If Canrobert with his fresh troops had followed in
pursuit, the Russian's retreat must have been turned into a rout
and his artillery captured; if on the following day he had
assaulted the Flagstaff Bastion, Sebastopol, Todleben owned, must
have fallen. He would do neither; his hesitancy and apparent
feebleness have already been explained; but to it, and to the
sinister influence which held his hand, were due the subsequent
miseries of the Crimean winter.
But the epic muse exacted from Kinglake, as from Virgil long
before, the portrayal not only of generals and of battles, but of
two great monarchs, each in his own day conspicuously and
absolutely prominent--the Czar Nicholas and the Emperor Napoleon:
"dicam horrida belia,
Dicam acies, actosque animis in funera REGES."
His handling of them is characteristic. Few men living then could
have approached either without a certain awe, their "genius"
rebuked,--like Mark Antony's, in the presence of Caesars so
imposing and so mighty; Kinglake's attitude towards both is the
attitude of cold analysis.
In the opening of the fifties the Czar Nicholas was the most
powerful man then living in the world.
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