5th.--Took Lucy back to school, calling on Rossettis in the way.... Heard from Christina the first news of the fall of Sebastopol. What times we live in! It would seem that the allied armies were quite determined to show the irresistible supremacy of the western nations this time. How fearfully humiliated must feel the Emperor of Russia! what a merited lesson! Perhaps most of all this is owing to the genius of one man--Omar Pasha. Forty years ago the Russian armies of serfs used to fight drawn battles with the conquering legions of the first Napoleon. Twenty-five years ago, the Turks were hopelessly their prey, and could not make a stand against them. One man, furnished only with a lively and keen perception of the real state of things, perplexes and retards the pedantic Russian generals, till he makes their troops doubt their own prowess, they who come to conquer and submerge; while his own wild ruffians at length believe themselves invincible wherever he will allow them to fight. He does all this in spite of the brutish obtuseness of his own generals, who, where there is a chance left them of blundering, do it--the pashas being as incompetent as the wild troops are naturally brave. Then follows the ever-memorable defence of Silistria, where some eight-thousand Turks, headed by a brave man and assisted by two young Englishmen, left to themselves for six weeks (while upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand English, French, and Turkish soldiers are _doing nothing_, not fifty miles distant), end by defeating the efforts of forty-thousand Russians to take the place by storm or bribery (much to the inexpectancy of all parties, it is whispered--oh dark and hideous suspicion!), and cause the Russians crestfallen to abandon Turkey. “For,” say they, “if a Turkish rabble can serve us thus, what were we, pitted against French and English?” Again, say French and English soldiers, “If Turks can handle them thus, what must be expected of _us_?” And so the huge reputation shrinks up, like the decline of an Academician, or any other titled, decorated, and legalized humbug; and nothing remains but bitterness, and the necessity (through long habit) of speaking pompously. To what pitch is England destined to soar in the history of the world? Externally a far-shining glory to all the earth, and an example: internally, a prey to snobbishness and the worship of gold and tinsel--a place chiefly for sneaks and lacqueys, and any who can fawn and clutch, or dress clean at church, and connive. The deepest pondering alas! brings me back to old and nothing-original conclusions--that the Aristocracy of this country presses, with torpedo-influence, all classes of men and works; commerce alone is free from their intermeddling, and thoroughly successful. In all else--be it war, literature, art, or science--we are great, if great, in _spite_ of them, and the depressing influence of established authority taking the precedence of merit and justice.