tions and desires, of which these are the precious expression, would seek in vain for utterance. Tell me, you, who have friends and kindred abroad, or who are bound to foreigners by more worldly relations of commerce, are you prepared for this rude separation ?

This, however, is little compared with what must follow. It is but the first portentous shadow of the disastrous eclipse, the twilight usher of thick darkness, that is to cover the whole heavens, as with a pall, to be broken only by the blazing lightnings of the battle and the siege.

These horrors redden every page of history; while to the scandal of humanity, they have never wanted historians to describe them with feelings kindred to those by which they were inspired. The demon that has drawn the sword has also guided the pen. The favorite chronicler of modern Europe, Froissart while according his admiration equally to bravery and cunning, to the courtesy which pardoned as to the rage which caused the flow of torrents of blood dwells with especial delight on "beautiful captures," "beautiful rescues," "beautiful prowesses," and "beautiful feats of arms," and he wantons in picturing the assaults of cities, "which, being soon gained by force, were robbed, and put to the sword without mercy, men and women and children, while the churches were burnt."* This was in a barbarous age. But popular writers, in our own day, dazzled by those false ideas of greatness, at which reason and Christianity blush, do

*Froissart, c. 178, p. 68.

not hesitate to dwell on similar scenes with terms of rapture and eulogy. Even the beautiful soul of Wilberforce, which sighed "that the bloody laws of his country sent many unprepared into another world," by capital punishment, could hail the slaughter of Waterloo, on the Sabbath that he held so holy, by which thousands were hurried into eternity, as

victory.'

66

a splendid

But my present purpose is, less to judge the writer, than to expose the horrors on horrors which he applauds. At Tarragona, above six thousand human beings, almost all defenceless, men and women, gray hairs and infant innocence, attractive youth and wrinkled age, were butchered by the infuriated troops in one night, and the morning sun rose upon a city whose streets and houses were inundated with blood. And yet this is called "a glorious exploit." This was a conquest by the French. At a later day, Ciudad Rodrigo was stormed by the British, when in the license of victory, there ensued a savage scene of plunder and violence, while shouts and screams on all sides mingled fearfully with the groans of the wounded. The churches were desecrated, the cellars of wine and spirits were pillaged; fire was wantonly applied to different parts of the city; and brutal intoxication spread in every direction. It was only when the drunken men dropped from excess, or fell asleep, that any degree of order was restored, and yet the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo is pronounced "one of the most

*Life of Wilberforce, IV. 256, 261.

† Alison, Hist. of French Rev. VIII. 114.

brilliant exploits of the British army.'

This "beautiful feat of arms was followed by the storming of Badajoz, in which the same scenes were again enacted with added atrocities. Let the story be told in the words of a partial historian: "Shameless rapacity, brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty and murder, shrieks and piteous lamentations, groans, shouts, imprecations, the hissing of fire bursting from the houses, the crashing of doors and windows, and the report of muskets used in violence, resounded for two days and nights in the streets of Badajoz! On the third, when the city was sacked, when the soldiers were exhausted by their excesses, the tumult rather subsided than was quelled! The wounded were then looked to, the dead disposed of." +

The same terrible War affords another instance of the atrocities of a siege, which cries to Heaven for judgment. For weeks before the surrender of Saragossa, the deaths were from four to five hundred daily; the living were unable to bury the dead, and thousands of carcasses, scattered about the streets and court-yards or piled in heaps at the doors of churches, were left to dissolve in their own corruption, or to be licked up by the flames of the burning houses. The city was shaken to its foundation by sixteen thousand shells thrown during the bombardment, and the explosion of fortyfive thousand pounds of powder in the mines, while the bones of forty thousand persons of every age and both sexes bore dreadful testimony to the unutterable cruelty of War.

* Alison, Hist. VIII. 189.

+ Napier, History of Penins. War, IV. 431.

These might seem to be pictures from the age of Alaric, Scourge of God, or of Attila, whose boast was, that the grass did not grow where his horse had set his foot; but no; they belong to our own times. They are portions of the wonderful but wicked career of him, who stands forth as the foremost representative of worldly Grandeur. The heart aches, as we follow him and his marshals from field to field of Satanic Glory.* At Albuera, in Spain, we see the horrid piles of carcasses, while all the night the rain pours down, and the river and the hills and the woods on each side, resound with the dismal clamors and groans of dying men. At Salamanca, long after the battle, we behold the ground strewn with the fragments of casques and cuirasses, and still blanched by the skeletons of those who fell. We follow in the dismal traces of his Russian campaign; at Valentina we see the soldiers black with powder, their bayonets bent with the violence of the encounter; the earth ploughed with cannon shot, the trees torn and mutilated, the field covered with broken carriages, wounded horses and mangled bodies, while disease, sad attendant on military suffering, sweeps thousands from the great hospitals of the army,

* A living poet of Italy, who will be placed by his prose, among the great names of his country's literature, in a remarkable ode, which he has thrown on the Urn of Napoleon, leaves to posterity to judge whether his career of battle was True Glory.

Fu vera gloria? Ai posteri

L' ardua sentenza.

Manzoni, Il Cinque Maggio.

When men learn to appreciate moral Grandeur, the easy sentence will be rendered, and the Glory of the warrior will be scattered like the unclean dust of his earthly body.

and the multitude of amputated limbs, which there is not time to destroy, accumulate in bloody heaps, filling the air with corruption. What tongue, what pen, can describe the horrors of the field of Borodino, where between the rise and set of a single sun, more than one hundred thousand of our fellow-men, equalling in number the population of this whole city, sank to the earth dead or wounded? Fifty days after the battle, no less than twenty thousand are found lying where they have fallen, and the whole plain is strewn with half-buried carcasses of men and horses, intermingled with garments dyed in blood, and bones gnawed by dogs and vultures. Who can follow the French army, in their dismal retreat, avoiding the pursuing spear of the Cossack, only to sink beneath the sharper frost and ice, in a temperature below zero, on foot, without a shelter for their bodies, and famishing on horse-flesh and a miserable compound of rye and snow-water? Still later, we behold him with a fresh array, contending against new forces under the walls of Dresden; and as the Emperor having indulged the night before in royal supper with the king of Saxony-now rides over the field of battle, ghastly traces of the recent slaughter are seen on all sides; out of the newly made grave hands and arms are projecting, stark and stiff above the earth. And shortly afterwards, when shelter is needed for the troops, direction is given to occupy the Hospitals for the Insane, with the order "turn out the mad."

But why follow further in this career of blood? There is, however, one other picture of the atrocious, though natural consequences of War, occurring almost