France declared war against Russia. Then came a period of popular excitement, which awakened in my mind something like the interest of the great war of half a century previous. But this war was on a grander scale of armament, even than the closing years of the Peninsular Campaigns, when Wellington had almost overcome the difficulty of persuading his government that “a little war” was the most useless and dangerous thing that a great nation could undertake. This was not likely to be a little war, for the greatest military nation of Europe was in alliance with the greatest naval power. In July, 1854, when ten thousand French troops, destined for the Baltic, embarked at Boulogne on board English ships, Napoleon III. thus addressed them: “Soldiers, Russia having forced us to war, France has armed five hundred thousand of her children. England has called out a considerable number of troops. To-day our fleets and armies, united for the same cause, dominate in the Baltic as well as in the Black Sea. I have selected you to be the first to carry our eagles to those regions of the North. English vessels will convey you there; a unique fact in history, which proves the intimate alliance of the
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two great nations (peuples), and the firm resolution of the two governments not to abstain from any sacrifice to defend the right of the weak, the liberty of Europe, and the national honour.”

When I went to Paris, in June, 1855, the combined operations of the English and French forces had been carried forward for more than a year. In September the Allied troops landed in the Crimea, and the battle of the Alma ended in a victory, which might have been followed up by more decisive results. Then came the long siege of Sebastopol; the chivalrous charge at Balaclava, which was “not war,” but madness; the great battle of Inkermann; the storm in the Black Sea; and the winter of intense suffering. The Crimea disclosed our weakness as well as our strength. Forty years of peace had unfitted our home Departments for the organization of war upon a large scale. All our shortcomings were patent to the world in a Parliamentary Inquiry, whilst France might conceal her mistakes under the Censorship of the Press. It was altogether a novel feature in the Russian war that the power of English journalism forbade every attempt at concealment. “Wellington would not have endured that such a man as William Russell—all-observant, bold, honest, and patriotic, should have accompanied his army, to record its actions in words so stirring and appropriate that the historian might be content to follow the spirited sketches of the Times Reporter. But Wellington did not live in the age of the Electric Telegraph. He probably would as little have approved of the declaration of Lord Palmerston in the House of Commons, on the 26th of April, 1855, “It is my intention to request my noble friend at the head of
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the War Department, to urge upon the Commander of the Forces to let us have every day some information of what is passing at the seat of war.” Every day! perhaps every hour! Hot from the terrible siege, rushes the lightning spark over land and sea. The bell tinkles in a quiet room at Whitehall; the needles move; the mind at the other end of the wire is telling its wondrous tale through a medium as marvellous as ever was conceived of magic communication by the wildest Eastern fancy.

Universally known as were our administrative errors, I heard in Paris no sarcasms about our presumed incapacity for war. The French saw, not without admiration, how a people more given to trade than to fighting could, out of the appliances of their commerce, remedy the evils which long habits of peace had engendered. Never in the history of man did the productive forces of a nation so instantly concentrate themselves upon the supply of urgent and sudden necessities as in the second stage of the war in the Crimea. As remarkable, too, was the patriotism of the collective nation, and the self-devotion of individuals, in adopting the most practical means to repair what was manifestly the consequence of official incapacity or negligence. In a few months the dismal scene of the winter was changed altogether, not more by a change of season than by a change of policy. Whilst I was in Paris there were some gloomy forebodings of the issue of the siege of Sebastopol. The French had attacked the Malakhoff, and the English the Redan, but were repulsed by the Russians with severe loss. Within six weeks after I had left Paris in July, Sebastopol had fallen. England was wild with the news brought by the Electric Telegraph. I
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was in London in the morning, was examining the old Roman walls of Colchester in the afternoon, and was supping at Norwich. All at once the great market-place of that city was lighted up as by a tremendous conflagration; tar-barrels were blazing till midnight; the bells were ringing; the town-bands were playing; the people were shouting. I certainly never in the war against the first Napoleon saw such a vigorous demonstration of national feeling. We became soberer in a few weeks, when we learned how large a share the French had in this exploit, and how our own efforts, great as they were, had been to a certain extent unsuccessful. The newspaper readers began to be critical. We disdained the French praises of our bravery. We fancied we knew all about the matter when we read Mr. Russell’s correspondence. But nine or ten years have opened new sources of information, French, English, and Russian. To compare and to judge impartially will be the business of another generation, and perhaps even of this in a few years, when all shall agree that the truth is not likely to be developed by keeping alive national jealousies by the pens of picturesque writers, and that the sober records of one who was opposed both to the French and English—General Todleben—are of far more permanent value than all the fascinations of brilliant authorship.

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