whom he gravely pointed out the improbability of his men, however patient, starving in the midst of plenty, while strong enough to take what they wanted; and "to this the Commodore added, that if by delay of supplying him with provisions, his men should, from the impulses of hunger, be obliged to turn cannibals, and to prey upon their own species, it was easy to be foreseen that, independent of their friendship to their comrades, they would, in point of luxury, prefer the plump well-fed Chinese to their own emaciated shipmates!" "The first mandarin acquiesced in the justice of this reasoning," adds the Chaplain, with the mild inward laugh which befits his position. And here, alas! our Chaplain leaves us, getting permission from his Commander, along with two or three other travel-worn of ficers, to return home by a ship which was just leaving the port. The cruise and its dangers and excitements were over, as everybody believed; and the Centurion, too, as soon as she had got herself put in sailing trim, was to follow. So everybody thought, and so the silent Commodore let them think, keeping a close eye upon his stores, his repairs, everything necessary for the long voyage before him, and meanwhile turning his own plans over in his deliberate self-sufficing mind. It was only when he had left the port, bound, as the world supposed, for Batavia and England, with Dutch letters on board for the Dutch port, and not a doubt of his destination on any mind either aboard or ashore, that he called his people to him on the quarterdeck, and opened his mind to them. That galleon! could they go back to England without it, leaving the Spaniard to brag of their failure? Were they to acknowledge themselves foiled, and give in, English seamen not understanding the meaning of such words? It had wellnigh broken his heart to give it up that time when he thought the

against Carthagena, so much to stop the Spaniard's bragging mouth. And now our sailor had the heart to go home.

The total amount of treasure taken altogether by the Centurion amounted to £400,000, แ independent," adds the historian, eager to make his hero's full merits clear, "of the ships and merchandise which she either burnt or destroyed, and which, by the most reasonable estimation, could not amount to so little as £600,000 more; so that the whole damage done the enemy by our squadron did doubtless exceed a million sterling. To which if there be added the great expense of the Court of Spain in fitting out Pizarro, and in paying the additional charges in America incurred on our account, together with the loss of one man-of-war, the total of all these articles will be a most exorbitant sum, and is the strongest convictions of the utility of this expedition, which, with all its numerous disadvantages, did yet prove so extremely prejudicial to the enemy." With this utterance of calm exultation the Chaplain winds up the extraordinary tale. And surely, though we may have changed our minds a little about the Christian duty of being thus "prejudicial to the enemy," "there never was a story of wholesale plunder and destruction more splendidly relieved by those qualities which are among the highest possessed by human nature, and which the one thing most fatal to humanity, war, has ever had most share in calling out-dauntless courage steadfastness beyond compare patience, devotion, loyalty a dutiful and unhesitating obedience in the face of every difficulty-a noble, silent, magnanimous reign of one man over his fellows. Be the object what it might, such a narrative could not but move the hearts of men; and the object, as Anson saw it, was, by his lights, one of the purest principles of patriotism

to magnify, glorify, and enrich his

country to make the very name of her a terror and power-to make her feared by the greatness of the pains she could inflict, yet loved for the unparalleled mercy she could extend. Such was his aim, inarticulate, and never put into words; but written in fire and flame, in panic-stricken and grateful hearts, along all the shores of that Southern Sea. The galleon and its ingots were necessities of the work -the garment of fact and potential secondary impulse which are indispensable to human action, but not its pervading motive, nor anything but a big shadow upon its simple heroic soul.

The fine climax of the storythe sudden, silent, swoop into the Southern Seas, and stroke as of fate upon the long-dreamed-of victim is told with less picturesque effect than the other part of the voyage. We miss our Chaplain's eye, which was ever open to those details which make up a picture. Time does not permit us to follow him into his more philosophical chapters

not even into the story of the galleon itself, and all the precautions observed upon its yearly voyage; or his grave survey of the effects which might and ought to have followed had the squadron but started a little earlier. The only other quotation we shall make is one interesting only as showing what a strange sarcasm a hundred years can make out of words spoken in the most perfect gravity and good faith. The writer is discussing the probable results of his Commodore's generous treatment of the Spanish captives:- "Nor let it be imagined," he says, that the impressions which the Spaniards thus received to our advantage is a matter of small import; for, not to mention several of our countrymen who have already felt the good effects of these prepossessions, the Spaniards are a nation whose good opinion of us is doubtless of more consequence than that of all the world besides!" Strange whirligig

of time which brings about so many revenges! Whatever the future may be which remains for this extraordinary nation, where is there a people in the world whose good opinion is of so little importance now?

Anson had the gratification of bringing at once the news and the results of his good fortune to England without being forestalled by any flying rumour. In the very Channel he escaped, without knowing it, a danger as great as any of those he had more painfully surmounted in the Pacific, having sailed through the midst of a French fleet in a fog, which concealed him from them, with all his dollars on board. "Anson is returned with vast fortune," writes Horace Walpole in June 1744. "He has brought the Acapulco ship into Portsmouth, and its treasure is computed at five hundred thousand pounds." The latter circumstance, however, is a mistake: Anson sold his galleon at Macao, and came home in the Centurion, valiant old hulk, the only one which had survived the cruise.

It is very strange, after the clear revelation of this man which has come to us among the waves and seas, to find him disappear the moment he touches English ground. If it is the want of our Chaplain, whose office in nature it was to elucidate his silent Commodore, or if it is that his work was done, and humanity had henceforth no need of him, it is hard to tell; but the fact is very clear that he disappears forthwith from all knowledge of inan. True, he won a victory over the French three years after, notable enough in its way, and was made a peer, and has left honourable Ansons after him to the present generation. He was even promoted to be a Lord of the Admiralty ten years later, in which capacity Lord Waldegrave reports of him, that "Lord Anson, as usual, said little; though it is found "le had done everything in his

power that our fleet might be in the best condition." He held this appointment for a very short time, but seems to have been again called to office at a later period. "He was in reality a good sea-officer," Lord Waldegrave says, with a certain fine patronage, "and had gained a considerable victory over the French in the last war (Cape Horn and Paita and the galleon evidently not considered worth speaking of!) "but nature had not endowed him with those extraordinary abilities which had been so liberally granted him by the whole nation.' Thus the fine stream of story sinks into the mud of contemporary gossip and loses itself, gleaming out now and then, soiled with the witty insinuations of that sweet-spoken age, in Horace Walpole's letters. The narrative of the great sailor's voyage is "very silly and contradictory," Horace thinks, jeering nastily at our Commodore. Fortunately posterity, in that as in some other things, has not been of Horace's opinion. "A real poem in its kind, or romance all fact; one of the pleasantest little books in the world's library at this date," says Carlyle. A book all reality, full of a straightforward occupation with its own business, which is one of the highest evidences of truth.

Thus arose, without preface or exposition, one of the few men of the eighteenth century who had an absolute and most distinct piece of work to perform in the world. He did it, as usual, saying little; " and, having done it, subsided into that peaceable obscurity upon which even a peerage throws little light. The modesty of his exit chimes in with our favourite ideal of that British sailor whom England loves. There were incompetent admirals enough, as there were incompetent generals, in his time. Anson alone handed down out of one century into another, to Nelson and all his captains, the old glorious English tradition of empire over the sea.

Ir is a ghastly but a striking picture of the battle-field of the Alma with which Mr. Kinglake opens his third volume. "The breadth of the lands and the seas which divided this simple Crim Tartary from the great seats of European vice, had hitherto defeated the baneful energy of those who came out to prey upon armies by selling strong drinks, and robbing the dead and the wounded. Armed and clothed as he stood wheu, receiving his death-wound, he heard the last of the din of battle, so now the soldier lay. Many had been struck in such a manner that their limbs were suddenly stiffened, and this so fixedly, that, although their bodies fell to the ground, their hands and arms remained in the very posture they chanced to be in at the moment of death. This was observed, for the most part, in instances of soldiers who had been on the point of firing at the moment when they were struck dead; for, where this had happened, the man's hands being thrown forward and fixed in the attitude required for levelling a firelock, they of course stretched upwards towards the heavens when the body fell back upon the ground. These upstretched arms of dead men were ghastly in the eyes of some: others thought they could envy the soldier released at last from his toil, and encountering no moment of interval between hard fighting and death."-(Vol. iii. p. 3.) There are touches in this description which no one could have given who had not gazed on that still hillside when the battle, with its tumult and its pride, had swept by.

But while the spectator could mark the dismal sight, and whilst the victors were busy tending the

wounded, one of the most difficult problems presented by the art of war had to be decided on by the chiefs of the confederate army. A landing had been effected, a victory had been won; but what step was next to be taken? The Russian soldiery had disappeared in hasty retreat behind the rolling swells of ground which lay towards Sebastopol. Were the victors to stand still gazing idly on the empty field?

With his blood yet fired by the battle, and some of his divisions fresh and nearly unscathed, Lord Raglan was eager to pursue at once, but St. Arnaud declined to join. The next day, however, the great question had to be met. Its terms were these: On the Allied right was the sea; two days' march in their front was the north side of Sebastopol; on their left the great road from thence to Simferopol ; and beyond it, on the southern coast of the Crimea, the deep harbours of Balaklava and Kamiesh.

Three courses lay before them. 1. To advance straight to their front and storm the intrenchments which defended the north side of Sebastopol. 2. To abandon the enterprise should these works be deemed too strong. Or, 3. To secure good harbour, and, basing themselves on it, to undertake an attack on the south side of Sebastopol, by abandoning their base on the west coast, and marching to the south-east across the country, by the Mackenzie Heights and the plain of Tchernaya, to the harbour of Balaklava.

The first official record of opinion on this point is contained in an admirably-written memorandum by Sir John Burgoyne, Chief Engineer of the English army. It is dated