to be delivered on a certain day. In this manner the whole force of the country was put upon the work; and cylinders, connectingbeams, stuffing-boxes, piston-rods, &c., from a dozen different factories, have been steaming for weeks past across the island, towards the Messrs. Penn's fitting-shops, where they met and were put together for the first time. The major portion of the gun-boats themselves have been furnished by the private shipvards. From half-a-dozen points of the Thames these handy little craft, sometimes in twos and threes, ready rigged and with engines on board, took the water during the last six weeks. At Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle, Sunderland, Northam, Southampton, and Cowes, this tiny fleet has been fashioned through the long winter nights by the light of gas twinkling between their ribs. Although in outward appearance the boats are all precisely alike, their tonnage, draught, and propelling powers are widely different, as we see in the following table:

These vessels, together with those already in commission which did service in the Sea of Azoff and Baltic last season, bring this stinging little cloud of mosquitoes up to the round number of two hundred mentioned by Sir Charles Wood in his speech in the House of Commons.

The armament of all the gun-boats is alike, namely, two 68-pounders, made to fight fore and aft, with pivots to fire broadside if required. When not in action, the guns, of 96 hundred weight each, are housed in the middle of the deck. Each vessel will be a separate command, and the whole will be formed into four squadrons. The ships of the line, in which the commanders of squadrons will hoist their flags, will serve as nursing-mothers to this light artillery of the sea, which will scour the ocean on every side, returning ever and anon to the parent ship, as chickens return to the maternal wing, for warmth and support, in the shape of coals, food, and ammunition. The great diversity of power, and the difference of draught in these

vessels,

and are

vessels, varying as they do from 20 to 350 horses, and from 5 to 12 feet of water, will make them free of the shallows and inlets of any sea in which their services may be required. Against this ubiquitous and resistless force the Russians had, in the early portion of the year, nothing but row-boats to oppose; and we heard with wonder that the crews of these inefficient craft were armed with lances, and with a curious kind of mace studded with spikes, such as the Scandinavians used when the heroes of the Niebelungenlied were in the flesh. The dispatch-boats differ materially from the gun-boats, inasmuch as they are built of iron, with very fine lines, and are designed for speed as well as for fighting; hence they are classed as the Light squadron. The swiftest of them are capable of running fifteen miles an hour, and are armed with two Lancaster guns and four 68-pounders, not much smaller than the old 36-gun frigates of the last war. In 1850, Messrs. Laird of Liverpool and Mr. Scott Russel of Blackwall built powerful iron vessels, of a light draught, for the Russian and Prussian governments. Their capabilities were reported upon to the Admiralty before they left this country; nevertheless, the war found us entirely destitute, and we entered the Baltic with our huge liners, which were about as well adapted to the shallow waters of that sea as the life-guards would be to pursue Caffres in the bush. The whole country has witnessed, with mingled feelings of shame and indignation, the paltry attempts of Sir James Graham to throw upon the shoulders of Sir Charles Napier the whole blame of our ignoble promenade in the Baltic in the year 1854. What better could he have done with the means at his command? And whose fault was it that he had no better means? As early as the month of May in that year, the attention of the Admiralty was drawn by Captain Claxton to the fact that Mr. Scott Russel would engage to turn out of hand any number of light-draught gun-boats in ten weeks from the date of the order. That offer was disgracefully refused, on the plea that iron was not approved of as a ship-building material! Why, as a naval authority has well observed, they should have built paper boats, if they could have managed to bring our long range guns and mortars to bear upon the fortresses of the enemy. Dispatch was the one thing needful. Had Sir James Graham closed with Mr. Scott Russel's proposition, Sir Charles Napier would have got the weapons he wanted, and would not, we predict, have come bootless home and weather-beaten back,' from the campaign of 1854. If there was such an insuperable objection to iron vessels, why, we ask, did Sir James Graham exchange the "Thetis frigate with the Prussian government for the gun

boats

boats 'Nix' and 'Salamander,' both of this obnoxious material? Early in 1855, the Aberdeen Admiralty was partially forced out of its disgraceful inactivity by the loud calls of the public press for gun-boats; and in order to quiet the storm, one of its members stated in the House of Commons that several had at last been laid down.

When the first was launched, in the summer of 1855, it was found to draw twelve feet of water-a draught which would render it as incapable of running up the shallows of the Baltic as a camel would be of going through the eye of a needle. By the autumn of the same year, the Admiralty managed to build sixteen gun-boats of a more suitable size, and sixteen old dockyard lighters were fitted up as mortar-vessels, and sent out to Admiral Dundas. With these, together with the aid of a few mortars and light steamers furnished by the French, the vast stores contained in the arsenal of Sweaborg, together with the greater part of the town and naval buildings, were destroyed. We have only to learn the performance of this insignificant and hastily-fitted force to read the utter condemnation of Sir James Graham's Admiralty. The mortar-boats, moored at 3700 yards distance, with 400 fathom of cable to veer upon in case the enemy should get their range, threw 3099 13-inch shells into the Russian stronghold, each shell falling with a force of 75 tons; whilst the sixteen gun-boats, at 300 yards distance, with perfect impunity to themselves, threw into the arsenal 11,200 shot and shell. Under such an infernal rain of iron as our own and the French vessels projected, no wonder that the whole place on the second day was one vast sheet of fire. If with such a limited force we managed to deal so disastrous a blow to the enemy, what might we not have done with the fleet of gun-boats now collected together, in addition to the eighty odd mortar vessels, mostly constructed, by the bye, of iron? We venture to say that neither Revel nor Cronstadt would have reared their granite fronts above the water twelve hours after they had been bombarded by such a force. We will go further, and assert, with little fear of contradiction, that if a score of these gun-boats had entered, in the autumn of 1854, the Sea of Azoff, the Russian army would not have been able to have maintained itself in the Crimea through the ensuing winter; and, as a consequence, the flower of our army would have escaped destruction. The first great blow aimed at the power of the enemy was dealt by Captain Lyons; and the most successful of his little fleet was the gun-boat Recruit,' alias the Nix,' which the Prussians had built on the Thames as a pattern for us to go by as early as 1850; and was the identical vessel pointed out by Captain Claxton as an example to be followed in

May,

May, 1854. This admirable iron boat destroyed all the military stores at Taganrog, at 1400 yards distance, without the slightest injury to herself. Why, we ask, was this pattern vessel neglected for four years, at a time when all the world knew that by such vessels only, the naval warfare we were engaged in could be carried on? Posterity will sternly ask this question; and Sir James Graham will not be considered to have answered it by his miserable tu quoque arguments against a blustering old Admiral. Now it is too late and the horse is stolen, an admirably constructed lock is placed upon the stabledoor; now that the just war we have been waging has been strangled by diplomacy, the Channel is covered with a flying artillery, which is paraded before the eyes of Europe—just in time to fire a salute in honour of the proclamation of peace!

ART. VI.-Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Edited by his Son-in-law John Wood Warter, B.D., Vicar of West Tarring, Sussex. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1856.

'I COULD inform the dullest author,' said Coleridge, how he might write an interesting book. Let him relate the events of his own life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.' To this receipt for the manufacture of interesting books by the dullest authors, there is the fatal objection that the dull man would be no more capable of executing the task than of composing any other readable work. The power of recalling truly the past incidents of life, and still more of defining the shifting states of mind with precision, is an uncommon gift, and could never exist without considerable talents. Few have made the effort with tolerable success, not because the events of their lives and the feelings of their hearts would have been devoid of entertainment and instruction, but because their narratives were superficial and imperfect. Of those who have been eminently qualified for the undertaking Southey was among the foremost. No man, he said, ever retained a more perfect knowledge of the history of his own mind. He could trace the development of his character from infancy; and as early as his twenty-second year looked forward to the record as the most pleasing and useful employment in which he should ever engage. From natural temperament his attention was directed, in an unusual degree, to his own doings and thoughts, and the design he had formed of relating them to the world must have induced him to note them still more carefully in their progress, and have helped to fix them more firmly in his memory.

memory. In July, 1820, when he was forty-six years of age, he commenced the work in a series of letters to his friend John May, which were slowly carried on at irregular intervals till March, 1825, when he finally stopped with the seventeenth letter. This narrative, which leaves him in his fifteenth year, has the characteristic fault of all his writings, that many of the details are insignificant; but parts are delightful, and no one can read it without regret that it should not have been continued through another decade till he was settled in life. In a tranquil existence like his, the early portion, in which the character is formed, is the most important. The subsequent history is only a repetition of what has gone before; few fresh opinions are taken up, or friendships made, and the man remains the same to the end of the journey. What Southey omitted to complete for himself his family have not been at the pains to supply. His son, who assumed the office of his father's biographer, could never have reflected much upon the nature of his task, or studied very carefully other Lives of reputation to ascertain by the example of masters in the art what to do, and hardly less material, what to leave undone. No attempt appears to have been made to gather from survivors the particulars which might have been recovered of the college and later school days of the Laureate, which his own narrative has left untouched. Even if he had continued his history through that eventful period, the value of extraneous testimony would have hardly been diminished. To know a man thoroughly, he must not only be painted as he sees himself but as he is seen by others.

The letters of Southey fortunately commenced very shortly after the date at which his autobiography stops; and in these he was accustomed to narrate freely the events which befel him and the feelings they produced; but in such a series there will always be many gaps, and many redundancies, and there has seldom been an instance in which vigorous pruning was more imperatively required or more imperfectly applied. The son having bound up much in his sheaves which should have been cast aside among the stubble, he is now followed by the son-in-law with a large after-harvest, in two volumes octavo, to be succeeded by two more, in addition to an independent publication of the Laureate's correspondence with his second wife. The new editor is less competent than the old. The letters of Southey are written in pure English and a perspicuous style, but in general they are meagre in substance and tame in composition. He had not the art of setting off trifles; and when he attempts to be vivacious, mistakes nonsense for humour. Mr. Wood Warter knows no distinction, and has buried what was worth preserving in a mul