The Press. — London, England, 1855-05-26 00:00:00

••••1.1.4•4 w 502 an impossibility to bring down ammunition from the camp under the enemy's fire, which swept the road. Lieutenant Pearl makes use of one expres sion which is singular as coming from a mili tary man. He observes, page 143, that— It was now pretty clear that our batteries were at too great a distance from the enemy's works, but I believe they were placed here for humanity's sake, instead of at 800 yards, as was first contemplated. "Humanity's sake " is a reason which wo have not yet heard offered as influencing a general in the disposition of his batteries. The following little incident of getting a gun into position tells with very good effect: — At eleven p.m. in the evening of the 30th of October I was ordered on a working party, with forty men, to the Three-Gun Battery, on the extreme left of the Greenhill trenches, across the ravine above the picket-house, and we were engaged in placing a furnace in position for heating red-hot shot, as a gun was being brought up (24-pounder ), to replace one that had been disabled. It was to throw red-hot shot into a ship which was moored across the inner harbour, and which gave this battery considerable annoyance. The gun had to be brought round in front of the battery by a winding road through the picket-house yard, and behind the battery there was a most precipitous rock, at the foot of which was a valley, through which the gun had to pass. We could plainly hear persuasive language and whips cracking down below us, and shortly after an artillery officer came to me to make a request that I would allow my men to go down and assist them, as the horses were unable to bring the gun up. We went down and found eight horses at work. They were fairly worn out, and would not move an inch. We hitched the drag-ropes to the axles of the gun-carriage, and the men endeavoured, with the assistance of the horses, to get it up this little rising ground, but were unable to accomplish it.. It was of the greatest importance that the gun should be in position when the morning dawned, and now it was fast advancing. I requested that the horses should be taken out, and that the men should be allowed to try it by themselves, which was agreed on, and borrowing a few hands from the picket-house, they gave three cheers, and ran it up in no time. The horses were again placed in, and we escorted the gun to its next sticking-place, which was in front of the battery which it was to occupy, and the dawn of morning had now come, and we could plainly see the harbour below and the Russian butteries. This was no place to leave it to be practised on all day, and all praise is due to our fellows for their exertions in moving tt from this perilous position into the battery. Great proof of skill and presence of mind was there shown. The horses had been taken out, and the gun was just being put into position, when all on a sudden it got too much way, the men at the drag-ropes were. capsized, and a corporal of artillery, being in the shafts, showed great presence of mind, by sticking to the shafts, and guiding this heavy piece of ordnance into its position ; whereas the slightest hesitation on his part would have precipitated the gun over the cliff, and in all probability have killed a dozen of my men. He received the greatest praise from all around. After the battle of Inkermann the men began to show signs of knocking up entirely. Without clothing, covering, or wholesome food, overworked and underfed, could it be wondered at? The Turk who remarked that such splendid men as ours ought to be care fully preserved from labour and brought up in carriages to the actual field of battle to tight only, would have been marvellously surprised at the sight of the British camp after the storm of the 14th November : The men were worn out, and it was difficult to get them to work with any rapidity or energy ; but it was naturally to be accounted for, from being overworked and not having proper food. I have seen men in the trenches by my side eating raw salt pork and beef like cannibals ; and, when asked why they aid it, their reply was, " We have no time to cook it, sir." Could we expect anything but disease from the effects of such diet? The coffee was also a great part of the time in an unroasted state; sad how was it possible that this could be used by those who had not time to fry it, even if they had materials for so doing ? Up to this time we had received our rations pretty regularly, until the bad weather set in, and the rain rendered the roads almost impassable. The Commissariat used every means in their power ; but when the provisions did fall short it was evident that they had not sufficient stores, if any, in camp, and nothing was to be obtained by them nearer than lialaklava. Shortly after Lieutenant Peard fell ill, and, being fortunate enough to get invalided out of camp, he started on board a sick trans port for Constantinople, en route to England. His description of the accommodation for the poor unfortunate wounded men fully bears out all that has been told upon the subject:— We proceeded very steadily on our course ; but there was a light breeze, which at night died away, and the ship, being without ballast, rolled in a way I had never expe rienced before : chairs, tables, crockery, being unlashed, rolled from side to side, and the noise was dreadful. We could plainly hear the poor fellows between decks moaning away after every great lurch, and crying out for the order lies, who, by the bye, were as much like patients as many others on board. Some of the sufferers had broken legs and jaws, which of course gave them frightful pain as they rolled from side to side on the deck. They had THE PRESS. no cots or partitions to lay hold of, and their sufferings must have been intense ; over this calamity, however, we had no control, and they rolled with the ship from side to side, which of course prevented their bones uniting. Several men died daily, and constantly bodies were launched into the deep, over whom Captain M-, Bt4th Regiment, read prayers. Between the master and mate of the vessel there seemed to be some difference of opinion as to whether they could get into the Boa phorus or not, and for two days they tacked about oft the entrance. At last they got in and anchored under Beicos. While there that magnificent ship the Royal Albert passed in the full pride and pomp of war, crowded with troops. What a contrast the two ships pre sented—the one full of eager hearts and robust, healthy frames, longing for " glory" ; the other, crowded with poor, wan, emaciated, dying spectres! With how much or how little •f this bubble " reputation " To conclude, Lieutenant Peard's little book, as an authentic compilation of the facts of positive personal experience, will be found attractive, and beyond that it has no preten sions. Olympus. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co. CHARLES LAMB tells us in one of his essays that he never thinks ; that he hates thinking ; that his books think for him. What dear Elia so quaintly and jestingly said of himself is true of at least one half of what are called our educated classes. We seldom meet a man now-a-days, especially in print, who does not have his thinking done for him by books or by the public journals; and when by chance we do encounter such a person, we are often disposed to wish he had been content to do as his neighbours, and echo the thoughts of better men than himself, remembering that singularity is not originality, nor pretentiou philosophy. Occasionally, however, we stumble on a man —and more rarely on an author—to whom cannot be applied the severe and well-known rebuke administered by a celebrated critic to a pseudo-philosopher, " that there was much " that was new and much that was true in Mr —'s work, but that unfortunately the " new was not true and the true was not new." No such caustic or epigrammatic judgment is likely to be passed upon the book before us, "Olympus," which is evidently written by a man who can and does think, and who having thought a thought hammers it out on the hard anvil of reason, till what was at first only an unformed idea becomes a reality and a thing. Whatever faults we may have to find in the book before us, a want of originality or a servile adoption of conventional cant cannot be included among the number. We are far from invaria bly agreeing to the author's postulates ; and some of his opinions shock our prejudices if not our reason ; but if we were uniformly of one mind with him on all questions, where would be the originality which we have said he so eminently possesses? Let him now speak for himself. Behold the confident air with which he slings his pebblestone at two of the world's giants, whose dimensions he laughs at: Yes, thought I, the poor fellow is most certainly dead, and he left me two books : one was an old copy of " Ovid's Metamorphoses, embellished with sculptures," which I always had a fancy for; and the other, " Milton's Paradise Lost," which I never shall have a fancy for, holding as I do that " immortal work " to contain more serious tom• foolery and solemn nonsense than hath entered into the heart even of a Wordsworth to conceive. • Our author, however, is not quite alone in his depreciation of Milton. Hutchinson, the founder of the Hutchinsonian philosophy, calls " Paradise Lost " " that cursed farce of Milton " where he makes the devil his hero." Hear the satirist on satirists : No proceeding is more unfair or more common than to judge a man out of his own mouth ; for we learn and speak by alternation, and generally praise those qualities in which we are most wanting. The idle and irresolute pay homage to energy and decision, the extravagant man commends highly prudence and economy, and many a tender heart talks savagely and in scorn. Satire is mag- nanimity run mad—kinder feelings outraged and driven wild, throwing themselves for protection upon the sarcastic and severe. You may always trust a satirist—poor fellow, he is the most harmless of men ! Again, the greater sinner the greater saint. No one so ardent for the faith as blaspheming Paul. No one so ready to offer resolute defence as the irresolute Peter. SATURDAY, And again :-- They will rave like Timon, or sneer like Swift, or sham the laugh of Rabelais, like the most expert courtier ; they inspire a J uvenal and a Persius in every community, and in almost every company. These are looked upon as bitter and morose men, or if they write as authors are supposed to have good intention in the main, and an inmost wish to chastise the vices of their day. They have no such wish. Theirs is the voice of anguish and distress, but they are spirits too high to indicate that they suffer, save through badinage and abuse. Nevertheless, the spirit prompting such satires seems uncourtly and discrepant. Men iu general avoid them. There is au unpleasant arrogance, too, in this sardonic tone scarcely allowable. It is assu ming too much in auy one to sneer down institutions and practices sanctioned by the whole race of mankind. And why should this biting scorner assume such authority, and persuade us that ho knows more than others? Censure is seldom liked, and no man is justified in beginning his career by offending. There is much truth and much sadness as well as eloquence in the passages we have just quoted. Yet there is a balm for fools to be found in them. Tu the shallow-brained there must be some consolation in the knowledge that the raving Timons, and sneering Swifts, and laughing ltabelaises, are more miserable at heart and greater objects of pity than the dreariest blockheads they jibe at. The ghost of " Our own Correspondent" speaks thus lightly of the craft which in life he followed : Men on the press are men always above the press, they have to write down to the liberal, radical, evangelical class, whose opinions, being the opinion of the many, rule the Parliament and the Throne. " The public " governs the press—not the press the public. The public is what Locke would call, had he ever heard of it, a complex idea, the components of which are false and crude ideas, scraps and facts of all kinds gleaned from debating societies and lec ture-rooms, miscellaneous readings of all the newspapers and three-halfpenny magazines, whose object of course is to get a sale, in order to do which they must please tl*i vulgar taste, and inform it just so much as it will allow it self to be informed—anti a spice of the lowest form of reli gion, or rather of irreligion proper. And such is the potency of this phalanx that, the leading paper of the world pays it adoration—a paper above a bribe, but bowing down to the innumerable livepences of the many. • In the subjoined passage the writer evinces a right philosophical appreciation of great men and of the true elements of greatness : One day at Logos, while crossing the Grand Square, on that side nearest the Columns of the Sun , 1 saw four famous men in company, one of whom, by his massive head and well known features, 1 at once recognised as Napoleon; the others were 11allenstein, Caesar, and Ale: - ander the Great. These mighty desolator% of the earth were in earnest conversation together. 1 regretted that no man of my win country could be found worthy to rank with these heroes, and make a iiith in this august company. Their discourse was not of legions, or the strategies of war, or the past career of glory and crime which they had run : These were the mere weapons with which each had striven to work out the shadowy conceptions of his own taciturn soul, and to these no allusion was made. But they were questioning the wills of the fates in which they had all been believers during life. One had called himself the child of destiny, another had studied many a dark ha roscope, and looked upwards ut the dim Cassiopeia for counsel and sanction in every hazardous struggle. He had said— There's no such thing as chance; And what to us seems merest accident, Springs from the deepest source of destiny. Another had said to the faint-hearted pilot, " Fear not, coward, thou earnest Closer!" They all believed in dreams and divinations, in aspects and signs of the heavens, pre saging human events. However barbarous such acts ap pear, and however great their ignorance, these men nevertheless, excelled in the greatest element of greatness. They took their vantage•ground from inward intuition always, from rule and measure never, and they used war and havoc as mere means to some accomplishment which they deemed themselves called upon to perform. With all of them the spiritualist was always above the soldier, and it was this which gave them such terrible influence over men's minds. The influence of fear as a moral agent is wittily, if not very reverently, pointed out in the following passage ; but we would caution the author against too free an indulgence iu tone of levity on such solemn subjects : " And Burton tells us," I continued, " that ' the dimen sions of this abode are, according to Lessius, one Dutch mile in diameter, all filed with fire and brimstone, because as he demonstrates that space, cubically multiplied, will make a sphere able to hold eight hundred thousand millions of damned bodies—allowing each body six feet square — which will abundantly suffice.' " As a general rule, you find that all the timorous and stupid of this class hold together vt ith surprising unanimity upon the point of everlasting damnation. Origen believed that the devil himself would eventually come within the pale of salvation, and be saved; but if that respectable father were now alive he would need all his pluck and martyr spirit to support his opinion, for in the present day it is held as a sign of revolutionary tendency to tamper with the old cheerful notion of a very deep pit, filled with