FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, hospitals, containing an aggregate of nearly five thousand sick and wounded, while there were eleven hundred more on their way from the Crimea. In the Barrack Hospital alone there were about three thousand patients, all of them severe cases. How- ever, having proved herself so vigorous a reformer of hospital misrule, Miss Nightingale, through the tacit oppositionof all the principal medical officers, found it almost impossible to turn the service of even a portion of the newly - arrived nurses to any account. Cabals, ill-feeling, partydifferences, passive resistance in every shape, met her on all sides, her reforms were treated as unwarrantable interferences, and dis- countenanced as far as possible. She held, in the General Hospital, a very insecure footing ; and found her efforts crossed at every turn. Towards Mr. Macdonald the jealousy of the ,officials extended itself; in distributing ' The Times' Fund' he was most ungraciously treated, and his assistancedeclined whenever it could be dispensed with. But as Florence Nightingale was struggling against the disgraceful jealousy of hospital officials, her heart was cheered and encouraged by a glorious letter filled with true English warmth and sympathy, written by Queen Victoria ; " not a letter stiff with gold thread and glittering with gems," but womanly and queen-like, "with nothing of the ermine about it but its softness and purity." " Would you tell Mrs. Herbert," wrote the Queen of England to Mr. Sidney Herbert, " that I beg she 26
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