NATIONAL RELICS.
ON Monday, May 20th, the fiftieth anniversary of the sailing of the 'Erebus' and 'Terror' in search of the North-West Passage, was celebrated by a kind of pilgrimage to view the relics preserved in the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich. The visit of Admiral Sir Leopold M'Clintock, Mr. Clement Markham, Admiral Sir George Nares, and half the survivors of the search-expedition, to gaze once more on these remains, had in it a touch of old-world piety. The objects collected by the different search-expeditions, and now preserved in the old palace by the tidal Thames, are t' e merest details of ships' equipment and personal effects picked up piece by piece, and treasured by the searchers as evidence of the time and place at which the crews of the ' Erebus ' and 'Terror' were forced to abandon their ships, frozen in their encampments, or dropped and died among the Arctic ice. A fragment of the British ensign, planted on the extreme point of King William's Island, buttons, plate, portions of clothing, the sextant of the Terror,' knives, rifles, and a chronometer, were the actual relics recovered. Among them was a written document in which the interest centred. It was found on King Edward's Island, with another, which recorded that after the first winter "all was well," and ran thus :—" April 25th, 1848. H.M. 'Erebus' and 'Terror' were deserted on April 22nd, having been beset since September 12th, 1846. Sir John Franklin died June llth, 1847." The crews then numbered one hundred and five officers and men, of whom not oite survived. Neither of the ships was found, or their hulls might have been preserved as a lasting monument of the Franklin's crews, and of the devotion of Lady Franklin and of those who aided in the search.
The feelings with which these objects were viewed by the survivors of the search-expeditions will appeal to every Englishman. The Franklin remains have taken a place in the rare category of national relics,—those real objects, which, unlike many of the mock pearls of history, from time to time take their place, at once, and by acclamation, in the affections of a people, and are preserved as visible memorials of high endeavour. The form of such relics matters little. It is part of their nature that they should be accidental. They cannot be manufactured, like a national monument, though they may become naticnal monuments. The sentiment which adopts them cannot be created artificially. No one ever suddenly discovered the merit of a national relic, and awarded it a place in popular esteem, as people discover the merits of historical personages, or rehabilitate them. It is a case of love at first sight. The 'Victory' took its place unbidden in the hearts of Englishmen. The Foudroyant,' Nelson's other flagship, though rescued from the German ship-breakers, seems already forgotten. There is no room for two Victory's.' We do not wish to divide our homage. We keep it all for the vessel in which Nelson triumphed and died. From the accidental character of these national relics, comes their rarity and their strange variety. We can no more tell the object which will win such honour, than the book which will become a classic. The common element in the sentiment which consecrated and endowed with lasting regard the Plat wan tripod, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Standard of Mahomet, the Caaba, the hull of the Victory,' or the cannon of Londonderry, is not obscure, though the objects chosen are so various. The list is evidence of the antiquity of the desire for concrete evidence of great facts, and the objects chosen do not owe their variety to caprice. It is the event itself which selects as a fitting memorial the particular object on which the national imagination seizes. England is fortunate in owning the best of all—the only complete national relic in the world—an embodiment of all that such a memorial should be, recalling in detail every association which the action could suggest. In the 'Victory' we have not only the thing that links us with the action done, but the actual scene of Nelson's death, in circumstances which had brought that part of the nation which he led—the British Fleet—to the climax of glory and success. Yet the thing, the ship, was, in a sense, an actor in the deed, and we have each and every part of it intact, and in itself beautiful, to appeal to the imagination from every point of sympathy and allusion. The mere reproduction of the ship and of the scene of Nelson's death in the Naval Exhibition, at Chelsea, made an appeal to national sentiment which has not been surpassed by any spectacle seen in London since the funeral of the Duke of Wellington. But the existence of such a relic is due to the accident that Trafalgar was a sea-fight. Just as there were many brave men before Agamemnon who died unsung for want of a Homer, so the greater number of great achieve. ments enjoy no such perfect commemore-tion, because no
object suggested itself which could be kept as a memorial. While Trafalgar has the Victory,' Waterloo has left us no national relic at all. Greece saved no relic of Thermopylw, nor has England of Lucknow, or of Gordon at Khartoum.
There have been national monuments which have taken shape so fast when the heat of action and high emotion was still glowing, that they have the force of national relics, of actual things which were set among the action of the day. The offering of the tripod which the Greeks dedicated to the Delphian Apollo after the Persians had been routed at the battle of Plata, dated from that night of triumph on which the Grecian leaders drank from the golden cups in Mar donins's tents ; and the legend on its pedestal must have appealed to their gazing descendants as if stamped with the names of the saviours of Hellas in metal melted almost on the battle-field. But on the same day the Greeks omitted to pre- serve an object which offered itself as a perfect national relic, and was at once and at the time noted as a concrete omen of success. On the afternoon of the same day on which the Greek army (ideated Mardonius at Platzea, the Greek fleet were preparing to attack the Persians at Mykale, on the opposite side of the /Egean. "The Greeks had begun to more towards the barbarians," says Herodotus, "when, as they advanced, a rumour flew through the host from one end to the other, that the Greeks had fought and conquered the army of M trdonius in Bce4tia. At the same time a herald's wand ' (such as would have accompanied the messenger had such tidings really been delivered) was seen lying on the beach." This wand was the omen of success which, taken with the mysterious and true rumour, won the day. "Many things prove to me," says Herodotus, "that the gods take part in the affairs of men. How else, when the battles of Plata and My kale were about to happen on the same day, should such a tumour have reached the Greeks in that region, cheer- ing the whole army, and making them more eager than before to risk their lives?" Bat the wand itself was not preserved as it should have been, as a relic, which might, in another race, have kindled a fervour equal to that with which the Jews regarded the sacred contents of the Ark of the Covenant. The veneration and pride with which the Jews looked on the Ark, are the model and epitome of the mixture of religion and patriotism which may be excited by such a relic. There is no national idea recorded in history more strong and endur- ing than this pious preservation of the simple evidences of the favour of Jehovah—the Pot of Manna, and the Tables of Btone—as the common inheritance of the Chosen People ; no tale of national disaster more crashing than the simple enumeration of the fact, "The Ark of God is taken- the glory is departed from Israel."
Purely personal relics seldom awake national enthusiasm unless they are also suggestive of national effort. France would gladly exchange the seal of Charlemagne for a suit of the armour worn by Joan of Arc ; and the ruins of the Malakoff are more precious to the Russian than the crown of Kazan. Nelson's blood-stained coat is almost worshipped because its wearer was the embodiment of the national spirit, while the armour of the Black Prince at Canterbury only aises, with a faint echo of national pride, a stronger sense of personal ambition. Crowns and swords and thrones are not, as a rule, in the category of national relics; they are the hall-mark of dynasties, or pieces of national furniture which are evidences of an interesting past. Even the Iron Crown of Lombardy was little more than a "property," necessary to a formal function which gave the Emperor a semi-fictitious right to govern a people who soon ceased to have a separate existence. There was more virtue in a portion of the garment of Alahomet, when the "Holy Standard," dis-
played in Constantinople, summoned the faithful to the aid of the Sultan against the Janissaries in 18-22, than in all the crowns of Europe in the revolutions of 1S48. The Holy Standard was a national relic used for political ends ; as is also to this day the leather apron of Orchan, the founder of the Ottoman line. Unfurl that apron, and eight hundred thousand Osmanlis will follow it till it is captured or they are slain. Europe selects its national relics from the chance association of great events, and consecrates them to practical suggestion and moral stimulus. That is the way in which the President of the Royal Geographical Society interpreted the influence of the Franklin commemoration. But he did not insist enough on the peculiar appeal to emotion made by
the sight of the relics themselves. There the Germans are wiser. They have displayed at Berlin every relic and trophy of the war with France, with maps of the fortresses won, and eulogies on the exploits accomplished. Our naval relics. remain at Portsmouth and at Greenwich, because we under- value their influence.
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