reserve medical staff when the wounded arrived in thousands from Alma at Scutari? Where were the attendants for them during the passage from Balaklava? Where are the magazines of biscuit stored up in the British camp for winter use, as they were in the French during the six weeks of fine weather after the army first arrived at Sebastopol? It is plain that nothing was foreseen or provided for; and the only conceivable reason why it was so, must have been that forethought implied preparation, and preparation expense. Even the miserable excuse of terror of expense is awanting, for the country, long before November, was incessantly urging the necessity of winter preparations, and the papers loudly demanded it.

Mr Cobden said at Leeds that we had no concern with an aggression three thousand miles off-that we should leave the Russians and Turks to fight it out themselves, and withdraw our troops without delay from the Crimea. He forgets that, if we can reach the Crimea in fifteen days from Portsmouth, the Russians can reach Portsmouth in fifteen days from Sebastopol; and that if we shun the contest in the Crimea for that great fortress, we may have to maintain it in Hampshire for our own arsenals. He says the Czar is not more ambitious now than the French were in the time of Napoleon, or than we ourselves have been in India. This is too true. It is hard to say whether the American Government, elected by universal suffrage, and strongly influenced by mercantile interests, or the French Convention, springing from the storms of the Revolution, or the British rule in India, directed by a mercantile company, or the Russian in Europe, wielded at the will of the Czar, has proved itself most ambitious. We are all more or less ambitious-prudence or inability to rob alone restrains us. The conclusion Mr Cobden draws from this is, that since we live in a world of robbers, we should submit quietly to be robbedsince we live in a world of smiters, we should present our cheek to be smote. The conclusion we draw is, that we should prepare ourselves manfully for the struggle, and avert

disaster by taking measures to prevent it.

Happily for the country, there can now be no longer any doubt as to the course which should be pursued to attain this object. In this respect, at least, the reformed Parliaments have done a very great service to the nation. They have presented a beacon to be avoided by all future rulers. We have nothing to do but undo everything which they have done, and we are sure to be right. Their principle was to sacrifice the future to the present, and we see the consequence; let ours be to sacrifice the present to the future, and we shall see the consequence. Submit to present burdens in order to purchase future advantages-that is the well-known secret of success in private life, and it is the equally certain means of attaining prosperity and security in public affairs. There is no royal road to safety in nations, any more than to kings in geometry. If we would be secure in the end, we must make sacrifices in the beginning, just as, it we would be rich in old age, we must be industrious in youth. Why is the Czar now so formidable, and able to bid defiance to banded Europe, and hold the balance, even notwithstanding his comparative poverty, with the united forces of England and France ? Simply because in peace he did not relax the sinews of war, but, on the contrary, employed forty years of pacification in making a great and ceaseless preparation for future hostility, as we did in relaxing former efforts, and abandoning the means of future defence-Fas est et ab hoste doceri. Let us, now that we are engaged in this conflict, imitate this example; and the superior wealth, energy, and courage of our people must in the end, as it did in the war of the Revolution, secure to us the victory.

Let us not be deterred by early disaster, even if, quod Deus avertat, it should occur. Recollect the disarming, after the victories of Marlborough, was punished by the convention of Closterseven; that after the American War, by the flight from Flanders; but recollect also that the energy of the Earl of Chatham produced the peace of Paris, the constancy of Wellington the triumph of

A LITTLE group of reverend gentlemen stand in the porch of Briarford school. The subdued hum behind, full of awe and a little excitementthe sun-burnt urchin peeping from the window, with his hand over his eyes for custom's sake, to shade him from the sun, though no sun is here-the neat little woman curtseying and respectful behind, taking leave of the Vicar and his reverend associates, give you note that some pastoral oversight or examination has been going on in this small noisy sheepfold to-day.

First of all, here is Mr Wyburgh, vicar of the parish. If the good man were minded to disguise himself, scarcely a scarlet coat could serve the purpose, for his trim and snowy linen, his close clerical vest and spotless costume, his stiff plain band of white neckcloth, is not more distinctly and decorously professional, than is the very voice and smile, the little gesture of the reverend hand, and measured cadence of the respectable footstep, so familiar on all parochial highways. You will perceive that the Rev. Richard Wyburgh is what, when we would speak after a complimentary fashion, we call "under the middle size"-in plainer words, a small spare figure, without an ounce of superfluous weight to encumber his activity; not a strong man by nature, but knitted into sinewy vigour by a life of patient exertion, undemonstrative and unboastful; a little shortsighted, as those concentrated puckers round his keen, kindly, twinkling eyes bear witness; a little bald, with thin locks half-way between white and sand colour in complexion, and strangely feathery in texture, fringing his well-formed head; otherwise not a sign of age about him-as quietly alert and full of spirit as in his youth. A singularly different person is Mr Wyburgh's curate, who stands beside him. Tall, lank, stooping, and "ill put together," there is not much that

VOL. LXXVII.-NO. CCCCLXXII.

you can call handsome in the outer man of good John Green; and poor Angelina, though she sighs over them most dolefully, cannot manage to bleach those refractory neckcloths into anything like the purity of Mr Wyburgh's. This prosaic and commonplace care is a very novel one for the Curate's pensive bride; but, after all, she would do her duty if she could; and it is melancholy to see the Rev. John, how he holds out these neckcloths at arm's-length, and shakes his head with a comic ruefulness before he puts them on-though he is, after all, so much of a sloven by nature, that this is a fitting chastisement of his own evil ways. Mr Green's coats, however made, wear into a peculiar fashion of their own: the skirts so soon learn to hang heavy with ponderous volumes, of which burden they retain the shape even when itself is removed; and the collar stands out high and distinct from the neck, which slants away from it, stooping forward. Mr Green carries a prodigious stick, a most truculent and suspicious-looking bludgeon, and has a wardrobe of handkerchiefs of all the colours of the rainbow thrust into one pocket, to balance the book in the other. So it is in reality a very odd figure which overshadows the Vicar, drawing back a little within the porch of the village school.

The third person is Mr Powis, rector of the small adjoining parish of Woodchurch, cadet of the antedilu vian great family in Wales, servant and suitor of Margaret Vivian of the Grange; and it is needless to say how unstained and glossy, how irreproachable, at once in worldly fashion and in clerical propriety, is the costume of Mr Powis, in whom is nothing odd, nothing characteristic, not a stray lock or a spot of dust, to suggest to you that he has not newly stepped from his dressing-room-or "from a bandbox," as the village critics say. Daylight does not detract

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