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aggerated. The experience of the Peninsula, Walcheren, Burmah, and Sebastopol, has unfailingly proved this to be the case, and in manifold instances the evils were such as could have been avoided with ease.

The barracks and the military hospitals,' says Miss Nightingale, 'exist at home and in the colonies as tests of our sanitary condition in peace; and the histories of the Peninsular war, of Walcheren, and of the late Crimean expedition, exist as tests of our sanitary condition in the state of war. We have much more information on the sanitary history of the Crimean campaign than we have of any other. It is a complete example-history does not afford its equal-of an army, after a great disaster arising from its neglects, having been brought into the highest state of health and efficiency. It is the whole experiment on a colossal scale. In all other examples the last step has been wanting to complete the solution of the problem. We had in the first seven months of the Crimean campaign a mortality among the troops at the rate of 60 per cent. per annum from disease alone-a rate of mortality which exceeds that of the great plague in the population of London, and a higher ratio than the mortality in cholera to the attacks; that is to say, that there died out of the army of the Crimea an annual rate greater than ordinarily die in time of pestilence out of sick. We had during the last six months of the war a mortality among our sick not much more than among our healthy Guards at home, and a mortality among our troops in the last five months two-thirds only of what it is among our troops at home.'

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This splendid testimony to the value of sanitary science, exhibited on the largest scale, on an apparently hopeless field, is without appeal. The Commissioners propose a medical officer of health for the army, second in rank to the principal medical officer, and attached to the quartermaster-general in the field. This officer, says the Report, should be the head of the sanitary police of the army, should be answerable for all the measures to be adopted for the prevention of disease, and should report to the quartermaster-general, and to the principal medical officer. In order to prevent any evasion of responsibility, they further recommend that the sanitary officer shall give his advice in writing, and that the disregard of it on strategical grounds shall be equally recorded by the officer in command. Having thus provided for the army in the field, the Commissioners propose that there shall be associated with the Medical Director-General of the Army a sanitary, statistical, and medical colleague. Each of these officers would be at the head of a distinct department

This idea of a sanitary officer for armies in the field originated with Mr. J. Ranald Martin, who has long advocated the measure in his correspondence with the medical journals, and with the East India Government. To this gentleman we also owe the suggestion of a health officer in civil life.

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the sanitary officer taking cognisance of all questions of food, dress, diet, exercise, and lodging for the soldier; the statistical department gathering together those invaluable details relative to the health of the army, for the want of which the British troops have so long suffered a mortality out of all proportion to the civil community; while the medical department would serve as a connecting link between civil and military medicine, keeping the latter up to the last word of science, as spoken by the great medical authorities in all countries. Some of these suggestions will require deep consideration before they are adopted. Nothing, at any rate, must be permitted to fetter the absolute power of the commander in the field, who must have a real as well as a nominal freedom. But every precaution which can guard the health of the soldier without cramping the discretion of the general is demanded alike by humanity and policy. What was so powerfully said in the last century has remained in a great degree true in our own. The life of a modern soldier is ill-represented by heroic fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits or heaved into the ocean, without notice or remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away."

ART. VII.-Boswell's Life of Johnson: including their Tour to the Hebrides. By the Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S. A new Edition, thoroughly Revised, with much additional Matter. With Portraits. 1 Vol., royal 8vo. London, 1847.

MR.

R. THACKERAY has remarked that the advantages of the literary calling are not sufficiently remembered by those who complain of its hardships. The physician must have house and furniture, carriage and men-servants, before patients will confide in him, for nobody is willing to trust in his skill till he puts on an appearance which indicates that he is trusted by others. The barrister must be at the cost of chambers and clerk,

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and the expense of going the circuit. The artist must have his studio and a constant supply of canvas and paint. The author, on the other hand, requires scarce any capital with which to exercise his craft. In large towns public libraries supply him with books, and a few sheets of paper, a pen and a little ink are all which are required to write them. He can live in a cheap lodging, and needs none of the costly appendages of the doctor, lawyer, and painter. Such is Mr. Thackeray's summary of the case, and it is plain enough that every calling has its drawbacks and compensations; but, when all has been said, it will still remain a truth that the worst profession in the world, for those who rely upon it exclusively, is that of an author. With the exception of a very few popular writers and editors of journals, no persons expend so large an amount of talent and toil for so small a return as the better class of literary men. Gifted persons, whose pens are hardly ever out of their hands, can with difficulty earn three or four hundred a year. Great as is the demand for books in the aggregate, the works of an individual have not often a sufficient sale to furnish much profit. If he chances to make a lucky hit, he can rarely repeat it. Those who make their way in the ordinary professions have a steady call for their services;. the gains of the author, which are dependent upon a taste as variable as the weather, are always precarious. Though the public did not require incessant variety and were willing to go on listening to the voice of the charmer, he can seldom continue to charm as wisely as at first. Goldsmith urged the introduction of new members into the Literary Club because the original associates had travelled over each other's minds.' This is as true of books as of conversation. Few men are possessed of an inexhaustible stock of ideas, and while in the ordinary callings increased experience gives increased skill, the author often finds in the very prime of his life that his occupation is gone, and that little besides mouth-honour' is left him. But the chief evil, perhaps, of his employment, when his bread depends upon it, is in the nature of the exertion it imposes. The craft of an artist is in a large degree mechanical, and to paint is usually as much a pleasure as a labour. The duties of a physician soon become a routine in which the intellect is rarely put to a strain. The barrister has his materials found to his hands, has the comparatively easy task of addressing the understanding instead of captivating the taste, and has the immense advantage of speaking to an audience far from fastidious and which is compelled to listen to him. Literary productions, when they have any particular excellence, generally flow with much less facility. They call for a more exhausting patience Vol. 105.-No. 209.

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and a more fatiguing application of mind. Rapidly as Johnson seemed to write, he yet testifies that composition is usually an effort of slow diligence, to which the author is dragged by necessity, and from which the attention is every moment starting to pleasanter pursuits. No occupation is so tiring, none requires such concentration of the powers and such a freedom from everything which can distract the thoughts; none, therefore, is so harassing under the least derangement of health or circumstances. A man,' says Johnson, doubtful of his dinner or trembling at a creditor is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote inquiries; nor can any pursuit be so trying when poverty compels the toil to be unremitting; when

'Day after day the labour must be done,

And sure as comes the postman and the sun
The indefatigable ink must run.'

Half the works which delight the world may almost be said to have been written with the blood of their authors. 'Ye,' exclaims Johnson, who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, attend to the history of Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia.' With much more reason might those who think of adopting literature as a profession, seduced by dazzling dreams of affluence and fame, attend to the history of Samuel Johnson. Whoever weighs the sufferings against the success will have little reason to envy his lot; and though he presents as grand a spectacle of a brave man struggling with distress as the world ever saw, the grandeur is felt by those who contemplate his career, and little besides the distress was felt by himself.

Shortly after Johnson settled in London, at the close of 1737, his chief employer was Edward Cave, the son of a shoemaker at Rugby. Cave had acquired some scholarship by his education at the grammar school of that place, and was now established as a printer and publisher at St. John's Gate. He had started the Gentleman's Magazine,' and never, Johnson said, 'looked out of the window but with a view to it.' Such was his minute anxiety respecting it that he would name a particular person who he heard had talked of leaving it off, and would exclaim, 'Let us have something good next month.' Johnson spoke of him in later years with great affection, and described him as a good man who always delighted to have his friends at table,' but added, that he was a penurious paymaster, who would contract for lines by the hundred, and expect the long hundred.' However sensible he may have been of the value of his new contributor, whose articles, compared to the flimsy stuff which filled

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the journals of that day, were like jewels among sand, Cave does not seem to have relaxed his parsimony in his favour. The wages of Johnson were those of the ordinary literary drudges of his time, and the terms which conscious merit would have induced him to refuse, starving indigence compelled him to accept.

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Most of his productions during the early part of his sojourn in London have not been traced. In 1740 his known contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine' become more important, and it was at the conclusion of this year that he began to compose the 'Parliamentary Debates,' which he had previously been employed to revise. Persons were sent to the Houses of Lords and Commons to learn the names of the speakers and the sides they took. Sometimes his informants brought away notes of what was said, and from these slender materials Johnson constructed the finished speeches which appeared in the Magazine. His last, and upon the whole his ablest, effort of the kind, was his report of the discussion on 'Spirituous Liquors' in February, 1743. He then desisted from the task on discovering what he had never before suspected, that these effusions of his pen were supposed to be the true debates, for he would not,' he said, 'be accessory to the propagation of falsehood.' Though there could be no guilt where no fraud was designed, and though not a single ill effect was alleged to have been produced by the misconception of the public, his detestation of everything deceptive was so extreme that a few days before his death he declared that the Debates were the only part of his writings which gave him compunction.' Their genuineness was long undoubted even by men who might have been thought to be in a position to hear the truth from the members of either House of Parliament. Three of the speeches were published by Dr. Maty in the works of Lord Chesterfield 'as specimens of his Lordship's eloquence;' and years after the scrupulous moralist had abandoned the practice Dr. Francis, the translator of Demosthenes and Horace, mentioned at a dinner, at which Johnson was present, that the reply of Mr. Pitt to the elder Horace Walpole in the 'Debate on Seamen' in 1741, was the finest he had ever read-finer than anything in the great Greek orator himself. The rest of the company were loud in their applause, and when panegyric was exhausted, Johnson exclaimed,That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter-street.' This vigorous piece of fierce invective is the best burst of declamation he produced.

The excellence of the speeches may have done much to remove suspicion. It may have appeared more probable that they should be faithful reports than that they should be the composi

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