years, therefore, he carried on the duties of a young regimental officer-duties eminently uninspiring in times of peace, but the performance of which is nevertheless essential to a real understanding of the inner working of an army. To unfamiliarity, in high quarters, with the conditions of regimental life are largely due the many mistakes which have retarded the progress of military organization in this country. To Hamley these years, if uneventful, were of the highest importance. They sufficed to establish his literary reputation, and brought enduring friendships which lightened the burdens and disappointments of his after-life. In some respects the conditions were favourable to the young writer. Until 1851, he served continuously in small country stations where military formalism was not oppressive. Always a great reader, he found ample leisure and few distractions, while the happy association with Dr. Bent in Canada and the occasional visits of his brother subaltern Gleig, the friend of his cadet days, supplied an intellectual stimulus at the period of life when character takes form. During a hot summer the three devoted themselves to reading and discussion. 'They were all more or less argumentative and critical,' writes Mr. Shand, and it is easy to conceive how these appreciative studies of "the best masters" must have helped to develope Hamley's tastes.' Thus the years spent in Canada were wholly beneficial; and while acquiring the habits of the student, his many expeditions served to quicken his power of observation and to foster that sympathy with nature which afterwards lent charm to his writing. Returning to England, he was quartered at Tynemouth, when he broke ground in 'Fraser's Magazine' with an article entitled "Snow Pictures," effectively describing a shooting excursion in the State of Maine. "The Peace Campaigns of Ensign Faunce" quickly followed; and although these first efforts showed the crudeness inseparable from inexperience, both held out bright promise. The young subaltern had found a vocation which was to bring him lifelong interests and lasting fame. The change to Gibraltar in 1851 was perhaps a turning point in Hamley's career. The worn grey Rock, rising sheer out of the Mediterranean and rich in memories of the past; the scarred relics of the Moor and the Spaniard; the wonderful panorama of sea and mountain in which two continents share; the colour and the crowded life of the narrow streets-all combine to invest the historic fortress with indescribable fascination. Thus the new surroundings appealed powerfully to the young writer's imagination. On the other hand, he suddenly B 2 found found himself in the midst of a large and closely packed military society whose ways were unfamiliar and somewhat uncongenial. The intellectual level of the British Army to-day differs widely from that of forty-five years ago, and no one has done more than Hamley to bring about the change. 'I have no literary friend here,' he wrote, 'with whom to discuss my projects'; and while mingling freely with the social life of the garrison, he seems yet to have been apart. 'Most people stood in awe of him, owing to his silent ways and stiff manner,' states a lady who knew him well at this period; adding, with true insight, 'He had a most tender heart behind his stiff manner.' These were years of study and of thought. Hamley's mind was full of literary projects which there were none to share. It was perhaps the sense of intellectual isolation, keenly felt in the Gibraltar days, that deepened a natural reserve, then and in after years too easily mistaken for hauteur. The fine dialogue entitled "Michael Angelo and the Friar"— the earliest of the long series of contributions to 'Maga'-seems to reflect the mind of the author in the days of loneliness at Gibraltar. The monk is made to plead for relaxation from strenuous effort, and to urge the need of human love and sympathy. 'Other men Ev'n I, pursuing My cloistered way into a quiet tomb, In love or duty bound to mourn for me.' To Michael Angelo, impelled forward by the resistless claims of his art, no compromise is possible. He must labour on to the end, fulfilling his task and winning the immortality he craves. 'Friar, our minds Are not as stuff whereof we mould at will A striving wrestler or a sleeping nymph, But drop to earth rough-hewed; our share o' the task Is to dispose them so as they shall cast Their shadows on the world's disc faithfully.' Viewed as the work of an Artillery captain of twenty-seven, the poem is remarkable, and the spirit of lofty and untainted ambition which it breathes throughout supplied the ruling motive of the life of the author. "Michael Angelo " was followed by the "Legend of Gibraltar " and "Lazaro's Legacy," in which vivid pictures of Gibraltar in the eighteenth century are interwoven with the adventures of an imaginary grandfather of the writer. The realism and the humour of these light sketches won for them marked success, and Hamley immediately set about his one novel. It is easy to criticise "Lady Lee's Widowhood," and impossible not to feel the charm of the young author's touch. A vein of cheery kindliness runs through the story, extending to the ill-doing Bagot Lee, who, like Rawdon Crawley, is not made to appear irredeemable. Few novelists, prior to 1852, had sought to depict the British officer as a scholar. When not vicious or merely foppish, he was usually presented as a chivalrous person of dull intellect. Hamley, however, in defence of his cloth, gives us a captain of Dragoons who is able to quote Dante and enjoy Gilbert White without thereby suffering any loss of manliness. The type, probably suggested by the dual life of the writer, has since become well-established in fiction. He During the Gibraltar period Hamley's studies seem to have taken a purely literary range, and there are no signs of any leaning towards the higher branches of the science of war. was, however, no mere student; and his selection by Colonel Dacres for the adjutancy of a division of Artillery proceeding to the Crimea, proves that he was regarded as a specially capable and energetic officer. The Campaign of Sebastopol gave a new turn to Hamley's thoughts, and the admirable series of letters contributed to 'Blackwood's Magazine' marked a fresh intellectual departure, which he thus eloquently describes : Hitherto I, and doubtless most others of my contemporaries, had viewed in a kind of epic light the men of Wellington's campaigns, besides whose rich and stirring youth ours seemed pale and empty. Now we, too, had passed behind the scenes; we, too, had been initiated into that jumble of glory and calamity, war, and had been acting history... We, too, knew of the marshalling of hosts, the licensed devastation, the ghastly burden of the battlefield and the sensation of fronting death; and, henceforth, the pages of military history, hitherto somewhat dim and oracular, were for us illuminated by the red light of experience.' In these letters, Hamley's literary and military instincts for the first time found joint expression. The one gave charm and inspired the many descriptive touches in which not a word seems superfluous or misplaced. The other appears in a uniformly wise and calm judgment of the operations and of the causes which nearly led to disaster. Much of the writing of this period was characterised by wild exaggeration, indiscriminate condemnation of individuals, and ill-regulated criticism. The loud outcry raised by the press was in the main misdirected and often injurious to the interests of the Army. In marked contrast to the prevailing flood of declamation, stand Hamley's thoughtful and soldierly comments. In 'The War in the Crimea,' published in 1891, the ruling conditions of the painful campaign are thus admirably summed :— The Army once before Sebastopol and dependent on a military system so deficient in much that is essential, no arrangement or forethought within the scope of human intelligence could have averted the disasters which followed.' No summary could be more just; but it had been anticipated in the letters from the Camp on the Upland, and, as Mr. Shand points out, when the later book came to be deliberately written, there was no opinion to retract. Only a soldier with an intuitive grasp of military principles could have penned the Letters from the Crimea '; while, from the purely literary point of view, these letters, produced under many difficulties in the intervals of harassing duty, can fearlessly challenge comparison with the memorable dispatches of Dr. Russell or the polished pages of Kinglake. Hamley was present at every battle in the Crimea, and at Inkerman he displayed sound military judgment and marked initiative; but throughout the Letters a rare restraint is placed upon the use of the personal pronoun. With true modesty the writer describes what he sees, and, unlike some later historians of operations relatively trivial, he never alludes to his individual actions. A review of a small volume of "Poetry of the War" was an appropriate contribution from the hut before Sebastopol; but the essay on "North and the Noctes," written under the distracting conditions of the siege, was certainly a unique tribute to the memory of John Wilson. In January 1854 Hamley returned from the Crimea with the brevet of Lieut.-Colonel and a Companionship of the Bath. He was not yet thirty-two; he had established his reputation as a practical soldier, while as a writer he had conquered a new domain. Henceforth the wide field of military history lay open to him, illumined, as he tells us, by 'the red light of experience.' Long neglected, almost despised, by the British Army, the science of war was to find in Hamley a powerful exponent. Jusqu'à ces dernières années, pas un national n'avait écrit ex professo sur les parties savantes de la guerre.' Such was the just comment of General Foy in the first quarter of the century; and until the publication of Napier's brilliant History, the reproach remained. English writers had been content with mere narrative. Of original auteur thought For a thought or military insight, there were few signs. scientific analysis of the Campaign of Waterloo, it was necessary to turn to the pages of Jomini or Clausewitz. England had no school of military criticism, and, judged by the poverty of its literary output, the British Army was intellectually far behind those of France, Prussia, or Austria. It is Hamley's greatest distinction to have redressed the unequal balance and to have ushered in the dawn of a new era. Quartered at Leith Fort, Hamley for the first time met Mr. Blackwood, and his circle of friends now rapidly widened. It was natural that he should be attracted to the society of writers whose aims and modes of thought he shared, and by whom he could count on being understood. Into literary rather than military circles, therefore, he was inevitably drawn; and although he formed friendships in the service which outlasted trial, a great part of his life lay outside of and apart from the Army. There can be little doubt that this circumstance was, in some measure, detrimental to his professional advancement in a country where personal influence plays a dominant part in selection for military preferment. The period of three and a half years passed at Leith, Woolwich, and Dover, produced a large number of contributions to 'Maga,' and Hamley also undertook the task of selecting and editing the first series of the Tales from Blackwood,' upon which he bestowed much careful thought. His extraordinary versatility showed itself in such widely different papers as the striking review of Bazancourt's 'Narrative of the Campaign' and "Mr. Dusky's Opinions on Art." The latter is a good example of the powers of satire, trenchant but not unkindly, which the writer had at command. The affectations of art-criticism have never been more effectively exposed, and such a passage as the following is an apt parody of a manner by no means extinct : The first thing that strikes me, in the work of the past year, is, that though all other seasons and times of the day are reproduced in landscape (except the pitch-dark of a winter's night, which it would be difficult for anyone in the present state of art to place satisfactorily on canvas), yet that particular state of atmosphere which exists in the month of August, from about five minutes before two to about twenty minutes after, when the sun's sultry and lavish splendour is tinged with some foreboding of his decline, and when Nature is, as it were, taking her siesta, is nowhere sought to be conveyed. I thought, on first looking at a small picture in the East room of the Academy, that this hiatus had been filled up; but on further study I perceived that the picture in question had been painted |