Note 249 — Chapter II · SOWING THE SEED (Nov. 1856–Aug. 1857)

Twenty years later another reparation was made. Sir Theodore Martin, in his Life of the Prince Consort, had taken an unfavourable view of the McNeill-Tulloch report. In the fifth edition he revised the passage. “It is almost more than we could have hoped,” wrote Lady Tulloch, in telling Miss Nightingale of the revision; “I say we, knowing how much interest you took in the matter.” “I give you joy,” replied Miss Nightingale (Feb. 23, 1878); “I give you both joy, for this crowning recognition of one of the noblest labours ever, done on earth. You yourself cannot cling to it more than I do: hardly so much in one sense, for I saw how Sir John McNeill and Sir A. Tulloch's reporting was the salvation of the Army in the Crimea. Without them everything that happened would have been considered ‘all right.’ … I look back upon those twenty years as if they were yesterday, but also as if they were a thousand years. Success be with us and the noble dead.” A copy of this letter was sent to Sir John McNeill, who replied (March 25): “It was kind of you to copy it for me. There is no one, dead or alive, whose testimony I could value so highly with regard to the matters in question as I do Miss Florence Nightingale's. Her favourable opinion is very precious to me, not only because she knew more, and was intellectually more capable of forming a correct judgment than any one else who visited that strange scene, but because my regard and affection for her is such as would make it very painful to me to find that she had reason to think in any degree less favourably of our services than she did formerly. Her letter is very characteristic, and therefore to me very precious.”