Page:The Second Armada - Hayward - 1871.pdf/6



is talking about it, and everybody is quite right. We do not know that we ever saw anything better in any magazine, or any better example of the vraisemblance which a skilled artist can produce by a variety of minute touches. If the writer is, as reported, Colonel Hamley, then Colonel Hamley, when he wrote the charming story of 'Lady Lee's Widowhood,' misconceived as a novelist the nature of his own powers. He should rival Defoe, not Anthony Trollope. The writer of this paper, living about 1925, gives his son an account of his adventures as a Volunteer during the invasion of England, fifty years before, and so powerful is the narrative, so intensely real the impression it produces, that the coolest disbeliever in panics cannot read it without a flush of annoyance, or close it without the thought that after all, as the world now stands, some such day of humiliation for England is at least possible. The suggested condition precedent of invasion, the destruction of the fleet by torpedoes attached by a new invention to our ships, has attracted many minds; and with the destruction of the regulars, the helplessness of the brave but half organized Volunteers, and the absence of arrangement, make up a picture which, fanciful as it is, we seem, as we read it, almost to have seen. It describes so exactly what we all feel that, under the circumstances, Englishmen, if refused time to organize, would probably do."—Spectator (London).

"The extraordinary force and naturalness of the picture of the calamity itself, its consistency throughout, from the bits of the last Times' leader, read by the unhappy volunteer in the city, to the description of the conduct of the Germans in the fatal Battle of Dorking, and in the occupation of the English homes which follows, seem to us as natural in its touches as can well be conceived."—Pall Mall Gazette.