wife's under a mistake: the entail was supposed to have been broken, which turns out not to have been the case; and it is an additional pleasure to us," said Mary's husband, turning round with a smile to meet her look, which was fixed upon him, and then leisurely surveying the amazed assembly-"it is a great additional pleasure to us," continued Mr. Summerhayes, "to find ourselves entitled, on a day every way so happy, to give up our laborious stewardship, and put our boy in possession of his own. I ask you over again, my excellent friends and neighbors, to drink the health of Charles Clifford of Fontanel." Major Aldborough; "I told you all how it 66 Mary will drive down looking just as bright as ever," said Miss Amelia Harwood. "I always said she deserved to be happy, poor soul-she always makes the best of everything. Her heart was breaking that night of Charley's birthday. I heard for a certain fact that she fainted just before the It was thus that Mr. Summerhayes extri- ball-a thing I never heard of Mary doing cated himself from his false position. The before. Heaven knows what all she was cheers which disturbed all the loiterers in the afraid of; there was something very mysteball-room, and brought them in a crowd to rious about that fire; but now, you know, see what it was, were more for the retiring she has recovered her spirits and her color, monarch than the new sovereign. Charley and looks just as she used to look. I himself, in a warm revulsion of his generous shouldn't wonder a bit if she began life over heart, had seized both his step-father's hands, again, and was quite happy in the manorand wrung them with strenuous gratitude. house now Tom Summerhayes is coming "I will never forget your generosity," cried home." the eager boy, who would have made over Fontanel there and then had Summerhayes pleased, into his keeping again. Charley knew nothing of the stormy scene with Courtenay-the silent rage and mortification which had thrown off Mary's attempts at consolation before necessity and his better genius warned Mr. Summerhayes of this opportunity left him for a graceful retreat. Charley did not know, nor the world-and the few who did know had no wish to remember. The whole party was in a flutter of admiration; and poor Miss Laura and Miss Lydia did all but go into hysterics between horror at the catastrophe and pride in their brother. Never before had Mr. Summerhayes of the Manor taken so high a position before the county as that night when he gave up possession of Fontanel. CHAPTER XI. MRS. SUMMERHAYES. "IT is not to be expected she can like it much; but she is a good little woman-she" always was a dear little woman, ," said the rector; "and Mary's jointure will make a great deal of difference in the manor-house, and smooth things down considerably. She has been doing all kinds of upholstery there already." "And so she ought to be, Amelia," said good Miss Harwood. "I am sure she has many a poor woman's prayers.' All these good people were walking on the Fontanel road. It was a lovely evening in the early summer, more than a year after Charley Clifford's birthday. Though it was rather beyond the usual limits of Miss Harwood's walk, she was here leaning on Miss Amelia's arm to enjoy the air, and to look for somebody who was expected. The rector had strolled out on the same errand; and that, or something similar, had also drawn Major Aldborough from his after-dinner re- · pose. The old-fashioned gates of the manorhouse were open, and some expectation was visible within. Miss Laura and Miss Lydia, in very summery muslin dresses, were to be seen promenading before the house, and hastened out, when they saw the Miss Harwoods, to join their friends. "It is very trying for us," said Miss Laura. O Miss Harwood, it is a very trying occasion; not that our new house is not very nice and everything very comfortable; but it is very trying to us," said Miss Lydia, joining in; " and oh, on dear Tom's part, such an unexpected change." "Your brother is expected home to-mor "By Jove, I knew how it would be!" said row, Miss Laura?" said the rector. "Yes, to-morrow," answered Miss Lydia, through the soft twilight and the dews to the whose turn it was. "Poor dear Tom is so Manor, not without brightness and good fond of travelling on the Continent, it is so hope; while Charley and Loo rode away good for his health; and Mrs. Summerhayes towards the darkening east, with a deeper wishes to be at home to receive him. Lydia shadow on their young faces, not quite sure and I are so glad, and yet we are sorry," how their home would look when their mochimed in Miss Laura; "it will be such a ther was away. change for dear Tom." "Not nearly so great a change as for poor Mary," said Miss Amelia, "leaving her children, poor soul; but I dare say she wont complain, and it must be better for all parties to have it settled. And so you like your new house? I am told that Mary did all the furnishing herself." 66 Oh, yes, she is very kind," said Miss Laura; "she has made everything very nice; you must come and see it. Indeed, if it were not for thinking what a change it is for dear Tom," cried the sisters both together, with an evident impression that their brother had been defrauded of something he had a right to, "we should all be very happy; for dear Mary," said Miss Lydia, with a little sob, "is very kind-and look, here she comes." Mary stopped her ponies when she saw the little procession which had come out to meet her; the tears came into her bright eyes again."It is so kind of you all," she said, kissing her hand to good Miss Harwood, "and it is so pleasant to think I can see you oftener now.” "God bless you, my dear! said the two old ladies who had come for love. And Mary said "Amen,, and the children too;" and so drove her ponies cheerfully, with smiles and tears, in through the open gates, where, however, we will not follow Mrs. Summerhayes. Things had turned out a great deal better than could have been expected. Mr. Summerhayes was a man of the world, and knew how to make a virtue of necessity. He had given in gracefully and at once, and gained reputation thereby, nobody knowing what She came driving the pony-carriage, as she his private feelings were when Courtenay had appeared so often at Summerhayes. Gateshead's discovery came first upon his Poor Mary! if she had been a wiser woman, own widely different plans. The fire in the would she have been loved as well? She west wing never was explained-nobody, incame, all beaming, with the smile on her lip for her part, forgot it, or associated it only deed, inquired very deeply into it—and Mary, and the tear in her eye-courageous, affec- with old Gateshead's nightcap, to which, she tionate, sweet as ever. Charley and Loo had remained firmly convinced, the old man had ridden down with her till they came in sight set fire on his way to bed. The fire at Fonof Summerhayes, and then had taken leave tanel was indeed associated with old Mr. of their mother. Mary, with little Mary by Gateshead throughout the county, as was inher side in the pony-carriage, drove on to her deed a natural and perhaps correct supposiseparate fate alone. She was going to take tion. Anyhow, nothing but the destruction possession of the old manor-house, no longer that was rather an improvement than otherof the west wing had resulted from it, and the mistress of Fontanel, but Tom Summer-wise to the old place, in which Loo, till they hayes's wife, to receive him when he came were both married, was to keep house for her home from his travels, and to make life bright, brother. Little Mary who, was easy in her if he were capable of seeing it, to that im- temper and happy as the day was long, went perfect and not very worthy man. The agi- with Mrs. Summerhayes to the Manor-and tation in her face was only enough to Alf and Harry were to have two homes for their holidays. When Tom Summerhayes heighten a little her sweet color and brighten came home next day, he thought some fairy her tearful eyes. On the whole, had she not change had come over the manor-house, and great reason to be happy? She had forgotten forgave his wife with magnanimity for all the everything but her husband's virtues while trouble she had brought upon him. Mary he had been absent, and her children were accepted the pardon with gratitude, and Miss safe and prosperous and close at hand. She Laura and Miss Lydia thought Tom a hero; smothered the little pang in her heart at and so, with a tolerable amount of content parting, and said to little Mary, with a smile, united couple. Mary had her own troubles on all sides, life began over again for the rethat she would have had to part with them still, like most people; but perhaps had not all the same when they were married. So been much more happy as Mrs. Clifford than the mother and the daughter drove down she was as Mrs. Summerhayes. writer, M. de Bazancourt, to palm upon the world a hasty narrative of the Crimean War, in which the exploits of the English army were understated or omitted, we smiled at the folly but when we find an English historian-boastof the book and the malignity of the narrator; ing of official information-producing a work of no hasty growth, but of a seven years' incubation-who, nevertheless, appears to have employed a misplaced ingenuity to do the greatest possible amount of injustice to every motive and every act of our principal ally, the impression we receive is more serious and more painful. THIS History is the most remarkable book which has of late come before us; but it is also the book which most calls for exact and searching criticism. It has the freshness of an unwritten page of history, yet it awakens the remembrance of events which deeply stirred the heart of the nation. It records the greatest political transactions and the greatest mil- Therefore, at the very outset of these reitary enterprise in which the men of our time marks, we are irresistibly led to disclaim all have engaged. It exhibits the actors in these participation in that febrile vanity and femoccurrences stripped of all disguise, for the inine irritability which presumes to vindiauthor has not thought himself restrained by cate the national pretensions of one nation at duty or discretion from dissecting to the quick the expense of another. Mr. Kinglake apthe characters and motives of his own con- pears to think that some incidents, which temporaries. He has, therefore, thrown the arose out of the alliance of the two countries, passion of political life into this historical were derogatory to England. We are not narrative, and he flavors it with the peremp- aware of it, and we shall dispute the assertory assertion, the biting sarcasm,, the irrita- tion. But we are confident that in the whole ble sensitiveness, the lively retort of a man of these transactions nothing has taken place struggling to make a reputation in conten- which we so much regret as this fact, that an tious debate. The result may be extremely English history of the war should bear on flattering to Mr. Kinglake's literary preten- every page of it the taint of malignant aversions. He has rendered the uninviting nar- sion to the Emperor of the French, of coarse rative of dead diplomatic negotiations attrac-insult to most of the chiefs of the French tive to fascination, by a vivid delineation of Government and army, and of studied unindividual character and by a nice analysis fairness - sometime of poisonous inuendo of the wheelwork of affairs; and he has con- against the French troops. These are feeltrived to throw a romantic glow over the pa-ings which Englishmen not only do not share, trons and the clients for whose exaltation but do not comprehend. We doubt not that this history has, we presume, been chiefly written. Apparently to heighten this effect, Mr. Kinglake has not been slow to cast upon the objects of his disfavor every reproach and every insult of a pen strong in the power of invective; and these persons are, for the most part, not the enemies of our country, against whom this war was carried on, but the allies who joined us in thé quarrel, who stood by us in battle and in suffering, and who powerfully contributed to the glorious termination of the enterprise. It is so repugnant to manly and generous feeling, thus to speak of the comrades who lately shared our perils and our success, that Mr. Kinglake must have endured all the pangs of wounded delicacy and outraged fellowship, before he could bring himself to write as he has done of those who formed and who maintained, with courage and good faith, the alliance of the French army with the army of Britain. Yet if he had undertaken this work for no other purpose than to inveigh against our French allies, the result would not be very different from that which is now before us. When an attempt was made by a French they will destroy the permanent value of Mr. *Sir Richard Airey, when he was arraigned beministration of his department, with excellent judgfore the Chelsea Board of Enquiry for the maladment secured the services of the author of this history, who, it is well known, wrote his defence; a of Lord Raglan require to be set off by a bi- to the partition of Turkey? That, indeed, is ography of the French emperor, stained and what they might well have done, if they had distorted by the mean insinuations of personal been animated by no motives but the abject virulence and party hatred? We wish that before Mr. Kinglake had given these chapters to the public he had paused to ask himself one question. He professes the highest veneration for the memory of Lord Raglan. He has been chosen (and it is no slight honor) to examine his private and public papers, and to relate his achievements. Does Mr. Kinglake believe that Lord Raglan, if he were aliye, would have sanctioned this publication? Would he not have condemned it as an intemperate production-discourteous to his gallant companions in arms, and injurious to the good relations between two great nations? We are content to leave the work to the verdict of the public on this is sue. Throughout these volumes the alliance of the French Government with that of the Queen of England is described as an alliance of knaves and dupes. Every step taken by the united powers is the result of some diabolical artifice, concocted in the Tuileries, to draw the unsuspecting British Cabinet into war, to sever us from our natural allies, to place us in humiliating dependence on France. So that if Mr. Kinglake's version of these events is to pass for history, a cabinet of English statesmen, consisting of all the foremost men of the country, and comprising several shades of opinion, was a mere tool in the hands of those whom he describes as "the conspirators of December," and our boasted freedom served us so little that the despotism of a foreign power prompted and determined our policy. A supposition more cynical and more unfounded was never put forward by our worst enemies. Throughout these transactions we shall show, though Mr. Kinglake affects to deny the fact, that the policy of England had its full share in guiding the course of events, and that her policy was directed by a lofty conception of her own duties and of the public interests. It is true, and it would be ungenerous to conceal it, that England had not the military power to give effect to that policy without the aid of France. We could not alone have sent an English army to meet the Russians on the Danube. We could not alone have invaded the Crimea. We could not have met the vast hosts of Russia on equal terms. We could not have taken Sebastopol. These things were done by the alliance. They could not have been done without it. Would Mr. Kinglake have preferred to see the "conspirators of December" leagued with the czar, and lending themselves striking example of confidence on one side and of courage on the other. A sense of the mutual obligation pervades even these volumes. selfishness imputed to them in this history. Louis Napoleon took the opposite course. He took the course most congenial to the policy of England, and he used the whole strength of France, which the revolution had placed in his hands, to support that policy. He renounced, at our suggestion, all territorial aggrandisement in this war. He combated and overcame the anti-English prejudices of the army and the people of France, that army and that people which had just raised him to power. Is it then for an English writer to forget these things-to traduce every motive of an allied sovereign-to calumniate his own government in his blind desire to outrage France - and thus to make this record of a joint war a cause of irritation and offence, injurious, as far as its influence extends, to the union of the two most powerful nations of the world, whose happiness and safety lie in their mutual esteem and good-will? Not such, in our judgment, not such is the spirit in which the historian of the Crimean War ought to have entered upon his task. The writer who undertook this great national theme, and to whom important materials were confidentially intrusted, contracted an obligation of no common weight. His work has in it something of a public character. His voice ought to have had in it something of the voice of England-some tenderness to the faults of others, some modesty in remembering our own. This book may be read by posterity and by foreign nations (if it be read by them at all), as a record of the deliberate judgment of the country. It ought to have been just, generous, and conciliatory towards France. But no such sense of obligation has checked or embarrassed Mr. Kinglake's sportive and sarcastic pen. The book is throughout composed of his own impressions; he has made it the vehicle of his personal animosi ties and predilections;-he has not risen to the great objective conception of a memorable war, affecting the destinies of the world. A bombastic expression, a quaint picture, a pungent or humorous turn of phrase, a gust of vindictive passion or a mere fit of peevishness, suffice to conceal from him the most important incidents in the transaction he is relating. The very defects of the book make it entertaining in a rare degree, and have given it the run of the circulating libraries: but we shall not do Mr. Kinglake the injustice to suppose that he aspires only to gratify the prevalent taste for strong and smart writing. We shall endeavor to judge of the merit of his performance by a higher standard. Before, however, we proceed to notice in to the vulgarity of nicknames, and to tricks of vituperation unworthy of his pen. Nature and simplicity it would be vain to ask of him, for in the efforts he makes to be natural and simple every trace of these qualities departs. He is most at his ease either in launching a sarcasm elaborately concise, or in describing in large bursts of eloquence the pomp and circumstance of war. His love and sympathy for arms we take to be genuine, though, by his reckless remarks on others, he appears to want the delicate sense of military honor. Yet no doubt he may have been cast in an heroic mould, and it is possible that literature and law have deprived England of a great warrior. These gifts are more than sufficient to command readers and to excite attention. The introductory volume may here and there be rather tedious, but it is enlivened by a vein of the keenest satire; a narrative of a battle in three hundred pages may be rather long, but no man can read of the stately march of the Allied Forces from the landing-place to the Alma, or storm the Great Redoubt with Codrington, Lacy, Yea, and the Grenadier Guards, without a thrill detail the more salient points of his political narrative, the style in which the work is written claims attention. To say that it is written with art would be an inadequate term. It is composed with a degree of skill and study amounting to artifice. The language, for the most part of a sturdy Saxon root, aims sometimes at rusticity; but even in this dress Mr. Kinglake reminds us of a man of fashion disguised as a countryman on the stage. Sometimes it is archaic, and even biblical, as if the Eastern rambles of its author had left upon his lips some lingering veneration for the most ancient records of our race. Sometimes it is lyrical, and Mr. Kinglake is not afraid to brave that ripple of derision which is apt in these times to follow a piece of the finest writing. In every page we find the same incessant labor and the same exquisite finish; but these qualities reach their climax in the keen, rapier-like thrusts with which Mr. Kinglake assails the reputation of most of his contemporaries. The characters he has traced of Lord Palmerston, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, Marshal St. Arnaud, and many others, are not unworthy the touch of Mephistopheles. of pugnacity. Yet, we fear these ebullitions They are inimitably like-but it is the like- of martial prose will not stand the test of ness of caricature-likeness which is ren- time. Napier indulged in them sometimes; dered more intense by as much as it exceeds but though Napier has written the finest truth. This tendency to exaggeration is military history in the language, these flights heightened by the introduction of personal are not the parts of it which are most justly details, borrowed from the labored portrai- admired. Mr. Kinglake would have a more ture of the old-fashioned romances-Lord indisputable right to lasting fame in English Stratford is always" pinching his thin, tight, historical literature, if he had condescended merciless lips, or displaying the sea-blue to write with more sobriety. The extreme depth of his eyes under the shadow of the vivacity of his diction offends good taste; in Canning brow"-the Emperor Napoleon is his constant efforts to be impressive, graphic, drawn in colors which we decline to copy- and original, he is sometimes extravagant, Lord Raglan is generally presented in what sometimes unintelligible. The vitality of the tailors call a "regimental undress," and books depends on more simple conditions. In may be known from afar by the loss of his the long run the world despises all these arm-even General Airey displays "keen, tricks of rhetoric. A political pamphlet is salient, sharp-edged features on the field the most spirited of compositions, but it is of Alma," with an eager, swooping crest (it most ephemeral. The real test of the value was always strained forward and intent)." of a history is accuracy of narrative, true inThese touches are what, if they were used by sight into character and motives, and a just another man, Mr. Kinglake would probably estimate of the causes and results of each describe as ornithological. He delights, link in a chain of events. It remains to be moreover, to animate his personages with seen how far the "Invasion of the Crimea " furious passions. They are all very fierce" fulfils these conditions. -many of them are tortured by anger and resentment. Even Lord Aberdeen has a "passionate hatred of war." To judge from this history, the motive power of modern politics is to be always in a passion. We have too much real respect for Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and for the memory of Lord Aberdeen and of Lord Raglan, to recognize them at all in these histrionic attitudes. Mr. Kinglake never writes without wit, not often without refinement, we therefore the more regret that he should have stooped It would have been well for his readers, and for his own reputation, if Mr. Kinglake had been content to execute the purpose denoted by the title of his history, and confined himself to a military narrative of the Crimean expedition. But the whole of his first volume consists of political speculations, and a satirical analysis of the causes of the war, in which he is constantly out of his depth, often inaccurate, and sometimes under the influence of savage and unreasonable passion. Lord Raglan does not appear in the whole |