82 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 
Lamentable as has been the misconduct of the war. 
disgraceful as the incapacity of the leaders of the war, 
infamous, I had almost said treasonable, as the apathy and 
nepotism of the home government, no word of blame has 
found utterance concerning the pluck, the stamina, the 
endurance, the devotion of the highly-born, softly-nur- 
tured, noble subalterns of the English army. 
They died in their stirrups in that appalling charge 
at Balaclava, avenging themselves by tenfold slaughter 
of their outnumbering foes—they rotted piecemeal in 
those charnel trenches—they weltered in mute agony, in 
that dreadful ditch of the Redan, compelling their com- 
rades in anguish to like silence by the wonderful example 
of their young constancy. 
Heaven knows I wish to draw no invidious distinctions, 
or to institute odious comparisons, but I must be per- 
mitted to doubt whether the Schottishing flower of young 
York, who would shrink dismayed from the verge of 
snipe-bog, and faint at the idea of a ten hours’ July tramp 
over the Drowned Lands after woodcock, would have shone 
with much splendor in that hand-to-hand affair, in the 
Valley of Death, or have come with the vivacity of the 
Polka out of the semi-liquid, semi-frozen mud of those dis- 
astrous trenches. 
Seriously speaking, I believe that over earnestness in 
the pursuit of gain on the one hand, and over frivolity in 
the pursuit of pleasure on the other, are two of the beset- 
ting vices of the age; and I farther believe, that a little 
more charity and less austerity on the part of the old, 
and a great deal more manhood and less Miss Nancy- 
