KINGLAKE, ALEXANDER WILLIAM, an English

historian, born at Wilton House, near Taunton, August 5, 1809; died January 2, 1891. He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1832, and was called to the bar in 1837. Soon after he made a tour in European Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt. Letters which he wrote to his friends were, several years later, in 1844, published under the title of Eothen ("From the East"). On his return from the East he entered upon practice in London as a chancery lawyer. In 1857 he was returned to Parliament, in the Liberal interest, for the borough of Bridgewater; and again in 1868, but was unseated on petition. Besides Eothen his only notable work is the History of the Invasion of the Crimea (1863-88). He was a prominent antiNapoleonite.

Kinglake was a man of independent means and remarkable talents, and a brilliant and powerful writer, but something of a terrible example in regard to the practice which characterized his time, of devoting enormously long histories to insignificant subjects. He was also intensely partisan.

TODLEBEN, THE DEFENDER OF SEBASTOPOL.

The more narrow-minded men of the Czar's armyand even, while Nicholas lived, the confused Czar himself-would have thought they sufficiently described the

real defender of Sebastopol by calling him an "Engineer Officer," with perhaps, superadded, some epithet such as "excellent," or "able," or "good; " and it is true that his skill in that branch of the service enabled the great volunteer to bring his powers to act at a critical time. He was by nature a man great in war, and richly gifted with power, not only to provide in good time for the dimly expected conditions which it more or less slowly unfolds, but to meet its most sudden emergencies. When, for instance, we saw him at Inkerman in a critical moment, he, in theory, was only a spectator on horseback; but to avert the impending disaster, he instantly assumed a command. He seized, if one may so speak, on a competent body of troops, and rescued from imminent capture the vast, clubbed, helpless procession of Mentschikoff's retreating artillery.

He was only at first a volunteer colonel, and was afterward even no more, in the language of formalists, than a general commanding the engineers in a fortress. besieged; but the task he designed, the task he undertook, the task he-till wounded-pursued with a vigor and genius that astonished a gazing world, was-not this or that fraction of a mighty work, but simply the whole defence of Sebastopol.

The task of defending Sebastopol was a charge of superlative moment, and drew to itself before long the utmost efforts that Russia could bring to bear on the war. Since the fortress-because not invested-stood open to all who would save it, and only closed against enemies, the troops there at any time planted were something more than a "garrison," being also in truth the foremost column of troops engaged in resisting invasion; and moreover the one chosen body out of all the Czar's forces which had in charge his great jewelthe priceless Sebastopol Roadstead.

There, accordingly, and of course with intensity proportioned to the greatness and close concentration of efforts made on both sides, the raging war laid its whole stress.

On the narrow arena thus chosen it was Russia-all Russia-that clung to Sebastopol, with its faubourg the Karabelnaya; and since Todleben there was con

ducting the defence of the place, it follows, from what we have seen, that he was the chief over that very part of the Czar's gathered, gathering, armies which had "the jewel" in charge; and moreover that, call him a Sapper, or call him a warlike Dictator, or whatever men choose, he was the real commander for Russia on the one confined seat of conflict where all the long-plotted hostilities of both the opposing forces had drawn at last to a centre.

The commander of a fortress besieged in the normal way, cut off from the outer world, must commonly dread more or less the exhaustion of his means of defence; but no cares of that exact kind cast their weight on the mind of the chief engaged in defending Sebastopol; for, being left wholly free to receive all the succors that Russia might send him, he had no exhaustion to fear, except, indeed, such an exhaustion of Russia herself as would prevent her furnishing means for the continued defence of the fortress. The garrison holding Sebastopol, and made, one may say, inexhaustible by constant reinforcement, used in general to have such a strength as the Russians themselves thought well fitted for the defence of the fortress; and if they did not augment it, this was simply because greater numbers for service required behind ramparts would have increased the exacted sacrifices without doing proportionate good.

And what Todleben achieved he achieved in his very own way. Never hearkening apparently to the cant of the Russian army of those days, which, with troops marshalled closely like sheep, professed to fight with the bayonet, he made it his task to avert all strife at close quarters, by pouring on any assailants such storms of mitrail as should make it impossible for them to reach the verge of his counterscarps. That is the plan he designed from the first, and the one he in substance accomplished. From the day when he made his first efforts to cover with earthworks the suddenly threatened South Side to the time when his wound compelled him to quit the fortress, he successfully defended Sebastopol; and, as we have seen, to do this—after Inkerman, or at all events, after the onset attempted against Eupatoria-was to maintain the whole active resistance that