most beautiful visions, and healed the sick
by laying on of hand by the same invisible
power." Mr. Clark sends likewise this
apostrophe from Beaverton, Boone Co., Ill., U.S.:
" But I should love to see and hear thee, oh
thou noble champion of truth. One favour
I ask. If you are taken to the purer
spiritual life before me, then throw thy holy
influence on me, to convince the sceptical,
and to help me speak the truth, impress
me with your ideas. This you can do on a
medium, by and through the laws of unity
which exist between individual spirits of
pure harmony."

There appears to be no doubt that
important communications from this gentleman
may be confidently expected (in the language
of which nobody understands one word), on
the First of April.

Dismissing, here, this branch of the
preparations for the feast of unreason, we pass
to a joke happily conceived for the First
of April, though we doubt its success in
making as complete a fool of the British
Public as is desired. An old captain of the
Welsh Fusileers has translated into French
and published at Brussels, for the edification
and something-else-ification of the French
people, a paper originally written by MR.
HAYWARD for an English Review, and therein
published in the English tongue. Mr.
Hayward is correctly described in the Preface as
" Queen's Counsel, and distinguished man of
letters; " and he is further described as
having, for the purposes of the translation,
corrected his work, and enlarged it with a
variety of information drawn from the most
authentic sources. Its object is to show that
the English people had, in the beginning, the
most exaggerated expectations of the war
with Russia; that they were fully persuaded
that everything would go on of itself (que
tout marcherait tout seul), though we
suppose they may be allowed to have had some
dim impression, at least, that a vast amount
of their money would go off in helping it on;
that nearly all the privations and sufferings
of the English army "may be accounted
for without imputing any serious blame to
any minister, civil or military officer, or chief
of department, whether in London or whether
in the Crimea; " and that " nobody of good
faith who is acquainted with the spirited
reply of Lord Lucan (!), who has read the
lucid address of Sir Richard Airey (!), or who
has studied the extraordinary evidence of
Colonel Tulloch before the Chelsea commission
(!), will hesitate to pronounce a sentence
of honorable acquittal." The sufficient cause
and reason of any little British failure (if any)
that ill-conditioned journalists pretended to
observe in the Crimea, and of any slight
superfluous suffering and death (if any) that occurred
among the British troops, is to be found in
the alterations rendered necessary in the
character of the army's operations, after those
operations were arranged at Varna, and in
the remissness of the French; the soldiers
of which distracted nation (with the
occasional exception of a Zouave or so) were
never ready, were always behind time, were
not to be relied upon, and were handled by
their generals with timidity and incertitude.
M. DE BAZANCOURT having, with the not very
generous concurrence of his master the
Emperor, written a turbid, inflated, and partial
account of the War in the Crimea (which,
making every allowance for a Frenchman's
not being specially predestined to write in
the style of the Duke of Wellington, he
has indisputably done), Mr. Hayward sets
the matter right, and brings the French mind
to a perfect understanding of the truth, by
means of these lights and explanations
(éclaircissements) on the subject.

It happens, however — perversely, with a
view to the First of April — that COLONEL
TULLOCH, who seems to have no relish for
All Fools'-day, and no perception of the
humour of the jokes appropriate to it, comes
out arrayed in plain English attire, at about
the same time as Mr. Hayward appears in his
French suit, and offers his little lights and
explanations on the same subject. Colonel
Tulloch's " éclaircissements " are contained in
a Review of the Proceedings and Report of
the Chelsea Board; and they incontestably
prove, beyond the power of disproof by
man of woman born, every conceivable
detail of murderous muddle and mismanagement,
by English administrators of one kind
or another in the Crimea, on every
imaginable head on which it was possible to do
wrong, from the article of coatees up to
hospital medicines and down again to coffee.
They prove these imbecilities, too, out of the
lips of his own opponents, making their own
statements in their own defence before a one-
sided tribunal constantly wresting the case
out of the truth, by stopping short when they
see that damnatory pea in danger of rolling
out from among the thimbles. Whether
Colonel Tulloch shows the spirited replyer,
Lord Lucan, to have called cavalry officers
to prove that nothing more could have been
done than was done towards the sheltering
of the horses, whom he had himself, in writing,
under his own hand, severely censured
for " doing nothing " towards that sheltering
for five long winter weeks; whether he shows
that in the Crimea the same noble and spirited
replyer would not hear of sail-cloth for the
covering-in of horses, and that at Aldershot
it is now extensively used for that very
purpose; or whether he shows that the vast idea
never presented itself to the collective wisdom
of a whole brigade in want of barley,
that it was possible, instead of sending horses
all the way to Balaclava to fetch it, to send
them half the way, and there let them meet
the commissariat beasts, relieve them of their
load, and turn back again; or whether he
shows the English soldiers to have been
perishing by thousands, abject scarecrows in