made memorable for ever the Russian repulse at Balaklava, was a
splendid mistake, valuable chiefly for the spirit-stirring example it
has bequeathed to future generations of English soldiers, for its
illustration of death-defying, disciplined courage; the great fight
at Inkerman was only converted from a calamitous surprise into a
victory by sheer obstinate valour, not by able strategy; and the
operations that after Lord Raglan's death brought the unreasonably
protracted siege of Sebastopol to a close did but evince afresh how
grand were the soldierly qualities of both French and English, and
how indifferently they were generalled.

If the allies came out of the conflict with no great glory, they had
such satisfaction as could be derived from the severer losses and the
discomfiture at all points of the foe. The disasters of the war had
been fatal to the Czar Nicholas, who died on March 2nd, 1855, from
pulmonary apoplexy--an attack to which he had laid himself open, it
was said, in melancholy recklessness of his health. His was a
striking personality, which had much more impressed English
imaginations than that of Czar or Czarina since the time of Peter the
Great; and the Queen herself had regarded the autocrat, whose great
power made him so lonely, with an interest not untouched with
compassion at the remote period when he had visited her Court and had
talked with her statesmen about the imminent decay of Turkey. At that
time the austere majesty of his aspect, seen amid the finer and
softer lineaments of British courtiers, had been likened to the
half-savage grandeur of an emperor of old Rome who should have been
born a Thracian peasant. It proved that the contrast had gone much
deeper than outward appearance, and that his views and principles had
been as opposed to those of the English leaders, and as impossible of
participation by such men as though he had been an imperfectly
civilised contemporary of Constantine the Great. Since then he had
succeeded in making himself more heartily hated, by the bulk of the
English nation, than any sovereign since Napoleon I; for the war,
into which the Government had entered reluctantly, was regarded by
the people with great enthusiasm, and the foe was proportionately
detested.

Many anticipated that the death of the Czar would herald in a
triumphant peace; but in point of fact, peace was not signed until
the March of 1856. Its terms satisfied the diplomatists both of
France and