"If this power of the Church be indeed destructive or ruinous, it is no ecclesiastical, but a hellish power of Satan. I tell you when they maintain concubines, catamites, and robbers, and endeavor to hinder the Christian life, it is a devilish power that we must resist. I defend the Romish Church and the Christian doctrine against that hellish power of Satan."

There was a torch to carry into those chambers of imagery where the elders were bowing before profane idols. As if it did not flame high enough, or throw its beams over a wide enough space, the elders seized it, and lifted it up on a scaffold, and piled fagots around it, and made a flame which lighted up all Italy and Germany and France. For two hundred years Florence remembered the martyrdom of Savonarola. The Church that rejected him was glad to take him back victorious in death. A Dominican opposed him; the Dominican order asked for him an admission among the saints. A Pope excommunicated him; a Pope favored his canonization. Michel Angelo spread his inspiration over the walls of the Sixtine Chapel, Rafaelle honored him with a place in his most famous fresco, among the great doctors of the Church. Luther gave him rank with the holy witnesses of reform, Humanity gives him a place among its benefactors.

The Invasion of the Crimea: its Origin, and an Account of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan. By ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE. Vols. I., II.

WHEN the Crimean war was brought to a close by the reduction of Sebastopol, and its accounts came to be balanced, the English people settled down into a condition of mind which was not exactly one of satisfaction, certainly not one of pride, but one in which the preponderant feeling was perhaps that of relief at having at length finished a war of which the origin had been so uncertain, the object so shadowy, the conduct in many respects so discreditable, the glory so scanty, and the cost so dreadfully disproportioned to the results. It had not been a war which could, on the whole, be reviewed by an Englishman with much complacency, and possibly the nation would have been content to see its history remain unwritten. But this could not be. The materials for its history were known to be ample beyond all precedent. It shortly became known that these materials had been placed in the hands of Mr. Kinglake, who would in due course of time present to the eyes of the reluctant nation the most complete and vivid picture which could be produced from them of this latest "war for an idea." After nearly seven years of preparation, the first portion of the work has at length appeared, and is at once rendered remarkable by the extraordinary vigor of the criticisms which it has provoked from the reviewers of its own country. From the Edinburgh and Quarterly down to "the little dogs, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart," it is one grand burst of anger and objurgation.*

We opened the book with a strongly favorable prepossession, which may have been partly due to this extreme severity on the part of the British critics; for it was not unnatural that, when these sensitive reviewers broke forth with such unusual violence against the historian of their latest war, whose materials had been at once so ample and so fresh, and whose task

* Except the later very able and authoritative paper in the North British Review.

had been so long in progress, we should look a little beyond the avowed grounds of complaint, to ask where British pride had been wounded, where truth "not to be spoken at all times" had been too imprudently disclosed, and where criticism had been too freely dispensed in regard to the movements of British generals and the policy (or the want of policy) of British statesmen. It did not seem quite possible that so much wrath could be excited in English breasts by underrating France and overrating England. We remembered that the approbativeness of the Hon. Elijah Pogram, who declared that our people must be cracked up, sir!" was not wholly without parallel in the mother country; and we thought it not unlikely that some theory which recognized that amiable popular weakness might go far to account for the bitterness of the hostility which Mr. Kinglake had been so unfortunate as to provoke. We were not altogether wrong. It is hard for an Englishman to be told, still harder for him to hear the announcement made to the admiring world, that the English Cabinet, at a special council, went quietly off to sleep over the first reading of a despatch from the Minister of War to the general commanding the forces in the East, so momentous as that which directed the expedition against Sebastopol. It is hard to be forced to believe that the ministry of Lord Aberdeen, instead of "drifting" into the war, according to the expressive phrase of one of their number, were towed into it by the selfish diplomacy of a foreign usurper. Let us confess at once, as the author himself has undoubtedly done, that the anger is not unnatural, and was only what might have been expected.

Mr. Kinglake has produced a book which, if not as excellent as was hoped from his reputation as a brilliant writer and his deliberate preparation, is still, in many respects, vastly superior to the majority of histories written so shortly after the events they describe. Written as it must have been with a pretty clear foresight of the hostility of the professional critics, it was perhaps not easy to avoid a certain self-assertion and independence of tone which subject him to the charge of conceit. This blemish, however, is not offensively prominent; and it may easily be pardoned in a work which exhibits in a high degree the qualities of courage, energy, and an honesty

of purpose that keeps the sympathies of the author always in the right direction, and prevents his sarcasm, even when most bitter and relentless, from becoming indiscriminate.

The first of the two volumes of the English edition is given to an elaborate investigation of the "Transactions which brought on the War." Mr. Kinglake describes with amusing minuteness the quarrel between the monks of the Greek and Latin Churches for the supreme privileges of the holy shrine at Bethlehem, and the skilful management and use of the quarrel by the new-made Emperor of the French, as a means for strengthening his somewhat unstable position on the throne. With equal minuteness he describes the reawakening of the old strife between Russia and the Porte, on the question, half religious and half political, of the privileges of the Christians in Turkey, which was sustained with so much bitterness on the part of the Russian ambassador, Prince Mentschikoff, and with so much moderation and dignity on the part of the Sultan and his advisers, a strife alternately soothed by the judicious mediation of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and fanned into fresh heat by angry despatches from the Czar, until the final departure of Mentschikoff from Constantinople, the occupation of the Danubian Principalities by the Russian troops, and the assembling of the representatives of the Four Powers at Vienna. At this point Mr. Kinglake abruptly branches off into a separate and vivid history of the great exploit of Louis Napoleon on the 2d of December. His apology for this seemingly wide digression is his theory of the main cause of the war, that when the quarrel was in a fair way of being settled by the combined interference and remonstrance of England, France, Austria, and Prussia, the new Emperor, finding his throne undignified by the loyalty of a single Frenchman of character, and endangered by the concealed discontent of the French people, deliberately thwarted the action of the Four Powers, and exasperated the quarrel between Russia and Turkey.

"The associates of the Elysée well understood, that, if they had been able to trample upon France and her laws, then success had been made possible by the dread which the French people had of a return to tumult; and it was clear that, until they could do something more than

head the police of the country, their new power would be hardly more stable than the terrors on which it rested. What they had to do was to distract France from thinking of her shame at home by sending her attention abroad. For their very lives' sake, they had to pile up events which might stand between them and the past, and shelter them from the peril to which they were brought whenever men's thoughts were turned to the night of the 2d of December, and to Thursday, the day of blood. There could be no hesitation about this. Ambition had nothing to do with it. If Prince Louis and Morny and Fleury, if Maupas, St. Arnaud, and Magnan, were to continue quartered upon France, instead of being thrown into prison and brought to trial, it was indispensable that Europe should be disturbed. Without delay the needful steps were taken."

During the summer of 1853, the understanding of the Four Powers was perfect in regard to the occupation of the Principalities by Russia. In this understanding, and in the strong pressure which by means of it they were prepared to exert upon the Russian Emperor, Mr. Kinglake recognizes the proper, legitimate, and certain assurance that the haughty Czar might have been forced to abandon his pretensions, and that the peace of Europe might have been preserved. Under the circumstances then existing, the power most interested in opposing the course of the Czar was not France, still less England, but Austria, whose eastern territory was encompassed by the provinces upon which his troops had entered. But to allow Austria to take the lead, either in remonstrance or in retaliation, would be to neglect the very opportunity which Louis Napoleon had been so anxiously preparing, for exhibiting himself to France and the world in the character of the defender of the peace of Europe. Accordingly, Mr. Kinglake represents the Emperor as overruling the inertia of the English ministry, and absolutely forcing it, against its instincts and against its prejudices, to a virtual neglect of the broader alliance, and to the formation of a separate and distinct alliance with himself.

"The purport of this arrangement still lurks in private notes, and in recollections of private interviews, but it can be seen that (for reasons never yet explained) France and England were engaging to move in advance of the other powers. .. The Four Powers were to be judges, namely, France and England-were to be the

and two of them executioners."

.....