The Sun.
London, England, 1863-01-22 00:00:00

THE EMPEROR NICHOLAS.

" Holding the boundless authority of an Oriental Poten-
tate, the Czar was armed besides with all the power which
is supplied by high organisation and the clever appliances
of modern times. VVhat he chose to do he actually did,.
He might be sitting alone and reading a despatch, and if it
happened that its contents made him angry, he could touch
a bell and kindle a war without hearing counsel from any
living man. In the room where he laboured he could hear
overhead the clicking of machinery, and he liked the sound
of the restless magnets, for they were giving instant effeot
to his will in regions far away."

Admirably depicted thus, moreover, in a few mar—
vellous words is—

MR. GLADSTONE.

"If he was famous for the splendour of his eloquence,
for his unaffected piety, and for his blameless life, he was
celebrated far and wide for a more than common liveliness
of conscience. He had once imagined it to be his duty to
quit a Government, and to burst through strong ties of
friendship and gratitude, by reason of a thin shade of
difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was
believed that, if he were to commit even a little sin, or to
imagine an evil thought, he would instantly arraign him-
self before the dread tribunal which awaited him in his
own bosom ; and that his intellect being subtle and micro-
scopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggeration, he
would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat
himself as a great criminal for faulty too minute to be
visible to the naked eyes of laymen."
Or Mr. Bright, as the Peue-at-any-Price Cham-
pion, the author remarks felicitously, that "he had
the advantage of being generally able to speak in.
a state of sincere anger." Referring hardly less
felicitously, and far more gracefully, upon the very
next page, to Mr. Bright and his great co-operator,
Mr. Cobden, as those " two orators who had shown
with what a strength, with what a masterly skill,
with what patience, with what a high courage they
could carry a great' scientific truth through the
storm of politics." Of the then Prime Minister,
the Earl of Aberdeen, the historian dexterously
observes at once, in condemnation and in
extenuation, that his " hatred of war Was so
honestly and piously entertained, and was at the
same time so excessive and self-defeating,
that in one point of view it had the character of
a virtue, and in another it was more like a disease."
Adding, shortly after, that, " Lord Clarendon's pithy
phrase was less applicable to the country at large
than to the Prime Minister—lt was strictly true
that Lord Aberdeen drifted!" About the most bril-
liant delineation, however, among all the many mar-
vellous portraitures displayed upon these pages,
is Mr. Kinglake's really wondrous presentment of---
MARSHAL ST. ARNAUD.
"He impersonated, with singular exactness, the idea
which our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke
of what they called a Frenchman' ; for although (by cow-
ing the rich, and filling the poor with envy) the great
French Revolution had thrown a lasting gloom on the na-
tional character, and left this one man untouched. He was
bold, gay, reckless, and vain, but beneath the mere glitter-
of the surface there was a great capacity for administrative
business, and a more than common willingness
to take away human life. In Algerine warfare
he had proved himself, from the first, an active
enterprising officer, and in later years a brisk commander.
He was skilled in the duties of a military governor, know-
ing how to hold tight under martial-law a conquered or a
half conquered province. The empire of his mind over his
actions was so often interrupted by bodily pain and weak-
ness, that it is hard to say whether, if he had been.
gifted with health he would have been a firm, stedfast man;
but he had violent energies, and a spirit so elastic, that when
for any interval the pressure of misery or of bodily pain was
lifted off, he seemed as strong and as joyous as though he
had never been crushed, He chose to subordinate the lives
and the rights of other inen to his own advancement.
Therefore he was ruthless, but not in any other sense
cruel. No one, as he himself said, could be more good-
natured. In the intervals between the grave deeds that
he did, he danced and sung. To men in authority, no less
than to women, he paid court with flattering stanzas and
songs. He had extraordinary activity of body, and was
highly skilled in the performance of gymnastic feats. He
played the violin; and, as though he were resolved in all
things to be a Frenchman of the old time, there was once
at least in his life a time of depression, when (to the
astonishment of the good priest, who fell on his knees
and thanked God as for a miracle wrought), he knelt down
and confessed himself, seeking comfort and absolution from
his Church. When first I saw him, in that year, he was
moving with his force to wreak vengeance on a neighbouring
tribe, and he was to march five weeks deep into the desert.
He spoke with luminous force, and with a charming anima-
tion; and it seemed to me, as we rode along by the side of
the heavy-laden soldiery, that the clear incisive words in
which he described to me the mechanism of the moveable
column' were a model of military diction. But his keen,
handsome, eager-features so kindled with the mere stir
and pomp of war; he seemed so to love the simple
going and coming of his aides-de-camp, and the
rolling drums, and the joyful appeal of the bugles ;
he was so content with the gleam of his epaulettes half-
hidden and half revealed by the graceful white cabaan, so
happy in the bounding pride of his Arab charger, that he
did not seem like a man destined to be chosen from out of all
others as the instrument of a scheme requiring grave care
and secresy. Yet of secresy he was most capable, and at
that very time he had upon his mind, and was concealing,
not from me only (for that would be only natural), but from
every officer and man around him, a deed of such a kind
that few men, perhaps, have ever done the like of it in
secret."

Following close upon which, let us here place this
instant glimpse of Marshal St. Arnaud's inscrutable
Sovereign—

NAPOLEON 111.

" If he had been open in disclosing the ambition which
was almost cast upon him by the circun3stances of his birth,
he had been as successful as the first, Brutus in passing for
a man of a poor intellect. Both '.33 France and in England
at that time men in general imagined him to be dull. When
he talked, the flow of his ideas was sluggish; his features
were opaque ; and after years of dreary studies, the writ-
ings evoked by his thoughtful, long-pondering mind, had
not shed much light on the world. Even the strange ven-
tures in which ho had engaged had failed to win towards
him the interest which commonly attaches to enterprise.
People in London who were fond of having gatherings of
celebrated characters never used to present him to their
friends as a serious pretender to a throne, but rather as
though he were a balloon-man, who had twice had a fall
from the skies, and was still in some measure alive. Yet
the more men knew him in England the more they liked
him. He entered into English pursuits and rode fairly to
hounds. He was friendly, social, good-humoured, and
willing enough to talk freely about his views upon they
throne of France. The sayings he uttered about his ' des-.
tiny' were addressed (apparently as a matter of policy) to
casual acquaintances, but to his intimate friends he used the
language of a calculating and practical aspirant to the em-
pire,"

That momentary touch (seemingly so casual and
o careless!} the passing comparison of Louis Na-
Sleonanidtte First Brutus, is nothing less than a.
very master-stroke. It is here, however—upon this
mention of our Imperial Ally throughout the Rus-
sian War (our ally then in arms, as before and
since then continuously in peace), that we would
direct attention to what we cannot, in our heart
and conscience, but deem to be the one gisrir.,g
and abiding blemish of the work before us
—one in a manner, we grieve to think
and feel,
tainting its exoelienoo throughout.

In explanation of our meaning in saying which, it
will be enough for our purpose if we here particu-
larize the fourteenth chapter of the first volume of
this History. What earthly good purpose Mr. King-
lake may, in some fit of wild hallucination, have
proposed to himself the ambition of subservingwhen
sitting down to write that deadly perversion of
known facts, it would be difficult for us in any way
to conjecture. The advance of truth it cannot
possibly be : for truth has really little or nothing
whatever to do with it. In penning the pages we
refer to, the member for Bridgewater would appear
to have altogether overlooked several most im-
portant and significant considerations. He has
apparently lost sight of the fact that for ten full
years the reigning Emperor Napoleon has been
living there in the midst of the French people, in
the midst of the Parisians—not surrounded, like
President Lincoln, by a bodyguard armed to the
teeth, not carrying about with him, like the Lord
Protector, Oliver Cromwell, perpetually concealed
upon his person, loaded firearms, by way of individual
defence—but living there in France, in Paris,
happily, peacefully, with his wife and child, driving
about the streets, walking upon the pavements, at his
own free will and pleasure, unharmed, nay, more
than that, greeted with frequent evidences of
loyalty and admiration. Again it appears never to
have occurred to Mr. Kinglake that the creature,
the wretch, the "demon" he describes in this singu-
larly malicious chapter of his history, though ao
despicable and detestable in the estimation of Mr.
Kinglake, has nevertheless during all these years
past been good enough, in the estimation of our vir-
tuous Queen, to be admitted to her Majesty's per-
sonal friendship, and to salute her Majesty with his
lips upon his arrival as her guest at Windsor Castle.
The animus, however, in which the writer of these
otherwise noble volumes of modern history takes up
his pen to write (History P) about the reigning French
Emperor, may be understood at once to partake of
the nature of a monomania, when it is found to have
beguiled Mr. Kinglake into such extravagances as
those scattered with so lavish a hand through this
grimly chapter fourteen ! Amenities, they are, such
as, in our mere remembrance of them, stink in our
nostrils. Instance—his describing Napoleon 111. as
a poltroon so very base and despicable that at Stras-
burg, at Boulogne, at the Coup d'Etat, at Magenta,
and at Solferino he turned green with fright ! Again
the phobia into which Mr. Kinglake has been
bitten may be appreciated readily enough when-
ever (as though it were the sheen of water that he
saw !) he recognises the glint of this theme rising
before him at intervals in the course of his narrative !
For—at such times—he is just fairly beside himself.
St. Arnaud can never once hardly be mentioned
otherwise than as " St. Arnaud, formerly Le Roy."
As if Frenchmen were not often in the habit of chang-
ing their names, without the fact of their so doing
Constituting any brand whatever of their infamy.
As well refer perpetually thus, as with a crushing
irony, to " Voltaire formerly Arouet," or to
" Lamartine, once upon a time Du Prat." The
taunt is here simply ridiculous. The arch-
fiend himself, to the view of our author, is his
Imperial Majesty. Scanning him as from a
lofty eminence, the writer manifestly feels some-
what as great a disproportion between their re-
spective natures as that experienced elsewhere by
those " Superior Beings" (described by Pope) who,
" Admiring wisdom in an earthly shape,
Would show a Newton as we show an ape I"
Depicted by Mr. Kinglake's damning brush, it is
not an ape, however, that is here revealed to view—
but rather a satyr-like, gorilla-like, Fiend Incarnate.
And, so far from that kindly old proverb being in
any way right which tells us that, after all, he is not
quite so black as he painted, Mr. Kinglake assures
us confidently—he is far blacker. From first
to last—it is the painfullest error of judgment.
The whole of these pages, moreover, are writ-
ten in the vilest taste—the view taken being invi-
dious and ungenerous to the last degree, we will not
say merely to a great man (as he is), but to what
is of far larger worth in the view of humanity, to a
heroic army and to a great people. Otherwise than
in this particular, and in the faint echo also of that
pernicious cynicism (in all the references made tothe
holy mysteries of Christianity), which constituted
the conspicuous blemish of Etithen, Mr. Kinglake's
luminous record of the Invasion of the Crimea is a
work at once quite worthy :of his genius, and
another glory added to our literature.

MARKETS—This Day.

MARK-LANE.

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THE SIX WEEKS' AVERAGES. Wheat, 46s 7d;
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