them with no neglect. We simply show them how the case stands, and call upon them to act accordingly. But, if they are to do anything effective, at least as regards the Scottish militia, they must employ some adequate machinery for that purpose. The Government ramifications are now so intricate and inexplicable that no one knows with whom the real responsibility rests, or in which office the business of any department is conducted. By all we can gather, the militia seems to have been rested between two stools, the Home and the War Office-if, indeed, the Horse Guards has not something to do with it. This is utterly shameful and indefensible, and is a scandal to the country. It is easy to see that, under such a system, the militia never can be brought up to the proper mark; and, when we consider the magnitude of the force authorised by the Legislature to be raised, and the duties for which it is now destined, it appears almost incredible that no arrangement should have been made for placing it, in the three divisions of the United Kingdom, under the control and superintendence of high military authorities, competent to its direction, and able to report upon its wants and deficiencies. Let it not be forgotten that the militia is now a force liable, by statute, to severe and permanent service-no longer a local, but a movable body-and removed entirely from the class of ordinary volunteers. The man who enters it now, does not do so for the mere object of being trained to meet a possible emergency; but he becomes, so long as the war lasts, to all intents and purposes a soldier, and amenable to military law, within the confines of Great Britain. Foreign

service, for which he may volunteer, is an easy transition from this; because if a man agrees, or is compelled, to leave his home and abandon his usual mode of existence, it signifies little whether the distance of his removal is one hundred or three thousand miles. But since these duties must be undertaken, whether by voluntary enlistment or not-for the credit of our country for the sake of the men themselves - let due precaution be taken that they are not despatched unprepared. If they are to be soldiers, make them soldiers; and we defy any other nation in the world to furnish such material, if the proper pains and proper superintendence are supplied.

At a time when the public attention is so much bent upon the disclosures of the absolute incompetency of many of our public departments for fulfilling the objects for which they were organised, and of the lamentable effects which have been the consequence, we trust that these remarks will not be considered as out of place. Our resources, in point of men, compared with those of our antagonist in this war, may be small; but that is the very reason why they should be most carefully husbanded. Since the Legislature has resolved that we are to have a militia, movable in the time of war, and therefore severed from ordinary industrial pursuits, let it, we say, be made complete and effective up to the highest possible point, so that the militia-man, if he inclines to enlist in the line, shall join the army as a soldier, and not as a half-trained recruit. Most earnestly, and under the deepest conviction of their importance, do we urge these views upon the attention both of the Legislature and the Ministry.

THE Ides of March were fatal to Julius Cæsar; the sixth day before the Nones of March was fatal to Nicholas the Czar-of all the sovereigns of Russia, perhaps the most like a Roman Cæsar. It was at the end of an article on Schamyl, in the February number of this Magazine, that we observed, "Posterity will see him, and judge him; and One higher than Posterity." It is somewhat awful to think that he has already passed before the least fallible of these tribunals. It is trite to say that death is a great change for all men. But the greatness of the change depends on their circumstances. In the case of the man who has, before it, been living, as we familiarly say, with one foot in the grave—to the failing octogenarian-to the younger, though bedridden invalid, the change is least perceptible; it is merely the going-out of a low blue-burning light-the dispersion of thistle-down by the windthe drifting with the tide of a becalmed vessel behind a headland that hides it from sight, it may be into a port. Nor is death a startling change in the case of the soldier cut short in his glory, for he of all other men lives in the midst of death; or in the case of the adventurous traveller who goes to look death in the face every day at the poles or between the tropics; or in the case of the devoted sister of charity who even while alive, anticipates death, dresses herself in a pall and a winding-sheet, to show that her business is with the dying, and that she has taken leave of life for ever. But make the circumstances entirely other than these-imagine a proud beauty at the zenith of her triumphs beckoned away by Death from the midst of a festival-or some man of men, some great man, who has grown into a world-wide name in arts, science, literature, or kingly rule, obliged to drop all his schemes and honours at the silent moving of the same fleshless finger, and then death becomes in truth the most awful condition of our existence. Our short life is to most

of us like a Lapland summer. The hours of night come, but we heed them not; they wrap up other millions and invest them with impenetrable darkness; but all is light in our own limited horizon, and the sun which goes quite under to others seems to us merely to "set into sunrise." Nor are we altogether to blame for the feeling that

"All men think all men mortal but themselves; "

for the feeling itself is one of Nature's instincts, has its full sway, perhaps, in the purest and most healthy minds. Nor should we seek to educate ourselves out of it; for the idea of death, kept constantly in view, becomes a terror; and terror is worth little as a motive for living well, unless some feeling be led on by it to supersede itself; and this does not often happen. If men take heed to live well, they may generally leave their dying well in higher hands; for although we cannot help living to die, we die, after all, in order that we may live. Still it is well that our eyes should sometimes be forced to look upon the picture of that change through which we must all pass. We said before that the greatness of that change depends on the circumstances of men; or rather, we should say, its apparent greatness in the eyes of others. Death is very striking in all cases; for instance, where Strength and Beauty are summoned from this earth, either by some malady which seems incidental to another time of life, or some accident unlooked for and unsought for. may be said that the word accident implies thus much.

It

But some accidents are courted by the nature of the business or pastime in which persons are engaged. The death of Lieutenant Bellot was an heroic death, and a melancholy death, but not an appalling death; for he did not accompany the polar expedition through love of life. But some years ago we were most vividly struck by reading the account of a death in

again, Nicholas began his reign under the fairest auspices, and ended it under the gloomiest. After steering, in a measure, clear of his peculiar temptations, through that part of his life when men are most led astray, he lapsed into evil towards the last, as if through a supernatural influence; and the first symptom of this moral decay was the same in both cases-a deviation from the path of strict straightforwardness. When Saul sought to deceive Samuel in the matter of Agag, he showed that mental mortification was benumbing the sensitiveness of his nobility; and the same was the case with Nicholas when he made covert and ignoble proposals to the English Government. After this the story is short. He flung the glove of defiance to Europe and the world; and then he died. Let us speak of him, as we can and ought, with charity, We are in the presence of the dead, though of a dead enemy; and may we not, indeed, well say, that an enemy dead is an enemy no longer; for, by proving that he is obliged to undergo the common lot of all, his brotherhood is at once reasserted. There is one narrow gate through which, however divergent our careers may be, we must all one day pass; and woe be to us if we try to jostle each other in that gate. As we are upon this subject, we will take the opportunity of expressing our regret at the sad feeling which dictated a caricature in a very popular weekly paper. It looked so much like exultation over a fallen foe, that it brought per force to our mind Æsop's story of the dead lion, and the insult he received. It was dictated by an un-English feeling: we hope it was only an error of thoughtlessness; but thoughtlessness in print is a very grave error.

But the truth of what we observed a short time ago on the Czar's greatness, is seen by a glance at any terrestrial globe. There is the Russian empire stretching away over one hemisphere, and across the top of the other; the chains of her dominion are coextensive, or nearly so, with the chains of winter, and only cease to bind where the suns of the tropics begin to exert their influence. The Czar is Russia, and the power of the Czar literally spans the world. The Czar is Russia, whether called in Europe the Czar, or in Asia the great

white Khan-or in America, whatever men call him there. He rules over white Europeans, yellow Asiatics of the Mongol race, and red Indians in the new world. Over the children of the sun, the black race alone, he does not rule, although with a scarcely unnatural ambition he seems to aspire to do so. Are we speaking of the past in the present tense? The joy of Europe at his death seems somewhat excusable, for Russia appeared to die in the person of that Czar, who seemed to be of all his line the perfect incarnation of Russia. Peter the Great, though a true Romanoff, was not so Russian as Nicholas, who was in reality of a German family Russianised, of the house of Holstein Gottorp. The poet Poushkin, who was oddly tolerated by the Czar near his person, as the despotic feudal lords used to tolerate their impudent jesters, dared to symbolise this by mixing one glass of wine for the Russian blood with three glasses of water for the foreign. As Nicholas grew in years, the idea seemed to have grown on him that Russia resided in him, and that on his own head rested the responsibility of directing the future of Russia. It was not improbably the feeling of this responsibility that killed him; if it had not, he would have been an angel or a demon, and no mere man. His latter days appear to have been clouded with a mystic fanaticism; and this fanaticism seems to have acted in the vein of mania that lurks in his family, and somewhat overbalanced his singularly shrewd and vigorous understanding. Formerly capable of any amount of self-restraint, he seems latterly to have become subject to fits of fury, such as absolute power is apt to produce in its subject; to have become in some measure what the Greeks called ἀκρόχολος, and of which Cleomenes of Sparta was their example, and which is something less impotent, more respectable, though more alarming than our word choleric. This sends us back to the father of history, Herodotus, and the account of Cambyses, the Persian, and his eccentricities, produced by absolute power, success, and, it must be added, impiety. The beginning of the actual madness of Cambyses was his wanton slaughter of the Egyptian god Apis. We do not doubt that this had in reality something to do with it. Cam

byses did not believe in the gods of Egypt, yet, on a mind constituted as his was, a sacrilegious act, committed even against a religion that he did not believe in, was likely to lead to desperation. But the acts of his madness, thus induced or not, were indeed terrible. He invited Prexaspes, one of his courtiers, to tell him what the Persians thought of him. Prexaspes, taken off his guard, replied that they thought very well of him, excepting that he was given to hard drinking. The son of Prexaspes, the cupbearer of Cambyses, was standing at the door. Cambyses asked Prexaspes whether he would feel qualified to contradict the opinion of the Persians, if his fondness for wine left him sufficient steadiness of hand to send an arrow through the heart of the boy. The thing was no sooner said than done, and the poor bereaved father was obliged to confess, to save his own head, that not even a god could shoot so well. Much of this kind, though somewhat less horrible, were the escapades of the Emperor Paul, the father of the late Czar. But Nicholas's acts of this nature were undoubtedly exceptions to the general self-control which he exercised. They seem to have occurred when he was taken by surprise by any act that offended him. The case of the Frenchman, who was sent out of St Petersburg at a moment's notice, after being, as we may say at the university, "proctorised by the Emperor in person, for smoking a cigar in the street before his face, is one of these. No wonder! Cigars seem to be to kings what red cloth is to bulls. Even in that native country of smoking, Germany, where the weed and not bread seems to be the staff of life, so that we wonder how the generations before the discovery of tobacco existed at all, and half fancy a repeopling of the earth must have taken place-even there no one may smoke in the streets of a "residenz-stadt" generally; and when they may, the cigar must be taken from the mouth in passing that symbol of absolutism, a sentry. Frenchmen are always getting into trouble in this way. We heard of one being expelled from Vienna for not only puffing in the sentry's face, but can

for objecting; and the sentry

d himself for taking the

caning without using his sword. There is no doubt about it; the cigar in the mouth gives a certain democratic finish to a man. Even aristocratic England only half likes it; and we cannot wonder at its arousing the choler of Nicholas. There is another similarstory of his plucking an "imperial" from the chin of an officer who appeared before him with that apology for a beard; but he may have objected to the name as much as to the thing itself. We do not quote those petty acts, or the questionable anecdotes of them, as instances of the want of self-control which appears to have begun on a more alarming scale later in life-only as instances of predisposition to the hereditary mania. And was there no act of impiety, as in the case of Cambyses, or the case of Saul, to account for the development of what the Greeks would have called the divine perversion of character? We think there was. The Czar has appeared of late years in the character of a religious persecutor, after investing himself with every assumption of Divine authority in his own creed. We know not whether the story of the nuns of Minsk be true or not; but we know that he had, by his persecutions of the Roman Catholics of Poland, aroused such unpopularity on his visit to the Roman States, that the soldiers who were sent by the Pope for his safe escort are said to have thrown the money he gave them at parting on the road with a curse; and this in a country where the same poor soldiers are not ashamed to ask for alms as they stand on guard!

This hereditary tendency to mania in the House of Romanoff and their offshoot, the present dynasty, may be accounted for by the supposed existence of such a tendency in many families; but that no outward manifestations take place, because no circumstances have occurred to call it forth. Few shoulders are strong enough, or heads clear enough, to bear the weight of absolute power, and it is accordingly in a position of absolute power that such aberrations are liable to show themselves. It is too much for a human being to be made a kind of Providence to millions. The kings of the patriarchal times were only fathers of families on an