6

on principles somewhat similar to those established in our own country. There was a Minister of Marine, and under him a President and Vice-President of Council. Hobart's place came next as the chairman of a board or staff composed of six post-captains, an engineer, and a torpedo officer. This board really did all the work that was done, and of Hobart's part it was said that it placed the Turkish navy 'more or less under his influence.' This was precisely his difficulty throughout. According to the strength of the intrigues against him he got more or less' of his way. The War Minister, Redif Pasha, was no friend to Hobart, and he found means to interfere in all things, small and great, which affected the navy and Hobart's position in it. Hobart was up the Danube when the war broke out, and on its eve he addressed to the Times' and to Mr. Gladstone some letters which show how loyal and enthusiastic he was in the cause he had adopted, and the master he had elected to serve. Elected, for it was impossible that an English naval officer should serve in one country against another when both were at peace with our own, and Hobart's name disappeared for the second time from the pages of the navy list.

When the war began, the Turkish ships, sixteen of which were armoured, were divided into four commands, taking their orders direct from the Admiralty. There was the Danube squadron of seven ironclads and other smaller vessels, that on the western and that on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, and a squadron in the Mediterranean to meet anything which the Russians might send from the Baltic. At first none of these were placed under Hobart's orders. He was kept, as it was said, dangling about the Golden Horn' when his heart was with the sea-going fleets.

Serdar Ekrem, an octogenarian, who was at Rustchuk in command of the Danube flotilla, pointblank refused Hobart's advice as to its management and its provision with proper stores. He was ordered to attend to his own business, and as Galatz was in the hands of the Russians, who were supposed to have thoroughly mined the Danube at this point, he was told to leave his swift yacht and proceed to Varna by rail. But Hobart had already begun to doubt about torpedoes. He had no wish that his vessel should fall into the hands of the advancing Russian columns, and a little of the old sort of blockade running would restore a spirit jaded with what he calls the pig-headed obstinacy and the grossest 'ignorance' on the part of the commander on the Danube. Did space permit, we should have been glad to quote his

story of the run past the Galatz batteries. Suffice it here to say that, bearding the lion in his den, he ran by night so close under the Russian batteries that the words of command within them could be heard. Rushing at the rate of twenty miles an hour, he was past and away almost before the Russians were aware of what he was doing. But he could not resist the temptation of dropping a solitary shell into their camp pour prendre congé.

The entire failure of the Turkish navy to do anything worth speaking of in the way of hindering the crossing of the Russian armies is well known. The ships fell into disorder. One was blown up by the carelessness of its own crew; another fell a victim to a plucky torpedo attack-with the spar torpedo-by two young Russian officers: an attack which could not have succeeded had ordinary precautions been adopted. Had Hobart's advice been taken, and had he been placed in what was beyond measure the most important command, the Russians could never have had the facilities which were offered for the passage of the Danube.

Later on in the war Hobart appears to have commanded first the eastern and then the western Black Sea squadrons. The precautions ordered by him saved the latter from a daring torpedo attack on the night of June 9. It was on this occasion that the torpedo boat was upset by Hobart's obstructions, and Lieutenant Pustchin taken prisoner. It is characteristic of the Admiral's kindness of heart that his first thought was to telegraph to the young Russian's sister at St. Petersburg to assure her of his safety.

Little was done by the Turkish fleet in the Black Sea because there was little to do. It is pleasant to be reminded, in reading over the correspondence of the day, that the abstention from bombardment of unfortified towns and villages was known to be, as it truly was, due to Hobart's influence. Where the Turks entirely failed was in blockading power. The Russian ships seem to have been pretty free to come and go as they wished in the Black Sea; and it is a little surprising to recollect that the Turks were more prominently engaged in defending themselves from Russian torpedo attacks than in making attacks, though they were nominally in complete command of the sea. On the other hand, the Russians never had the enterprise to try their Popoffkas against any of the Turkish ships.

Hobart Pasha acquired a great contempt for torpedoes. He repeats in this book the views he had already put forward last year in Blackwood's Magazine.' It is much to his credit that he should lean rather on the inefficiency of the

weapon as such than on the skilful arrangement of his own defences. It is quite true that every Russian attack on the Black Sea ships failed, whether the weapon was the spar or the Whitehead, and that the destruction of the Lufti Djelil' in the Danube was entirely due to neglect of ordinary precautions. But we cannot go the whole way with the late Turkish Admiral. The torpedo is not a weapon to be entirely despised and taken no account of. It must continue to have a powerful influence on all organisations for future naval war. It may very possibly not be destined to take the foremost place which some enthusiasts have claimed for it; but neither is it destined, in view of the most recent experiments, to fall into desuetude. No doubt its true position has yet to be ascertained, but it is improbable that it will be found to be a low one.

To the Sultan of Turkey at least Hobart Pasha had shown himself, from first to last, a loyal and-he uses the word himself an affectionate' servant. His position in that potentate's esteem continually grew. His downright straightness of purpose had won its way through the marvellous network of intrigue which always surrounded him, and there was no sort of reward which the sovereign was not ready to confer on him. His restoration to his position in the English navy could not be withheld, from the moment that international proprieties permitted it. So, when Hobart Pasha died at Milan last June, he was an admiral and a marshal in the Turkish service, and a vice-admiral in the English.

The portrait of the Pasha which appears in this book does him scant justice. Though not what would be called a handsome man, he had a pleasant well-featured face. In figure he was perhaps below the middle size, and was remarkable for the smallness of his hands and feet. His frame was thick set, firm, and wiry, but with nothing bulky about it—had there been, it would have been carried off by the scrupulous neatness of his dress. Wherever he went, Hobart was a favourite. He was that sort of man who impressed all his acquaintances with his humour and bonhomie. His equals were always ready to help him in emergencies, and though no disciplinarian, his inferiors both in the English and Turkish services were glad to obey his lightest behests. Perhaps he falsified the adage, but he certainly did not care to obey himself. He undoubtedly lived a strange and eventful life. But no one can read these sketches and apply any tests to the earlier ones, without experiencing the wonder we have expressed at the beginning of this article. Why should he, when the true record of his life had in it such ample ma

terials, have preferred to import into it such wholesale fictions ? We venture to think that there is no other existing book which, purporting to be a true relation, has borrowed so largely from the land of shadows. It is the strangeness of finding ourselves comparing the earlier pages of this article with the later, and feeling that both are fully justified, and in fact unavoidable, which dwells on our mind as we conclude it. A naval officer sitting down to write the events of his life must be conscious of a position which can be occupied by no one else. He cannot forget for a moment that every brother officer knows him, and all about him. Any half-dozen contemporaries talking of him can collect and set out all the leading events of his life in a few minutes. He could not, in any moderately large naval company, assert his presence at any particular occurrence without being immediately corrected if the fact were not so. It is so impossible for us to believe that the late Hobart Pasha can have been oblivious of these things, that we cannot suppose that what he has done was consciously done. We fall back on one of two explanations. Either his mind was in such

a state that the recollections of what he had seen and what he had heard were equally vivid; or else he had had the intention, while so mixing them together, to point out that the sketches were in no proper sense sketches from his life.' In our dilemma we choose the first alternative, but then we shall have to say that to the many curious and striking acts of Hobart Pasha's life we must add his last, and believe him to be the author of a literary curiosity.

It is not without regret that we have made these remarks, for unquestionably the author has bequeathed to the public one of the most amusing books of the day-a book, too, calculated to awaken and stimulate that noble passion of naval enterprise which is the glory and the safeguard of the nation. We cordially recognise Hobart Pasha's high spirit, courage, and resource; but we wish that his memory had been more accurate or his imagination less lively. In justice to him, however, it must be said that these reminiscences were hastily written down when he was in declining health; he was too ill to revise the sheets as they came from the press, and before the volume was ready for publication the author was no more. These are extenuating circumstances, and although we hold it to be the duty of criticism to verify facts related in the form of an autobiography, we have done so in this instance without the slightest feeling of asperity or ill-will towards a writer who has afforded us so much entertainment.

ART. VIII.--The Greville Memoirs (Third Part). A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria, from 1852 to 1860. By the late C. F. GREVILLE, Clerk of the Council. In two volumes. London: 1887.

WITHIN eighteen months from the appearance of the

second part of these memoirs Mr. Reeve is enabled. to present us with the third and concluding instalment of the work. It appeared, as he tells us in his preface, to be ' unnecessary and inexpedient to delay the publication of the 'last portion of these papers, which contain some record of 'the events occurring between 1852 and the close of the year 1860, a period already remote from the present time, and ' relating almost exclusively to men of the last generation.' A perusal of the diary will confirm Mr. Reeve's statement. Mr. Gladstone is the only prominent statesman still living whose policy and whose principles are discussed at any length in these pages; and we may, therefore, congratulate our readers on the publication of the concluding portion of a work which has already excited considerable public interest.

In noticing these volumes, it is impossible to avoid offering a few general remarks on Mr. Greville's diary as a whole. The first entry in it was made on June 7, 1818, the last on November 13, 1860. It extends over a period of more than forty-two years; and it is not too much to say that it furnishes us with far the best picture that has ever been published of the inner political history of England during the whole of that time. It would, indeed, be idle to expect that the diary of a young man, twenty-four years old, should correspond with the journal of an old man of sixty. A narrative of this character, if it be worth anything at all, must show traces of the gradual evolution of the writer's mind. But the value of this diary consists in the circumstance that, throughout the whole period which it covers, the author was in intimate and confidential communication with the leading men of the day; that, on many important occasions, he was not merely the confidant but the adviser of statesmen; and that he consequently both acquired a knowledge of, and exerted an influence on, events which it is given to few men either to enjoy or to obtain.

The opportunities which Mr. Greville possessed were due both to his birth and his position. His father a Greville, his mother a Bentinck, he was thrown at the very outset of his career into society. His grandfather's influence provided him