The Press. — London, England, 1855-01-13 00:00:00

! JANUARY 13, 1855. such hospitality that he exclaims loudly in favour of "John Bull under canvas," and certainly not without cause. His dinner with General Sir is very well told ; everybody was, of course, in working dress, with caps on, and muddy boots:— A single wax-candle, placed on the ground, lit the interior. Canvas forage-bags, cloaks, and waterproofs spread around, hid the bare earth ; and on them reclined, more antique, the general and his staff. I alone enjoyed the dignity of a seat, viz., on a portmanteau. No such thing as table, chair, bed, bedding, or couch was visible Fortunately, however, for my un-Spartan appetite on the oc casion in question, it does happen that the general, having to feed three lusty aides, keeps a French chef; and this in comparable artist, though he cooks al fresco, is said to be capable of doing anything short of transmuting ration-pork and biscuits into soles au gratin. A very good dinner was followed by coffee, and by tobacco for the juniors. Meanwhile his traps and tent arrive, arrange ments are made for the night, and he turns in, tired and weary, for a good sleep, but about half-past three he is disturbed by distant musketry. In another minute he hears his friend the aide galloping off to ascertain the cause : Away went his horse's hoofs in the direction of the firing, whence, after a few minutes, they as quickly clattered back to the general. " Fall in !"—" Get under arms I" now buzzed along the lines, followed by a heavy trampling of feet, as the men ran from their tents to their firelocks. I had been forewarned that these " alarms " were constant, and had nothing necessarily alarming about them ; but, being dressed and booted, I could not resist going out to see what was doing. There, in their grey great-coats, and already formed in line, stood the soldiers of the divi sion. Three minutes before they were in dreamland. The musketry had ceased, but no more sleep was in store for them that morning. The " alarm" had, in fact, occa sioned a turn-out half an hoar before the period (four a.m. till sunrise) considered to be the most likely for attempts at surprises ; and which is, therefore, in obedience to a standing order, always passed under arms. It was now bright moonlight and bitterly cold. So, shivering both for myself and them, I ran back under cover, and dived under the pile of lining—feeling, T confess, a good deal like a Sybarite, who has no business to be so comfortable. " It certainly has a strange effect," he says, "to wake from some dream of England at " midnight in the camp, and suddenly become " conscious that you are upon the Czar's land "without leave." We have been accustomed to hear so much about the martinetism of Sir George Brown, that his name and stiff stocks are synonymous, but after this sketch of the formalities of parade report no one will ever accuse the gallant general of formal particularity : Both stood outside Sir George's tent, and I was one of a fumigating group not far off. The colonel's black trousers hung in folds over his spurs, for lack of braces. His red coatee was fastened with three buttons, and showed to ad vantage a chocolate-coloured flannel shirt. The long ends of a silk neckcloth, tied in a sailor's knot, dangled over the coatee ; and over all was a dilapidated great-coat, which had certainly not been brushed for the occasion. One hand he kept in his fob ; the other held a well-browned meerschaum ; and with many vigorous pulls thereat, he told his story I As regards the medical department of the army, although our Non-Combatant considers that medical men were wanting, yet he believes that hospital assistants were wanting much more. Many an officer had his life saved by the rubbing or mustard-plaister efforts of a friend ; " but who," asks Non- Combatant, " could do this for the soldier ? " In curious illustration of this he tells us a painful but characteristic story. After the repulse of a sortie a poor soldier lay in the trenches apparently in the last stage of cholera : A couple of men passed by with a stretcher, exclaiming that there was clearly no use in picking him up. " Don't you be in a 'uny," gasped the poor soul, " I'm not dead yet daresay I should do well enough, if I could only get something 'ot" So strenuous an appeal was irresistible, and they carried him off. But I hope his recovery did not depend on the speedy administration of the treatment he himself indicated ; for, pending the demand at that snoment for the scalpel and the saw, something 'ot" was .he last thing he was likely to get. The whole of our author's suggestions are founded upon good practical sense. It is quite true, as he says, that soldiers while describing their wants and sufferings are restrained by professional stoicism from telling one half of them, while habit dulls their consciousness of the other half ; but the whole system of do mestic economy in the army wants more or less reform, from that wooden canteen with which every man is afflicted as a water-flask, and which dates from the days of Marlborough, down to the green coffee and mouldy biscuit which is:daily served out. THE PRESS. The opening of the bombardment of course took place during our Non-Combatant's stay, and he saw also the battle of Balaklava. His account of a battle is that it is little else to the eye than a review : How anyone, who has not somebody in the secrets of the generals by his side to explain the movements, can wider stand an affair of the kind, is to me a mystery. Haman is in the melee, he only sees that. If, on the other hand, he is at a sufficient distance to take in the whole field,he sees an array of dark sparkling masses—now moving, now sta tionary—covered with smoke, or emerging from it. Finally he sees certain portion of the whole marching away, perhaps in very good order. We will suppose at such a Juncture that, by goood luck, he really does know that the fight is decided, and which party it is that is retreating and that he rejoices, or laments, appropriately. Neverthe less, as regards all the sudden emergencies, the daring movements, and sagacious plans—all, in fact, that give the battle its historical interest—our spectator comprehends no more of them, believe me, than you comprehend of the manceuvres of a review. But he admits that he was on the wrong side of the ridge for seeing the most interesting feature of the engagement. Although just on the point of leaving for home, having. in fact, sold his traps and gone on board a ship in the harbour, he yet witnessed the terrible battle of Inkermann. The day was thick and foggy, and it was a seven-mile uphill trudge, but he started off, cut across country, and was not long in meeting signs of fight : The fog prevented one's seeing far ahead, but the sharp reports of musketry and the roar of artillery were quite enough to mark the direction, even without the stream of French and English soldiers bearing on their backs and on stretchers the wounded to the rear. I did not stop to question these men, but tried to read in their faces the fortune of the day. They all looked grave, and behaved with a silent manly propriety, in good keeping with their sad office ; but quite at variance with the stories one reads of the conduct of soldiers when relieved, as they were here, from surveillance. On reaching Sir George Brown's quarters he found the gallant old man stretched out faint and bleeding; but to show how completely our epigastrium overcomes our finer feelings, he tells us how the seven-mile walk had so famished him that, in spite of all the horrors which surrounded him, he longed for a piece of ration biscuit : I felt the incongruity of asking for food at such a moment. I would have given anything to have been able to weather the day without. But I had taken a long walk, and (if not knocked on the head between whiles, which I did not anti cipate) should have to take another. So, being famished, I asked and was satisfied. I record the fact, because it illustrates the humbling truth, that hunger is as callous as Launce's cur. The battle by this time was nearly over, but he had a narrow escape from a shell, which burst close to him. However, he smoked his cigar and watched those impenetrable Rus sians marching past, with arms shouldered and in good order, although they were being pounded into by two long eighteens and a Lan caster gun, which cut lanes through them at every shot. He visited the field of battle, of course, and remarks, in singular corrobora tion of the reports from the field of Alma, that the attitudes of the dead were most startling. " Arms stretched upward bo " dies half raised—the head bent forward— " the nether-lip bent in—the eyes open—but "for the glassy stare andmarble feet you might " have thought them springing at your throat." As he returned from the field, he passed a few hundred prisoners being taken in to Balaklava, and upon whom our men were venting the most bitter maledictions and abuse for their cruelties on the field. Our Non Combatant paid a final visit to the camp, stopped a few days at Balaklava, and then started on his journey home. We cannot conclude, however, without giving one anecdote of Sir George Brown, which we cordially recommend to all croakers. After his wound at Inkermann, Sir George remained on board the Agamemnon, and: — The first day that he was well enough to come to table, somebody (I forget who) happened to be talking very lugu briously about various things and the campaign in particular, and at length exclaimed, " kh, war is a terrible thing !" " That's what in) wife says," cheerily pat in the general,and settled the croaker! There is in these ten letters so much honest truth, fresh from the Crimean hills, without any pretence to fine writing or to technical description, and such perfect pictures of camp life (in fine weather), that we are sure the reading public will agree that the Non-Com batant's time was not wasted in the Month before Sebastopol. 43 The Table-Talk of John Selden. With Notes by David Irving, LL.D. Edinburgh : Con stable and Co. THE breaking up of the ice in which the long domination of the Church of Rome had bound the mind of Europe was signalised, like all sudden accessions of intellectual liberty, by a considerable amount of reckless speculation. The opposite of the old order of thought—if thought it could be called—was frequently assumed to be truth for no better reason than that it was such opposite ; and the proverbial theological hostility was for once driven be yond all previous bounds by finding a swelling popular sympathy attending it. From theo logy this tendency of the public mind had not far to change to politics, and thus the thinkers of the age talked, like Selden, oftenest of " matters of weight and high consequence, " relating especially to religion and State." And religion and State were the two ques tions which, while affording the greatest field for speculation. were the least safe and the least settled of the time. The Tudors, while repudiating the popedom, had no inten tions of consulting the popular will in the religion that was to follow; but the cha racter of the first Stuart, added to the nature of his education, encouraged an amount of rambling inquiry as to faith and government that, in the midst of a multitude of shallow flatterers and pretenders, produced some sound theorists and commenced that public opinion which has since grown with accelerating rapidity. Selden was in theory a bold speculator —a fact the more remarkable that he was by profession and by reading a man of precedents and authorities. But his use of precedents was peculiar. It was by a plan something similar to that which a certain class of churchmen have during the last twenty years adopted the expedient of quoting antiquity to support innovation. In the Church in the time of Selden the great question was episcopacy and presbytery. On one side and the other divine right was freely claimed and an importance accorded to a point not strictly doctrinal which more vital subjects could not command. Naturally, the fragments of Selden's conversation preserved by Milward, and called his " table-talk," are taken up in a great degree by the question of Church government, but discussed iu a spirit showing plainly that the great lawyer was rather the opponent of the assumption of the clerical order in general than the partisan of any particular Church. Throughout Selden's conversation, indeed, there is a prevailing want of reverence where matters ecclesiastical are brought in question, and an equally prevail ing want of that curious learning with which his books and, by Clarendon's testimony, his con versation were so diversified. With the excep tion of an assertion—which, notwithstanding Selden's great authority, is not entirely true — viz., that the bishops do not sit in Parliament in right of their temporal baronies, we find only the following piece of antiquarian know ledge collected on the subject of clerical legis lation in the " Table-Talk " : Whether had the inferior clergy ever anything to do in the Parliament ? Ans. No ; no otherwise than thus : there were certain of the clergy that used to assemble near the Parliament, with whom the bishops, upon occasion, might consult; but there were none of the Convocation, as 'twas afterwards settled, viz., the dean, the archdeacon, one for the chapter, and two for the diocese, but it happened by continuance of time, to save charges and trouble : their voices, and the consent of the whole clergy, were involved in the bishops ; and at this day the bishops' writs run, to bring all these to the Parliament; but the bishops them selves stand for all. The style of the period of Bacon had not much altered in Selden's time, and we find in the latter as in the former the same indefinite mode of laying down authoritative statements. Thus at what time the few clergy assembled near the Parliament to advise the bishops became the regular Convocation is here not mentioned. There is no doubt that in the earliest assemblies to which we can give the name of Parliament churchmen took a large, if not the most active , part in the proceedings, and that these were by no means confined to the episcopal order only. It is therefore likely that the clerical assembly was formed into order much as the lay Parliaments, by the necessity that arose with the progress of time, I