February 1835, that which appeared in the preceding August having first had the signature of Boz. This was the nickname of a pet child, his youngest brother Augustus, whom in honour of the Vicar of Wakefield he had dubbed Moses, which being facetiously pronounced through the nose became Boses, and being shortened became Boz. "Boz was a very familiar household word to me long before I was an author, and so I came to adopt it." For these nothing was paid; the magazine being in no sense a paying concern.

About this time a kind of offshoot of the Morning Chronicle was started, called the Evening Chronicle; young Dickens was asked to contribute a sketch to the first number; did so; and proposed a series of similar light papers. The proposal was accepted; his salary being on this account raised from five to seven guineas a week. People read the Sketches by Boz, admired and talked about them. They were published in a collected form, and made a decided hit.

How the first glimpse of Mr. Pickwick rapidly ensued we need not here recount; nor how the newspaper reporter became, at one bound, a highly popular author and pet of the public and the publishers.

It is one of the peculiarities of the series of writings now known and thrice famous as The Works of Charles Dickens, that the earliest of them show in full force all the very same qualities of mind, and are as well written, too, in a literary sense, as any that followed. The surprising observation of external details, the quaint fancy, the delight in oddities, the humour (always depending much on exaggeration), the clearness, brightness, vivacity, animal spirits, are all completely represented in the Sketches by Boz; his sympathy with the poor and struggling is strongly manifest, and the peculiar tones of his pathos and

tragedy are also heard. His most extraordinary and emphatic powers of expression were already mature, and gained but little by the enormous practice of the next thirty years. Possibly a certain masterly freedom of handling may be recognised in some passages of his later writings, which thus excel, in point of style, anything in his earliest. But, on the other hand, there was certainly an increase of mannerism, and none of that great desideratum, good taste; and in the self-complacence of an actor sure of applause, the most artificial efforts at humour and pathos were produced without any gauging of their worth. We have written the word 'actor,' and it is no inappropriate term in this case. Never were books so like plays as these-author, stage-manager, scene-painter, property-man, and the whole troop of actors all comprised in one man's energetic person. The actual stage had always the strongest attraction for him. His favourite amusement in childhood and in boyhood was a puppet theatre. As lawyer's clerk, and all through his life, he steadily patronised the drama. His first published essay, 'Mrs. Joseph Porter,' is a droll description of private theatricals; and he was himself the very best amateur actor, probably, that ever wielded a hare's foot or a blunt sword. His small circle of intimates included a large proportion of actors.

Another noticeable thing is his immense and untiring activity. Everything he undertook, labelling blacking pots, shorthand writing, stage-managing, writing stories, he did with all his soul and with all his might.' Having found that he could write what the public was eager to read and to buy, he took off his coat, as the saying is, and went into the business of Fictionist, as he would have gone into that of railway manager, ship-broker, merchant, auctioneer, anything;

and made a fortune in it, as he would have made a fortune in any thing. One tale is thought about or begun before another is finished; incessant work is his chief delight. Such kind of authorship can only flourish in the soil of modern publishing. Dickens was a thorough business-man, had a sleepless shrewdness and tact in all practical affairs, and managed, after a struggle or two, to hold his own with publishers also.

We shall not now essay any estimate of his final position in English literature. We have confined ourselves, for the present, to some remarks on his early life, the facts of which have not, we think, been quite rightly appreciated by the narrator himself.

Dickens is the least bookish of all famous writers, at least in modern times; and in saying this we indicate some of his most delightful and popular qualities, and some of his most noticeable defects. As to his

education, it was perhaps the most suitable on the whole, considering the character of his mind and the career that proved to lie before him, that he could possibly have received. He had no capacity for meditation, none for reasoning; he had no longing to deepen or extend his mental powers by varied culture, either by means of study or conversation. His objects in life were hard work in his métier of story-teller and consequent success and fame, lively amusement of a 'jolly' kind, and a circle of friends consisting exclusively of those who in a greater or less degree fitted in with and furthered his own views and enterprises. With help and encouragement to the needy, and especially those struggling to work, he was always ready and generous.

Mr. Forster's biography is that of a sworn admirer; but we esteem the book as a valuable gift, and it is one that no other hand could have bestowed upon us.

T 2

HIRTY years ago a book was

:

mously it consisted of a series of letters purporting to have been written by a German officer to several friends, the subject being what the writer had observed in Turkey during the years 1835 to 1839, as also a narrative of events that had occurred during the same period, many of them being of great his torical importance, and in which the author had played a part himself. The celebrated geographer, Carl Ritter, considered this work to have been of sufficient importance to warrant his recommending it most strongly to the public in a preface; notwithstanding which, and the intrinsic evidence of its having been written by a man of the highest talent, the most extended and varied acquirements, the keenest perception and power of observation, and gifted with a most refined taste for the beauties of nature; notwithstanding all this, and that the style is most agreeable, being perfectly natural, and presenting external objects with the whole train of thought and feeling they evoked in the mind of the writer-this book seems never to have been much read, at least it did not reach a second edition.

The writer of the Letters was an unknown man, a simple captain of the Prussian Staff; he had not as yet directed the movements of armies by which two empires were overthrown. No one cared much for his book at that time; now it has been brought into notice by certain persons because its author

it up

we want to try to wipe out some of the dreary years that have intervened from our own score as well as from his, and abandon ourselves to the guidance of the Captain of the Staff, on the sunny shores of the Bosphorus, the rugged mountains of Kurdistan, and the waterfalls of the Upper Euphrates.

The Moltke family belongs, we believe, to some part of Holstein, Schleswig, or Jütland; probably, but we are not quite certain, to the first-named province. The subject of this notice, who was born on October 26, 1800, entered the Danish army on January 22, 1818, and was taken over into the Prussian army with the rank of Second Lieutenant, equivalent to that of Ensign in the British army, on March 12, 1822.

This peninsula is inhabited by a variety of races, all nearly allied to each other, but possessing each its peculiar type. One finds NiederSaxons, Angles, Jutes, Friesen, Norsemen, Danes; in fact, very much the same elements as are to be found on the eastern coast of England, and they have all the distinguishing characteristic of a kind of dry humour which one might guess to have its habitat, as the botanists would say, in low lying

countries.

Moltke was appointed as First Lieutenant to the General Staff2 on March 30, 1833, and has ever since remained in that corps, of which he became the Chief in 1858. We find him a Major-General in 1856, Lieu

tenant-General 1859, General of Infantry 1866, and Field-Marshal 1871. What was Moltke's specialty, that is to say, the particular branch of knowledge or kind of accomplishment which brought him at once to the General Staff and kept him there till he became its chief, and converted it into the most scientific body in Europe? It was, in the first instance, a wonderful facility in not merely surveying and making accurate drawings of ground, but of seizing its entire character and rendering this intelligible for scientific military purposes. When accompanying the Sultan, in 1837, on his tour through Roumelia and Bulgaria, on arriving at Tirnova, on the Danube, he is struck with the extraordinary character of the country, and says, 'I have never seen so bold a formation of rock as this, and as Effendimis (the Sultan) is going to the Mosque, I have taken advantage of the rest-day,' to make a survey which will compel the ground to yield up its secrets.'

It was on this foundation of compelling every theatre of war in Europe to yield up its secrets, that Moltke built his military science. Strategical rules are simple enough, and easily acquired at the desk, but in their application to the ground lies the secret: distance and time depend on the ground, numbers and equipment on organisation and good economy; all four taken together are the materials with which the strategist has to do his work.

Captain von Moltke left Berlin in the autumn of 1835, in company with a Baron B- -, and directed his steps, in the first instance, towards Vienna, and thence down the Danube through Hungary to Orsova, where his narrative commences. Let us remark that he had been

promoted from first lieutenant to captain in about two years, a very unusual thing at that time in the Prussian army. The intention of the two travellers was to make their way to Bukarest, from thence to Constantinople, where they were to remain three weeks, and then return home by Athens and Naples in the early spring. We must make a jump to the end of the third letter of the series, which winds up with these words:

Meanwhile our Tartar hurried us for

ward; and on the tenth morning after sallying forth from the gates of Rustschuck,

we saw the sun rise behind a distant mountain, at whose foot a silvery strip was stretched out,-it was Asia, the cradle of nations, it was the snow-clad Olympus and the clear Propontis, over whose deep blue surface a few sails flitted like swans. Soon afterwards a forest of minarehs,2 masts, and cypresses appeared to rise out of the sea-it was Constantinople.

This was on December 1, 1835.

About the 20th of this same month the two travellers accompanied the Prussian Ambassador to an audience at Mehmet Chosrew Pascha's, the all-powerful Seraskier. Let us transcribe a little bit at the end of this fifth letter: 'The Seraskier kept up the conversation, through the medium of a dragoman, with great spirit and ease. He addressed some questions to us on the subject of the Prussian Landwehr, which showed that he had paid much attention to the subject. He praised our military institutions very highly. In the course of conversation mention was made of military chess (Kriegspiel), of which he possessed a set. The Pascha seemed delighted to hear that A I could explain its use to him,' few days afterwards the Seraskier applied to the Prussian Embassy to prevail on Moltke to defer his

departure for a short time, and the compagnon de voyage had consequently to depart alone. This is all the book tells us; we must therefore supply what is wanting from other sources.

After the Massacre of the Janissaries in 1827, a new regular army had been formed under the name of Nizam-i-Dschedid (the new order), and this was with great difficulty brought up to a strength of 70,000 men, which, putting aside altogether its very imperfect organisation, was evidently altogether out of proportion to a territory extending upwards of sixteen hundred English miles from Bagdad on the Tigris to Scutari in Albania, and the finances of the Empire being insufficient to support a larger force, or even this one in a state of proper efficiency, it was thought that some sort of militia might be made available for the defence of the country and the maintenance of order.

The Sultan at first hoped to get French officers to undertake the task of instructing the Nizam and getting it into proper shape, as also of organising the Redifs or militia troops that were contemplated; indeed, the Turkish Ambassador at Paris had already succeeded in making an arrangement of this kind, when the Russian Ambassador at Constantinople, Butenieff, got wind of the affair, and put his veto on it. The Sultan, who had first destroyed the old Turkish army, was therefore compelled to accept the aid of his Egyptian vassal, Mehemed Ali, to put down the insurrection in Greece and the adjoining provinces. He was then deprived of Syria, Adana, and Crete by Mehemed, who was only prevented from marching on Constantinople and dethroning his master by the timely appearance of 15,000 Russians, who encamped on the heights near Scutari to cover

the capital-consequently the Sultan dared not disoblige Russia.1

Baron Stürmer, the Austrian Internuntius, was about that time instructed to offer the services of Austrian officers, an offer which was civilly declined. There is indeed a political and diplomatic frontier drawn between Austria and Turkey, but the nationalities on either side of it are identical throughout. It would not have been convenient under such circumstances to employ Austrian officers. Lord Ponsonby simultaneously proposed British officers as instructors, but although our naval officers are held in high esti mation, even a Turk is capable of perceiving that military organisation is not exactly the forte of the British nation.

Application was then made, by Chosrew Pascha, the Seraskier, to the Prussian Ambassador, Count Königsmark, to use his influence with his Court to obtain the services of Prussian officers; but the Count expressed his regret at not being able to do so, advising at the same time that young Turks should be sent to study at European military institutions.

Such was the state of things when Moltke arrived at Constantinople, as already described; the Seraskier took a fancy to him, that is to say, at once perceived that he was not only a man of the highest intelligence, but also a perfect master of his profession in the sense of understandingthe principles of military science, and not merely a valiant, rule-ofthumb wearer of cocked hats. In the beginning of January, 1836, Moltke writes to a friend:

The Seraskier sends for me two or three times a week, but as the Turks are now

celebrating the Ramazan, during which no business is transacted by day, my visits take place at night. The ten-oared caïque of the Seraskier is in waiting for me at Galata, and at the other side of the harbour