out of the Crimea. So peremptory and unfeeling were the terms of Panmure's telegram making this demand-so little were the Cabinet able to realise the strategic position and so poor was the measure of confidence they reposed in their Commander-in-Chiefthat Simpson was goaded into telegraphing his resignation on September 28.

'It is plain to me,' he wrote on the 29th, that in England a very erroneous notion exists on matters here in general. The Press seems to guide every one at home. Were we to act as you seem to expect in attacking the Russians in perhaps the strongest entrenched position that ever was seen, the odds are that the Allied Armies would be beaten. . . . It is unfortunate for commanders when they lose the confidence of their Government.'

Simpson retained his command till November 10, when he handed it over to Codrington, hostilities, with the exception of a few affairs of outposts, being at an end. But it was not until February 25, 1856, that the Plenipotentiaries met in Paris to treat about peace, and neither the British nor the French Governments relaxed preparations for a fresh campaign. An armistice was signed on March 15, but it was not until July 12 that the last of the British troops embarked and the evacuation of the Crimea was complete.

In this brief notice of these bulky but well-arranged volumes, no reference has been made to the frequent letters which Queen Victoria addressed to her War Minister throughout these two anxious years. They are sufficiently remarkable to deserve careful perusal, showing the intense interest felt by the Sovereign in everything affecting her Army and the understanding spirit which she brought to bear upon the most perplexing problems.

It has not been possible within the limits of this paper to give more than a general sketch of the deplorable confusion and absence of all provision for a campaign which prevailed when war was declared, and indeed until it was half over. Nor was that all. Military opinion upon points of strategy was constantly overruled and set at naught by Ministers whose dominant motive it was to keep the public and the Press in tolerable good humour, even to the point of sacrificing the careers and reputations of officers whom, having appointed to the work, it was their duty to support morally and materially. The narrative deserves close study by all present and future aspirants to a place in the legislature of this

country, not to mention the Government, for it is through the House of Commons that the pressure comes which drives Governments into courses about which, however profitable, it is humiliating to read.

The operations of war have been greatly modified in the course of half a century, but the lessons of the Crimean campaign are as cogent as ever. Should we, unhappily, be again involved in a great war, the most priceless service that men of leading can do for their country will be to allay the public impatience for great victories. Periods of apparent inactivity sometimes conduce more to bringing war to a close than a brilliant series of feats of

arms.

'It is extremely difficult,' wrote Sir Edward Hamley in his Operations of War,' 'to persuade even intelligent auditors that two armies are not like two fencers in an arena, who may shift their ground to all points of the compass; but rather resemble two swordsmen on a narrow plank which overhangs an abyss, where each has to think, not only of giving and parrying thrusts, but of keeping his footing under penalty of destruction. The most unpractised general feels this at once on taking a command in a district where his troops are no longer supported by routine; or, if he does not, the loss of a single meal to his army would sufficiently impress it on him. While distant spectators imagine him to be intent only on striking or parrying a blow, he probably directs a hundred glances-a hundred anxious thoughts-to the communications in his rear, for one that he bestows on his adversaries' front.'

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON.

BY FREDERIC HARRISON.

As one of the surviving friends in England who knew Eliot Norton for nigh upon half a century, having been his host on more than one occasion in this country, and also twice his guest in the home in which he was born and in which he died in Massachusetts, I venture to offer to all those whom he left to regret him, both here and there, a few words of affectionate remembrance.

I shall limit myself to my personal memories and regard for the man; for his varied writings and his dominant literary influence have been so fully described by others that it needs now no further praise. It is of the man himself I wish to speak. For as friend, as interpreter of movements and ideas, as host or as guest, as an intellectual link between two continents as well as between two nations, as for two generations a centre of Anglo-American thought-Norton held a position which, at least in the twentieth century, he came to hold absolutely alone.

In old Greece there used to be at Athens, and other republics, a citizen of high standing who was known as the Proxenos of some foreign State, whose duty it was hospitably to welcome, advise, and assist foreign visitors to Athens. The simple Proxenos held an honorary, unofficial, friendly function, something between that of a modern consul and an ambassador. Now Norton came at last to be recognised as a sort of volunteer minister for American literature in Europe, and still more distinctly as Proxenos, or ConsulGeneral for British literature and men of letters in his native State in America.

I had met Norton as a young man during his early visits to England. But when he passed some months at Keston, in Kent, it chanced that I was his neighbour in the country. In 1859 and thenceforward until my own marriage I lived with my father between Beckenham and Bromley in Kent. Eden Park then stood in a beautiful and quiet woodland country, before railways and villas had made it a suburb of London. The house, since destroyed, VOL. XXVI.-NO. 151, N.S.

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had some historic associations, for it was occupied in the eighteenth century by Lord Auckland, and it was there that the youthful William Pitt made his first (and only) proposal of marriage to Miss Eden, Lord Auckland's daughter. It was a house in which Gibbon had stopped on his way to Lord Sheffield at Uckfield; and, years later on, Louis Philippe stayed there in the days of his wanderings in exile. Eden was within a walk of Hayes Place, where Lord Chatham lived and died, and also within a drive of Keston and of Down, the home of Darwin.

It was from Keston Rectory that Norton, with his wife and family, visited us at Eden. It is now quite forty years ago; but I well remember the impression produced on me and on us all by the quiet, serious, and sympathetic American, who knew so many famous people and had seen so much. The somewhat slow and emphatic speech (as it sounded in the rattle of London society), the guarded and balanced criticism of men and things, the detachment of spirit and the freedom from all traditional and conventional formulas all this was as conspicuous in Norton at the age of forty as it was at eighty.

But the young Mrs. Eliot Norton charmed us all by her beauty, her grace, and her distinction. Forty years ago there were not so many beautiful and distinguished American women in England as there are now. Mrs. Norton had many of the best characteristics of her husband. She had the same refined taste, the same gentleness, sympathy, and love of learning. And, beyond that, she had the unmistakable cachet of a woman's elegance. No one would have taken her for an Englishwoman, with the suppleness, elasticity, and dolcezza of manner which we associate with a south European. And yet no one could take her for French, Italian, or Spanish. She was far too distinctly Anglo-Saxon for that, as indeed she looked. No! she was American, and American of the best type-the type which combines hearty frankness and independence with perfect suavity and simplicity of bearing.

Mrs. Norton the elder, the widowed mother of our friend, was quite as striking a type of the New England matron of the Pilgrim Fathers school-serious, stately, placidly observant and courteous, but unbending in every matter that had come as a tradition from her forbears, intellectual, moral, or spiritual.

I remember Norton as my guest at the Reform Club in London when I collected a small party of political and literary friends. He interested them all, rather perhaps because he was so different

from the familiar club oracle than by his imposing himself and his opinions on us. The perfectly open mind, ready to weigh any new view, political, social, or artistic, and yet not at all ready to pronounce judgment without a probing kind of criticism all his own, the staid demeanour that to us Londoners had something of the Puritan air, the cosmopolitan tone of the man, who as a youth had travelled far and wide, from extreme West to extreme East, who was no opinionated Yankee and yet no sentimental slave to European culture-all this was a combination quite uncommon in Pall Mall forty years ago.

I saw him at intervals and had some correspondence in the intervening years, but I pass to a later period of his life, when in his seventy-fifth year I visited him at his house at Cambridge, near Boston. He was then distinctly a veteran who had resigned his professorship for some years past, and was living in quiet ease with his three daughters in his ancestral home, within a walk of his beloved college of Harvard. All his world-famous friends were at that time gone-Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, Carlyle, and Ruskin. He himself was bright and active, was still doing some editing and occasional studies, but was not, I think, engaged on any continuous work of importance. He was leading a life of literary retirement, as a sort of Emeritus Professor of the Best Thought in our two races.

I venture to call his residence at Shady Hill, near Cambridge, his ancestral home, because from the American point of view this is really true. I remember, when he received me at my first visit and showed me over the house and grounds, he said: 'I am one of the few Americans who in old age still live in the house of my father in which I was born.' That is of course in the twentieth century a very rare thing. The enormous scale of the cities and districts in the United States, the incredible rapidity of growth in everything round the industrial centres, the mobility and facilities for change of place and life, interest and occupation, the sudden increase of wealth and social position common to most active citizens, however born, make it most unusual for the American, at the end of a long life, to find it convenient, or even possible, to live in the house in which he was born.

This Norton did, as also did one or two famous Bostonians. But in such a city as New York the only person I ever heard of as living in his family house was Abram Hewitt, once mayor and eminent philanthropist. Norton dearly cherished his own Shady