The Press.
London, England, 1855-06-30 00:00:00

PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

THE late hour at which some of the periodicals for
the ensuing month have reached us will prevent our
giving any but a hasty notice of their contents.
Blackwood opens with the first part of rather a heavy
article upon the " Imperial Policy of Russia," in
which the object of the writer appears to be to select
such points in Russian history as will incontestably
prove the existence of a determined aggressive policy
on the part of that country, and to propose such a
remedy as shall effectually limit her further en-
croachment upon Europe. This aggressive move-
ment the writer considers as twofold on the part of
Russia, depending as much upon the superstition of
the people as upon the policy of the Government,
and that, therefore, any hope that peace will be
forced upon the Russian Government by the disaffec-
tion of the Russian people, he regards as illusory, as
we have the Crown, Court, and People united as one
man against us in the present war. Whether this
view is founded upon correct grounds the result
must ere long show. The charming romance of
" Zaidee " is concluded in the present number, and
the readers of Blackwood will regret the termination
of so pleasant a story. " Notes upon Canada " are
continued, and contain many graphic sketches of the
country and amusing anecdotes of the Yankees.
Backwood life is here thoroughly well portrayed. A
clever article reviews Mr. Maurice's theological
works ; and the " Story of the Campaign " is brought
down to the latest dates, including the capture of the
Mamelon and Quarries, and the expedition up the Sea
of Azoff. The only political article in Blackwood is
upon the " Two Years of the Condemned Cabinet,"
in which the treachery and duplicity of the late
Government is very forcibly exposed t

SATURDAY,

Even to view the conduct of the Aberdeen Ministry in
the light which they choose, and to accept their own ver-
sion of the matter, in what a miserable aspect does their
conduct appear ! They allege that they resolved from the
first to reject and oppose the designs announced by Russia
in January, 1853. %Veil, then, they must have known the
perilous nature of the struggle that loomed in the dis-
tance ; but did they make the least preparation to check,
encounter, or repel it? Did they augment the military and
naval forces of the empire at home, or strengthen our posi.
Lion by new alliances abroad ? Did they take France into
their confidence, or form an indissoluble alliance for
mutual support with the Baltic Powers, which are destined
to be Russia's next victims? Did they enter into imme-
diate negotiations with Austria and Prussia, and the Ger-
man Courts, in order to nullity the notorious intrigues and
influence of Russia, and win them, by a display of ener-
getic action, to the side of justice and liberty? Not at all :
they did none of those things. Not a gunboat was added
to our fleet, not a soldier to our army, not a militiaman to
our home-service. They said to the Czar, " Come and
walk over us !" They never even hoisted an opposition
flag. And if the; German Powers are now favorable to
Russia, is it not very much owing to the fact that we
allowed Russia to bully and cajole them uncounteracted ?
—nay, that at first our Government even set them the ex-
ample which they are now following?

• • • • •
Such was the fatal policy of the statesmen to whom
Great Britain had in evil hour confided the conduct of the
war. Their whole proceedings tallied with their secret
designs. The Expedition to the East was meant as an
idle parade—to gull the people, and go no further than
Malta. When put on their defence at the opening of Par-
liament in January last year, Lord Aberdeen declared that
the reason why he did not hold the invasion of the Prin-
cipalities a easus belli was, that the Russians in that case
being in such force, would have marched straight upon
Constantinople before the Turks or we were ready to op-
pose them; while Lord Clarendon, on the other hand,
alleged that the reason was, that the Russian forces were
so few that they furnished no cause for apprehending that
the peace of Europe would be disturbed ! To such pitiful
contradictions and transparent subterfuges does duplicity
reduce its votaries. Both statements were untrue. The
Government did not design at first to oppose Russia or
befriend Turkey. We know this from the blue-books ;
from the fabt that no preparations for war were made after
the Pruth was crossed, although Lord Aberdeen alleged
the want of preparation as his excuse for not interposing
at the outset ;—from the fact that the fleet was forbidden
to give the slightest countenance or support to the Otto-
mans ;—and finally, that, even after war was declared, war
was still not purposed by the Cabinet. They never took a
hostile step until it was forced upon them by public
opinion.

And we now know " the reason why." They had se-
cretly resolved not to prosecute the war against Russia—
not to " humble" her, not to hurt her; and as the voice of
an aroused and indignant nation compelled them, bit by
bit, to go forward, they found themselves forced to add
mismanagement to duplicity, and embark the empire in
enterprises for which they had made no preparation.
This is forcible and true, yet the present Cabinet,
with one or two exceptions, formed the Cabinet
of Lord Aberdeen.

Frazer presents an entertaining and varied table
of contents. There is a good descriptive story of
the "Ascent of Mont Blanc," and an amusing " Essay
on Humbug," a review of Sydney Smith's" Memoirs,"
and of Stirling's " Life and Works of Velasquez,"
an article upon " The Drama, Past and Present,"
and a concluding paper upon " Parliament, the
Press, and the War," in which the question of
Administrative Reform is put upon a tolerably fair
footing. As far as the practical Reformers are con-
cerned, the writer observes :

We cannot compliment them on the success of their
performance. In the first place, their leader proposed to
lay his foundation upon such loose and exaggerated lan-
guage, that no man who weighed facts could agree to it.
How could the House of Commons tell their constituents
that they viewed with alarm the state of the nation, when
it was notorious that the nation continued to advance in
its career of prosperity, hardly, if at all, checked by the
vast burdens of the war in which it was engaged? And,
supposing there was any ground for such an assertion,
what sort of prudence would that have been which selected
such a moment to announce to Europe the alarming fact?
Surely we can reform our administrative service without
asserting such a monstrous hyperbole as that its abuses
have brought us to the brink of ruin !

•
•-• • •
If Mr. Layard and Mr. Lindsay are to be taken as speci-
mens of the class of men who should be substituted for
those at present in the direction of public affairs, it must
be owned that the cause of Administrative Reform is not
much recommended by such a prospect. From gentle-
men who demand a change of men on the ground of defi-
ciency in knowledge and habits of business, one would
expect at least accuracy and candour in the statement of
facts. But we must again warn Mr. Layard that his
vigour and ability will be seriously impaired if they are
accompanied by habitual inaccuracy. The member for
Aylesbury, without, we are convinced, the least intention
to garble or suppress the truth, has an unhappy infirmity
of blundering on matters of detail. If ever it behoved
him to have been cautions and well-advised in his facts, it
was in the statement of the case upon which he founded
his attack upon the public offices, the appointments to the
public service, and the dispensation of ministerial pa-
tronage.

No one has any doubt that the Civil Service does
want a moderate reformer) but these petty individual

JUNE 30, 1855.

instances of error cr neglect which have been bla-
zoned forth do not develop the question fairly, nor
....

. •
have the Reformers yet offered any reasonable solu-
tion of the difficulty.
The Dublin opens with a good article upon the
Reform Bill, " Twenty-five Years Ago," but from
which we have not space to make extracts. A review
of the " Works of Napoleon the Third" will be found
highly interesting, as much from the intrinsic merit
of the writings themselves as from the insight,
slight though it be, which may be obtained from
them to the character of the present Emperor of the
French. The whole of his works are here reviewed
seriatim, and the writer concludes with this
opinion :

His political creed, all things considered, is not, we
think, a dangerous one. His opinions &renew, but they are
not revolutionary. A profound conviction of the necessity
of adapting himself to the course of events prevents him
adopting any absolute notions. His mind instinctively
coalesces with the tendencies in existence. He is anxious
to keep in front of the movement, but he never attempts
to go in a contrary direction. If, then, we may not expect
in Louis Napoleon a regenerator, neither need we appre-
hend a disturber of the existing order of things. His
political conduct since the coup deaf corroborates this
conclusion. Nothing could be more just or moderate than
his foreign policy ; and his speeches, so pat to the pre-
veiling ideas that every one hails them as the best expres-
sion of his own notions, prove that he is sailing quietly in
the strong current of human events.
These considerations to a considerable extent allay those
misgivings which we might otherwise entertain from Louis
Napoleon's avowed idolatry of his uncle, and from► his own
deficiency in strong moral principle. He will give due
weight to altered circumstances in his attempt to apply the
idle Napoleonienne to France or Europe ; and as it is an
arrangement of Providence that the truly useful is, in the
main, the just and right, we may hope that the strong in-
tellect of Napoleon 111. will lead him to results which
good men would wish to see accomplished.
There are many other interesting subjects treated in
this number, among which we may mention
" Sheridan as a Dramatic Writer," "Polynesia," and
" The Ballads of Spain ;" but from the concluding
political article upon " The Government and the
War " we may extract a passage or two. After
reviewing the policy of the late Cabinet and the pro-
gress of the war, the writer declares that it is obvious
that neither Lord Palmerston nor his followers are
the men for the time. The want of the country is

An honest and firm Government, ready to carry on the
war with energy, avoiding the tricks of diplomacy, which
gave been all exposed, and preferring a peace earned by
victory to tarrying at the door of Francis Joseph's palace
or elsewhere. We want a Ministry prepared to reform
abuses, to raise the military character of the country, to
recover the ground we have lost. We want in the premier-
ship a leader having the nation at his back, and a compact
party to sustain him ; we want in the War•office a man of
experience in the conductin,, of war, of vigour of mind,
of independent force of character, and comprehensive
genius. Such a statesman has been pointed out in Lord
Ellenborough. His late efforts towards the more active
and efficient conduct of the war seem to mark him the
successor of Lord Panmure.
Of the fear that the Conservatives could not form a
Government in event of Lord Palmerston's resigna-
tion, he observes :
Lord Derby did not fail on a late occasion. He found it
then impracticable to unite the parties he considered ne-
cessary to a stable and efficient Government, in the pre-
sent condition of the House of Commons. He was opposed
by the Peelites, between whom and a genuine Conserva-
tive there is, as it were, a gulf fixed ; he was cheated by
Lord Palmerston, who to secure undisputed possession of
the goal of his long ambition, rid himself of Lord Derby,
and then of the dear trio, without whose aid he at first declared
he could not accept office. But things are changed much,
even within four months ; and so disgusted are the people
of every party with the " smallness of the men now in power
tout they are ready to force their representatives to give a
fair trial to any Cabinet which shall come forward with
boldness and determination to apply strong remedies to
our national diseases ; and we firmly believe that, even
without a dissolution, the Conservatives, by laying aside
their peculiar party questions, and throwing their whole
energy into the war, would command the suffrages of the
country, which, in the existing position of affairs, would be
to command the House.
Beat/ey presents, as usual, a light and amusing
table of contents. We have a political sketch of our
present position; another, more graphic, of Kertch
and the Cimmerian Bosphorus ; a portrait of the
present Emperor of Russia, drawn more favorably
than that by De Eustine ; the history of Mormons;
end a pleasant, kindly sketch of Leigh Hunt as an
essayist.

.d Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the
Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland.
By Sir Bernard Burke, Ulster King of Arms.
Part I. London : Hurst and Blackett.
Tins is the first of four parts of an elegantly-printed
new edition of Sir Bernard Burke's well-known
" Dictionary of the Landed Gentry." From its very
nature it is almost impossible to reach perfection in
so extensive an undertaking. The author has, how-
ever, by great labour and care, produced a full and
valuable record of the lineage and connections of a

THE PRESS.

multitude of the untitled families of the three king-
doms, which has the additional advantage of being
the only work on the subject, and of preserving
much information which in the little attention at
present paid to genealogy might have otherwise
been lost.
The besetting danger, however, of the author of
such a work (as well as of peerages) is the readi-
ness of those to supply information who most fre-
quently have nothing valuable to communicate, and
the apathy of the more ancient families on the subject
of modern heraldic publications. This will occa-
sionally result in the production of genealogies
somewhat resembling that furnished to one of his
characters by Theodore Hook, and Sir Bernard
Burke deserves commendation for the comparatively
small number of such epic efforts that he has allowed
to pass.
Those who were interested in the late newspaper
controversy as to "Who are the aristocracy f " will find
a full answer in this elaborate book. The simple rule
by which they might have decided—namely, whether
feudal privileges had or had not remained in a par-
ticular family—would, on the testimony of these
genealogies, have gone in favour of those of the
landed gentry who owed neither to the Revolution of
1688, nor to the necessities of Walpole, nor to the more
grim extremity of the recent Whigs, their rank in the
aristocracy. Had peerages been created at the pace at
which they were conjured from 1830 to 1840,
Heraldry would have found herself even in a more
unfortunate plight than that in which she now
labours. The threat of James the Second's Lundle.
land, that he would swamp the peers, " should he
" have to put coronets upon a troop of horse," was
anything but a ridiculous boast in the days of the
Whig lordmakers ; and the affectation of taking
titles from family names, in imitation of many of the
peerages by writ, gave that air of antiquity to the
new creations, which sat on them as gracefully as
venerable worm-holes in a modern mediaeval cabinet.
Such dealings with the peerage made a book like
the present desirable, and, as we have said, it con-
tains much valuable information. There is, how-
ever, by far too great a space devoted to Irish
families, many of them of the most inconsiderable
position or descent ; and some, whose Anglicised
names were adopted in lieu of their own by pressure
of the acts suppressing Irish Celtic patronymics, seem
to have a prevailing mania for deriving their origin
from noble houses of England and Scotland, in place
of their own ancient ancestry.

An Historical Sketch of the Crimea. By Anthon:
Grant, D.C.L., Archdeacon of St. Albans. London
Bell and Daldy.

THE history of the Crimea is full of in-
terest and historic association ; and to suc-
cessfully detail the ever varying fate and fortune
of this " battle-field " of the East and West
requires not only the fluency of the accomplished
writer, but the genuine knowledge and research of
the student. In both these qualities Dr. Grant
excels, and his historical sketch reads more like a
romance than as a record of bygone ages. For
centuries previous to the acquisition of the Crimea
by Russia it had been the point of contest or con-
course for Scythian and Persian, Roman and Goth,
Hun and Turk. No country in the world, Dr.
Grant tells us, presents such " a series of vicis-
" situdes so varied, so continuous. The land is
" literally scarred with the footprints of bygone
" events" :

All the great nations of historic times have left on its
surface traces of their power. Not for its own sake, but
for the sake of other interests, it has been compelled to
be the arena or witness of vast conflicts and antagonisms,
under which it has groaned and suffered. One of its
towns was the capital of a considerable kingdom. and was
at one time embellished with the richest treasures of
ancient art : another acquired the title of the birthplace of
the Russian Church. Two great nations, the offspring of
the barbaric period, after perishing in other lands, here
lingered as in their last asylum, and then expired. Its
waters have been swept by the most renowned fleets that
have ever commanded the sea. Its hills have been the
refuge of the oppressed ; its valleys the scenes of terrible
slaughter: its plains the resting-place of every savage
horde in its migration from east to west. And this change-
ful fate has followed it up to the present time without in-
termission, and now it is gathering to itself a fresh and
more lasting celebrity.
Among other facts connected with its history
is the remarkable one of the first investment
and defence of Sebastopol. Vladimir, one of the
early Grand Dukes of Russia, deciding upon becoming
a Christian, sought to signalise his baptism by a
deed of great daring :
In A.D. 9MB the harbour of Sebastopol saw the troops
and ships of the Russian chieftain enter its straits, and
the former moored in front of what is now called the
Quarantine Bay. Hut, as if in early augury of its powers
of defence, the town offered a more desperate and pro-
tracted resistance than he had expected. His besieg►ng
works were undermined, and his assaults repulsed. After
many failures to take the town, when solicited to raise the
siege, he vowed that he would stay there three years rather

623

than not succeed. Yet, foiled he must have been, had not
a treacherous monk within the city (his name, reserved
for execration, was Anastasius) shot an arrow into the
hostile camp with information of certain underground
aqueducts which supplied the town from the cut with
water. Vladimir lost no time in cutting oil' these channels,
and the town was forced to capitulate. He received the
city as a gilt of ti 04.1, celebrated his victory by being bap-
tised and married, and in token of his clemency and thank-
fulness he at once restored the town to the Emperor. On
the heights overhanging the quarantine harbour, among
the ruins of Chersou, still stand the remains of the
Church of Vladimir, probably marking the very spot where
the Russian chieftain received the seal of his Christian
adoption.
Under such circumstances the gallant resistance of
the town speaks highly for the peculiar capability
of defence it possesses by natural position. There
is one fact worthy of notice. The Russian general-
in chief has lately exclaimed against the barbarity
of the allies destroying the museum at Kertch.
The incident is to be deploted, yet as an act of some
ignorant marauding Turks there is some excuse to be
offered ; but let us bear what Dr. Grant tells us of
the devastation effected by the Russian themselves
in 1787-8:

All that was ancient was doomed and destroyed. Kertch
and Kaffa especially were scenes of worse than Vandal
devastation. Beautiful mosques and minarets; public
fountains and aqueducts, the pride and the great glory of
the Moslem; public edifices, however imposing and
sacred, were overthrown ; trees were cut down, tombs
rifled, the relics of the dead cast abroad, swine led out of
coffins, and the monuments of antiquity annihilated.
The traveller Clarke, in 1800, watched the rude Russian
soldiery pulling down the principal minaret at Kaffa; and
while the inmertuibable lurks were breathing deep and
bitter imprecations on the enemies of the Prophet, even a
tireek turned and muttered, iu scorn and indignation,
XxiAsi (barbarians) !
In the few pages of this modest little book the
leading facts of Crimean history will be found narrated
in a manner equally perspicuous and entertaining.

Quintus Horatius Flaceus. London : Bell, and
Daldy.

A NEW edition of Horace, printed from Mr. Mac-
leane's text, would not call for remark were it not
for the novel and appropriate illustrations which in
this present edition embellish the pages of this
favorite author. The design of this volume is not
only to offer an illustrated edition of the work, but,
in the words of the preface, "to put before the
" readers of Horace a few good specimens of the
" source from which many of his expressions are no
" doubt derived," and thus helping to illustrate the
allusions, as well as explain the text of the author.
Forty-seven engravings from antique medals, and
statues drawn w►th care and executed with great
finish, all illustrative or suggestive, adorn its pages,
while. at a moderate price, and in the excellent taste
in which it is got up, this edition has a great claim
to the patronage of all who would possess, at little
cost, the most elegant edition of the works of this
poet.

The Romance of the Aristocracy. By Sir Bernard
Burke. New and Revised Edition, in Three Vols.
London: Colburn.
THIS collection of " Anecdotes and Records," com-
prising the most memorable incidents in the history
of our noble houses, seems likely to become a
standard work. Independent of the interest attach-
ing to stories abounding with singularities of cha-
racter, wild adventure, daring heroism, romantic
peril, and exquisite strokes of pathos, the book is
useful as an authentic record of that. kind of anec-
dotical lore which most persons have some acquaint-
ance with, but which passing from mouth to mouth
gets so sadly disguised as to require freque►,t
reference to some established authority. The anec-
dotes, however brief, present animated picture
of the manners and sentiments of the times to whit h
they refer, and the author appears to have taken
great pains to verify the truth of his relations in the
minutest particulars.

The Jealous Wife. By Miss Pardoe. Three Vols.
London : Hurst and Blackett.
Miss PARDOE excels in social portraiture. The
Jealous Wife " is extremely simple in structure,
depending for its hold over the reader's mind on its
natural delineation of incident and character in do-
mestic life. Expectation is the kind of interest it
excites, as, until the conclusion of the book, it is im-
possible to foresee what turn the caprices of Ida, r
the resentment of her husband, will take. The dia-
logue is sometimes a little stiff, as people in real life
seldom address each other in such set terms as are
often employed here. Ida, when excited, addresses
her husband, "But we must not forget our guests;
"return to them at once, dear Sydney, while I gather
"up my dishevelled hair and make myself present.
" able." The familiar conversation of social life, how-
ever, can seldom be faithfully preserved in fiction.

"IN