yond question the temptation to wards discouragement must have been hard for the intellectual morality of this lonely thinker, and the study of a soul that meets us in these pages but enhances their fascination. We witness a great moral combat; we are also happily present at the victorious issue. Here is his own picture of his triumph. It seems his friends nicknamed him Pervicax-the obstinate. He introduces us to this Pervicax, who, since thirty years, studies, observes, writes for no purpose. Except two or three, who suspect his value and are silent, no one takes Pervicax seriously.

"If he had merit,' they say, 'the masters would salute him before the face of all.' Suddenly a homage comes to Pervicax from afar and above; he is sought out amid his isolation. 'Really what a surprise! Well, the man has talent, let us admit it.' And from to-day to to-morrow Pervicax becomes a prophet-a prophet in his own country. He is surrounded, admired, commended; they praise a pamphlet which appeared some fifteen years ago in midst of universal indifference; they exhume some college thesis in which they protest his talent already showed itself; his last work is laid on the table well in sight, with the paper-knife between the leaves.

The time has gone by for shrugging of shoulders, for sneering looks, for pitying smiles; all has changed aspect, and with the stones that they used to throw at him they are now anxious to build up a pedestal for the statue that is being prepared." This passage, for all its evident pleasure at receiving at last the recognition that is his due, shows also in its satire how truly the Abbé Roux gauges men and mankind.

The comparison between the thoughts of Roux and those of another solitary, who, it is true, never "arrived" until after his

death, is so likely to be made at the present moment when readers are occupied with Amiel's 'Journal Intime,' that a few words about the two men may not be out of place, the more that their work and life have already been confronted. There is this analogy between them, that both were led by loneliness to cultivate a perhaps excessive development of their inner life; both were inclined by isolation towards that intense self-analysis which is natural to lonely men of subjective nature. But here the analogy ends; for Amiel was a dreamer rather than a recluse: he lived near to society, and could have the world with him when he willed, as he often did. Roux is a solitary by necessity, not by choice. He is further isolated from his fellow-men by the site of his home, as well as isolated from his mental peers by his profession. Roux lives in an intellectual desert; in Geneva, Amiel could have his choice of friends. both are sad, again there is a difference. Amiel might be called a virtuoso of melancholy. Not so Roux. He is too ingenuous; there is no design, no posing, no selfconsciousness about this priest. His outpourings are genuinely penned for relief from the loneliness that, but for this safety-valve, would madden him or drag him down. They are neither brothers in misfortune nor brothers in soul. It is curious to understand why people so love to raise these analogies, to make these classifications. May no soul stand alone on its own merits or demerits?

If

Roux, middle-aged though he be, has, as he himself says and knows, not yet lived. Whether he may still develop, or whether a quarter of a century of loneliness has ossified his powers of adaptability, are points only the future

can solve. Nor is it sufficient that his innermost thoughts have been given to the world, that France now knows that it numbers a thinker the more. Unless his Church release him, unless she place him in some more genial and fruitful environment, the Abbé Roux remains where he is, tied by his stomach, as he drastically expresses it, held down by the necessity for bare food, that makes him dependent on his cloth. He has not abandoned all hope. "If the good God would grant to me some day to quit the country, then the country, seen across my memory; across my regrets perchance, will have charms for me, like those

faces of relatives that were severe to us, and that seem so sweet to contemplate when they are no more." In this passage Roux makes his peace beforehand with the country for any hard things he may have said or felt. Will he be allowed to escape from the modest hamlet hidden among undulating lands of chestnut woods, from the bald square church with its blank walls, devoid of any architectural pretensions save its square half-detached belfry, that resembles almost an Italian cam

panile? Will the plain house, hidden in the quiet garden that invites to dreaming, will the rude balcony that runs along its upper frontage under the overhanging eaves, know no more the tall, massive frame of this priest? Who can say! As yet no word of promotion has been spoken. Listen how he consoles himself in a prose poem, which, as his editor remarks, Lamennais would not have disdained to own:—

"Obscure seed, remain under the earth. Wherefore burst forth and

flower? Thou dreamest of sunlight, of breezes, of dew. Alas! the sun burns, the breeze torments, the dew

weighs and sullies. Trouble awaits thee in the daylight--trouble, not peace; and if some glory is promised thee, it will prove vain and brief. Remain under the earth, obscure seed."

"I will be a flower. I must be a flower. Trial for trial, it is better to suffer in the light than in the shade. For I suffer here. Nor do I find it true that isolation is happiness. Night surrounds me, the earth presses on me, the worm insults me. Above all, desire eats out my life. I must be a flower. I will be a flower."

But, over and above all, above literary and artistic instincts, above desires, wishes, and hopes, there liever and the priest. moves, thinks, and feels the beWe will end our essay with the last words of the volume, a species of abjuration, of pardon and prayer for sins of omission and commission, committed or omitted consciously and unconsciously:—

"I declare to retract every passage in this book which remotely or approximately is in contradiction with religion and morality. No thought is avowable unless it is Catholic. All that did not belong to the Roman Empire was called Barbarian ; all that is not attached to the Roman Church has Error for its name. A philosopher, as ingenious as he may think himself, and as he may be said to be, propagates darkness not light, scandal not peace, if he do not teach like Peter, with Peter."

In the early part of the year 1854, I was startled one morning by the clattering of a mounted orderly, who reined up at the door of my modest lodging in HalfMoon Street, and impressed my worthy landlady with a notion of my importance which she had not hitherto entertained, by handing her a letter which required an immediate answer. I found it to contain a request from Lord Raglan's chief of the staff, that I should repair at once to the Horse Guards. The English army was on the point of embarking for the Crimea, and, as may be imagined, I lost no time in obeying the summons. I was ushered into a room containing a long table covered with maps, and round which were standing several officers of rank, among whom, the only two that I remember, were Lord de Ros and Sir John Burgoyne. The Commander-in-Chief himself was not present. The Crimea was at that time almost a terra incognita in England, and travellers who had ever been actually inside the forbidden precincts of Sebastopol itself were rare.

Now it so happened that about sixteen months before, I had travelled through Russia, and spent two or three hours within the walls of that celebrated fortress, and I

other information he had received, and he begged me to give him the result of my observations. I assured him that if any such fortifications on the land side existed, they must have been erected since my visit. I had entered the town from Balaclava, and I must certainly have remembered passing through them. I was therefore prepared most positively to assert that, in October 1852, there was no more impediment to an army, which should effect a landing at Balaclava, from marching into Sebastopol, than there would be for an army to march into Brighton from the downs behind it; and I felt sure that my travelling companion, Mr Oswald Smith, would, if further evidence were required, confirm this statement. At the same time, I had, without any pretension to a knowledge of military tactics, amused myself, as soon as a hostile invasion of Russia was determined upon, in forming quite another plan of campaign, which consisted in a combined attack upon the Isthmus of Perekop, by way of the Gulf of Perekop on the west and the Sea of Azof on the east. The capture of the small fort there would have cut off the whole of the Crimea, to which very few troops had yet been transported. It would have been impossible for Russia to reinforce Sebastopol, either by sea or land, and the fall of that fortress, provided that the Allies could have maintained their position at Perekop, would simply have been a question of time. We should have stood upon the defensive against Russia at a position

of great natural strength, instead of on the offensive against her, at the point where, as it afterwards turned out, the genius of Todleben made her impregnable for a year. The capture of Kertch and Theodosia would have given us command of the resources of the Crimea; and the defeat of the garrison of Sebastopol, had it ventured out to attack us, would not only have sealed the fate of that fortress, but would have given us the whole Tauric peninsula, which we could have held as a permanent guarantee; and then, if Russia still refused to come to terms, we should, by leaving a sufficiently strong force to defend Perekop, have been free to transfer the scene of operations to the Caucasus and the provinces beyond it. I ventured, after giving Sir John Burgoyne all the information in my power as to the defences of Sebastopol, the apparent strength of its garrison, and so forth, to point to Perekop as a weak spot, but of course could only do this with the greatest diffidence. So far as I can remember, he listened without making any remark; at all events, I soon felt so much impressed with a sense of my own presumption in volunteering a plan of campaign, that I confined myself to a mere hint of it; but I have often wondered if the whole thing had to be done over again, whether it would be attempted in the same way as it was before.

I was extremely anxious to take a part in the campaign in some capacity or another, and should have accepted an offer of the late Mr Delane to go out as 'Times' correspondent, had not Lord Clarendon kindly held out hopes that he would send me out when an opportunity offered. It was while anxiously awaiting this that Lord Elgin proposed that I should accompany

him to Washington on special diplomatic service as secretary; and as the mission seemed likely to be of short duration, I gladly accepted the offer, in the hope that I might be back in time to find employment in the East before the war was ended. Nearly a year elapsed, however, before I was again in a position to remind Lord Clarendon of his promise; but Sebastopol was still holding out bravely, and the public were getting impatient at a siege so protracted and so barren of definite results. I was emboldened thereby to publish a pamphlet, in which I suggested the expediency of a campaign in the Caucasus, a part of the world to which it was difficult to attract attention, until the siege of Kars forced its strategic value upon public notice. Feeling strongly the importance of a diversion in this direction, and the use which might be made of the Circassians, who were in a chronic state of guerilla warfare with Russia, but with whom during the year that our own hostilities with that empire had lasted we had opened no relations, with the view of inviting their co-operation and alliance, I proposed to Lord Clarendon that I should undertake a mission to Schamyl, for the purpose, if possible, of concerting some scheme with that chieftain by which combined operations could be carried on, either with the Turkish contingent which was then just organised by General Vivian, or with the Turkish regular army. It had always seemed to me that to ignore the existence of a race of brave and warlike mountaineers, who were fanatic Moslems, fighting in the heart of Russia for their independence, and yet most easily accessible by sea, was wilfully to cast aside a most powerful weapon for attack which the fortune of

war had placed in our hands: we had only to land a strong Moslem force at Sujak Kaleh, on the Black Sea coast, whether of Beatson's Bashi - Bazouks, or Vivian's contingent, or Turkish regulars, provided they were Moslems, to have the whole male population of Circassia, every one a trained warrior, flock to our standard. Such a force would have the friendly mountains on its right flank to retreat to in case of necessity, the river Kuban to protect its left flank, and the rich plains which lie between the Kuban and the mountains to march across.

The objective points of such an expedition would have been the passes of Dariel and Derbend. These two mountain defiles closed by an allied army of Circassians and Turkish or irregular Moslem troops, all access into Transcaucasia would have been barred to Russia except by way of the Caspian Sea from Astrakhan-a most difficult and tedious operation, for in those days the steam-transport upon it was too limited for the conveyance of an army except in minute dribblets. The Russian army in the Caucasus, at that time under General Mouravieff, only amounted to 60,000 men. The Transcaucasian Provinces of Abkhasia, Mingrelia, Mingrelia, Imeritia, Georgia, and Gouriel were all of them disaffected to Russia,- as I afterwards had an opportunity of knowing when I campaigned through them, and being almost exclusively Christian, would have welcomed with delight a Christian army come to release them from the Muscovite yoke. This army would only have had to contend with that under Mouravieff, and would have operated in combination not only with the force on the Kuban, holding the northern passes, but with a Turkish

army advancing from the direction of Kars. Mouravieff and his force would thus have infallibly been caught in a trap, from which there was positively no escape. Not only would Kars never have fallen, but Russia would have lost all her Transcaucasian provinces to boot. At that time the allied armies, French, English, and Italian, round Sebastopol numbered 150,000 men; but even supposing none of these could be spared, Turkey could have furnished a force of 50,000 men under Omer Pasha, exclusive of the Kars troops, which, with 25,000 of Vivian's and Beatson's, would have sufficed for the operation.

These considerations I urged so strongly on Lord Clarendon, that he determined to send me to Constantinople with a letter to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, authorising him to send me to Daghestan, in the Eastern Caucasus, where Schamyl had his stronghold, for the purpose of making certain overtures to him, at his lordship's own discretion. Lord Stratford listened most sympathetically to my proposal; indeed he had been for months urging on the Government that a campaign should be undertaken without delay for the relief of Kars - and of the rival plans proposed, was by no means opposed to the operation being undertaken by way of the Caucasus, as a diversion to compel Mouravieff to raise the siege. had also sent Mr Longworth to the coast of Circassia to communicate with the Naib, Schamyl's lieutenant in the Western Caucasus ; but he declined to commit himself to sanctioning my proposed expedition to Schamyl, on account of the great personal risk which attached to such an enterprise. Of the Naib's own messengers, which he despatched from time to

He