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Vicksburg having been captured, the fall of Port Hudson was unavoidable. It surrendered unconditionally, on the 8th of July, to General Banks. The prisoners amounted to between 6,000 and 7,000.

The commencement of the conscription in the city of New York produced a series of riots, which continued from the 13th of July till the 16th, and were not entirely suppressed till the 17th, when more than 30,000 soldiers of the regular army, besides militia, had been assembled in and around the city. The destruction of property caused by incendiary fires was valued at more than 80,000l. The number of persons killed was about 76, inclusive of some 20 negroes murdered by the mob, and about 600 persons were wounded or otherwise injured.

In accordance with the Acts passed by the Confederate Congress in April and September, 1862, President Davis, on the 21st of July, issued a proclamation calling out for military service, for three years, if the war should continue so long, the whole of the able-bodied population of the Confederate States, between the ages of 18 and 45.

The Siege of Charleston.-Morris Island, on the west side of the entrance to Charleston harbour, is separated from James Island, which is farther west and more inland, by creeks or inlets of the sea. It is about three miles long, less than half a mile wide in the upper or northern part, and less than two miles wide in the lower or southern part. It is an elevated sand-bank, without tree or shrub. Fort Wagner is situated near the northern end, and Fort Gregg at the extreme north, called Cumming's Point. On the 10th of July, before daylight, and under cover of gunboats, General Gilmore effected the landing of a body of troops, with batteries, at the lower end of the island. The defenders were defeated, with a loss of 300 killed and wounded, including 16 officers. On the 13th of July, General Gilmore had obtained possession of the whole of the southern end of the island. On the 18th, after a furious bombardment of Fort Wagner by monitors and gunboats, continued during the whole day, an attempt was made at dusk to capture it by assault. After repeated attacks, the Federal troops, including a regiment of negroes, were repulsed with a total loss of about 2000 killed and wounded, the total loss of the defenders having been only 150. On Monday, the 17th of August, at sunrise, a furious bombardment of Fort Sumter was commenced. General Gilmore opened fire from all his batteries on Morris Island, while Admiral Dahlgren moved up his entire available force of monitors and gunboats, to assist in the bombardment, which was continued incessantly till the evening of Saturday, the 22nd of August, when Fort Sumter was a mass of ruins. On the following day Admiral Dahlgren summoned Fort Sumter to surrender, and General Gilmore demanded the surrender of Charleston and the other forts. General Beauregard refused both. On Monday, the 24th, at one o'clock in the morning, General Gilmore threw into the city 13 shells, charged with combustible matter called Greek Fire. The damage done was very slight. These shells were thrown a distance of more than five miles. General Gilmore having failed in his attempt to capture Fort Wagner by assault, adopted the plan of regular siege. On the 6th of September, the sappers having advanced to the edge of the moat, the garrisons of Forts Wagner and Gregg were withdrawn during the night, in forty boats. Only one boat was intercepted, containing twelve men. Fresh guns have been mounted on Fort Sumter; two attempts to take it by assault in the night have been repulsed with loss, and the Confederate flag still floats over the ruins of the demolished fortress.

After about eight months of apparent inaction, General Rosecrans,

who had probably been reinforcing his army and collecting war-material and stores, commenced a great movement against General Bragg in Tennessee. His objects were obvious enough to defeat General Bragg, whose force was much smaller than his own, and then conduct the Federal army triumphantly into Georgia and Alabama. Moving from Nashville, his base of operation, he advanced in the direction of Chattanooga. General Bragg was then compelled to make a countermovement of retreat from Shelbyville and Tullahoma, falling back to Chattanooga. General Rosecrans, following closely, crossed the Tennessee some miles below. General Bragg then evacuated his strong entrenchments at Chattanooga, removing the inhabitants and everything of value; and by this change of position secured his rear, and his communication by railway with Atlanta, through the Alleghany Mountains. Chattanooga was entered by a portion of the army of General Rosecrans, on the 10th of September, the main body remaining three or four miles lower down. General Bragg having been reinforced with two divisions of Longstreet's corps, from the army of General Lee, on the 19th of September, at ten o'clock in the morning, attacked the army of General Rosecrans. Falling at first upon the left wing, under General Thomas, the Confederates caused the reserves of the centre and right to be sent to his support. They then suddenly attacked the centre, drove it back, and separated the two wings. There was much confusion and rout, and the Confederates captured many guns, but the Federals were partly rallied, and held their ground, On the 20th, the attack was renewed, and the centre and right were defeated, and compelled to retreat. The left wing, under General Thomas, having secured a strong position, resisted with resolute bravery till dusk, when it fell back, and during the night joined the rest of the defeated army at Chattanooga. General Bragg reported that he had captured 7,000 prisoners, 36 pieces of artillery, and 15,000 small arms. The Federal loss, in killed and wounded, must have been very large. This was the Battle of Chicamauga, so called from the name of a stream near which it was fought.

For nearly three months after the 14th of July, when General Lee recrossed the Potomac from Maryland, nothing of importance took place between the two hostile armies in Virginia. At the beginning of October, General Lee's army occupied the line of the Rapidan, and General Meade's head-quarters were at Culpepper. On or about the 8th of October a large portion of General Lee's army commenced secretly a movement northwards, by the sides of the Blue Ridge, past the right flank of General Meade's army. In a day or two this "dangerous flank movement," as General Meade called it, was discovered, and the whole of the Federal army was withdrawn from the line of the Rappahannock to Centreville and Fairfax, the Confederate forces having seized and occupied the position of Manassas. No attack was made by either army, and in a few days General Lee's troops were withdrawn, when it was found that the railroad from Manassas to the Rappahannock had been so completely broken up as to require some weeks to renew it.

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PART II.

ARCHITECTURE AND PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS, LEGISLATION, STATISTICS, AND CHRONICLE OF 1862-63.

VII.-ARCHITECTURE AND PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS. 1. GENERAL PROGRESS :-ART AND PUBLIC MONUMENTS. LOOKING at the number and magnitude of the buildings and public works newly finished, approaching completion, commenced, or only talked about, this might well be thought the golden age for architects and builders, for engineers and contractors, and, indeed, for every class of artist and handicraftsman able to build and cunning to work in stone and in brick, in wood and in iron. But if we listen to the critics and professors we shall soon learn that it is a golden age only in the mercenary view of the matter. The true golden age, architects and writers on architecture are agreed, was an age long pastthough they differ widely as to the number of years, or even of centuries, that have since rolled away. The present, they tell us, is an age of ostentatious semblance and intellectual poverty. To restore the true age of gold we must think as they thought, or at least do as they did in those good old times.

The question of style, though still an undetermined question, is one that has the most powerful influence on current architecture. The advocates of the different styles continue to denounce, though with somewhat less vehemence, every style but the one they advocate. They are as they were: but there are symptoms that if they do not advance they will be left hopelessly in the rear. They have not yet come to see, or to admit, what is beginning to be understood outside the charmed circle, that a true style is the outgrowth of its age: the result of the physical and material, no less than of the intellectual, social, and religious development of the time and place and people; and that as a particular stage of development and culture passes away, or merges in a new and necessarily a different one, so with it must architectural style, if it be the true expression of its time. And therefore it is, that whilst all native or developed styles, however widely they may differ from each other, are found to be beautiful or suggestive, and therefore worthy of study, every style which is the mere revival, or reproduction, in a later age of one that had, centuries before, gone through its natural processes of birth, growth, maturity, decay and death, is, after the fashion of the hour has changed, invariably looked upon with something of contempt. But a few years ago imitations of Greek or Roman buildings were produced in abundance, alike in London and in Paris, in Berlin and in Munich, as pedantically perfect in their way as the Greek and Latin verses elaborated with so much toil and pride in modern universities; but does any single living soul at this day care a straw more for the one as architecture than for the other as poetry? And so, though not yet to the same extent, of the copies of libraries and palaces we imported later with such pains and cost from Venice and Florence, and other

cities of the sunny South, into our own dingy capital and murky manufacturing towns. We are at present in what seems to be the height of the medieval fever, and worship, with unquestioning faith, the "truthful and lovely " Gothic which our fathers rejected as uncouth and barbarous. But assuredly before many years are over, this fashion will also fade away; and, unless the Gothicists be wise in time, and employ their style, as the architects of every original period employed the style from which they borrowed, merely as the germ from which to evolve one in all respects adapted to the circumstances and requirements of their own time and country, the recoil from it will be as violent as was the recoil from its immediate predecessors. It may be, and perhaps is, the fact that Gothic architecture contains the germ of the style best adapted to the character and climate of England; but the style developed from it must be one that shall assimilate to the fullest extent the intellectual culture, the artistic power, and the scientific resources of the age. No crude imitation of thirteenth or fourteenth century work can possibly do this, or be a fair and lasting exponent of the nineteenth century. It may be perfect of its kind, but it will never be a true and living style. No people can go back five or six centuries in Art any more than in science or literature.

At present the prospect of any such style is by no means assuring. As indicated by the major part of the buildings recently completed or in progress, it would seem as though the architectural mind were in a state of confusion. Out of the chaos may come something true and good, though there is no appearance of it yet. Gothic is still the only wear; but it is truly a motley Gothic. On the old English garment are tacked all sorts of foreign patches. The result is a curious diversity of form and ornament. Such a thing as an established system, or principle, seems to be not even thought of. However special may be the character of the building, however peculiar the place, the design proposed appears to have been suggested by individual fancy and remembrance, or to be the result of the last novelty set forth with somewhat more than ordinary ingenuity and paradox. If there be a competition there will be offered as many varieties of style as there are competitors; and no one of the designs, probably, would suggest to a spectator that it was made what it is because it was most appropriate to the specific purpose of the building, the locality, the space, money, and materials at command.

And the especial evil is that in all this diversity there is very little originality. Imitation takes every variety of form and colour; but it is imitation after all. Of novelty there is, indeed, more than enough; and to make this novelty more conspicuous and attractive we have it running into every antic trick and vagary. Our old classical imitators were too often pompously dull, frigid, and commonplace in their attempt to be dignified, but they were for the most part gentlemanly in their dulness; whereas we are not only fantastic and flippant, but vulgar. And of all things architecture will least bear vulgar affectation. Yet, withal, there is much that is admirable. Our architects, many of them, display great ability; great artistic resources regarded from their own point of view, and, regarded from any point of view, great ingenuity, technical knowledge, learning, and fancy. Their

deficiency is in independence of thought, self-reliance, seriousness of purpose, and elevation of style: in other words, the great original architect of the country has yet to make himself known.

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Of the national buildings there is little this year to record. The permanent galleries," as well as the iron and glass courts and cupolas of the huge International Exhibition Building, are, as every one knows, doomed. After what we said of the building last year it will not be supposed that we find in this much to regret, as far as the edifice itself is concerned. Neither as a work of art nor as a utilitarian contrivance will its disappearance be a very serious loss. But extensive portions of our national collections are lying useless, and some of them perishing, for want of a proper habitation. The National Portrait Gallery waits a more fitting home. For our manufacturing interests the necessity is deeply felt of the formation of special collections of objects connected with the industrial arts, technology, patents, &c. And seeing this, and the improbability of Parliament granting for some time a sum sufficient to provide anything like adequate accommodation for them elsewhere, it is difficult not to feel something like a doubt, when weighing the matter free from all bias, whether it would not have been the more judicious course to turn so spacious, and, in the "permanent building," so substantial a structure to account, when it was obtainable at an inconsiderable price, and convertible to use at a moderate outlay. We shall now have to wait much longer and spend much more. It will be a national disgrace, however, if we do not get a worthier building-whether it be on the same site or another. The materials of the Exhibition Building have, it is said, been sold (for a larger sum than the building might have been purchased for as it stood) to the directors of the Alexandra Park. They are to be removed to the new park at Muswell Hill, and there re-erected after an improved design. One of the domes is to form the central feature of a building which is to be a sort of rival to the Sydenham Crystal Palace; the other is to be raised in another part of the grounds, and to form a great conservatory. Up to the present time little progress has been made in the demolition of the building : the floor has been in good part taken up, and the glass has been removed from the domes. The annexes, as trenching on the ground of the Horticultural Society, were pulled down and sold no long time after the close of the Exhibition. The timber roofs and the pillars which supported them were purchased to be employed in the construction of Baptist chapels-one of which will be described farther on.

We mentioned last year the opening of the new central courts at the South Kensington Museum. 'What we said of their good and bad qualities has been fully corroborated by the experience of a winter and of another summer. Their convenience as places for the temporary exhibition of attractive objects is manifest to the cursory visitor. Their unsuitableness for the permanent deposit of objects of art, and their discomfort as places for the patient examination of the treasures collected in them, are unfortunately still more manifest to the student. Indeed, however loud was the chorus of praise which first greeted them, there would seem to be equal unanimity of censure now, or rather, say, a general agreement that they are at best only a sort of make-shift. Even the Muscum authorities appear ready to admit the failure: at

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