Gesler. Thou didst place A second arrow in thy belt-nay, nay! I saw it well. what was thy purpose with it? Tell. It is a custom with all archers, sir. Gesler. No, Tell, I cannot let that answer pass. Tell. Since - Well, my lord, you have promised not to take my life, I will, without reserve, declare the truth. If that my hand had struck my darling child, And, be assured, I should not then have missed. Schiller. 1. COSTLY appara'tus and splendid cabinets have no magical power to make scholars. In all circumstances, as a man is, under God, the master of his own fortune, so is he the maker of his own mind. 2. The Creator has so constituted the human intellect that it can only grow by its own action; and by its own action and free will it will certainly and necessarily grow. Every man must, therefore, educate himself. His book and teacher are but helps; the work is his. ΕΙ 3. A man is not educated until he has the ability to summon, in an emergency, all his mental powers in vigorous exercise to effect a proposed object. It is not the man who has seen most, or read most, who can do this; such a one is in danger of being bōrne down, like a beast of burden, by an overwhelming mass of other men's thoughts. 4. Nor is it the man who can boast of native vigor and capacity. The greatest of all the warriors, in the siege of Troy, had not the preeminence because nature had given strength and he carried the largest bow, but because SELF-DISCIPLINE had taught him how to bend it. DANIEL WEBSTER. 1. NOBODY sees a battle. The common soldier fires away amidst a smoke-mist, or hurries on to the charge in a crowd which hides everything from him. The officer is too anxious about the performance of what he is specially charged with to mind what others are doing. The commander cannot be present everywhere, and see every wood, water-course or ravine, in which his orders are carried into execution: he learns from his reports how the work goes on. It is well for a battle is one of those jobs which men do without daring to look upon. 2. Over miles of country, at every field-fence, in every gorge of a valley or entry into a wood, there is murder committing wholesale, continuous, reciprocal murder. The human form God's image is mutilated, deformed, lacerated," in every possible way, and with every variety of torture. The wounded are jōlted off in carts to the rear, their bared nerves crushed into maddening pain at every stōne or rut; or the flight and pursuit trample over them, leaving them to writhe and roar without assistance- and fever and thirst, the most enduring of painful sensations, possess them entirely. 3. Thirst, too, has seized upon the yet able-bodied soldier, who, with bloodshot eyes, and tongue lõlling out, plies his tradeblaspheming, killing, with savage delight, callous when the brains of his best-loved comrade are spattered over him. The battle-field is, if possible, a more painful object of contemplation than the combatants. They are in their vocation, earning their bread; what will not men do for a shilling a day? But their work is carried on amid the fields, gardens, and homesteads of men unused to war. They who are able have fled before the coming storm. The poor, the aged, the sick, are left in the hurry, to be killed by stray shots, or beaten down as the charge and counter-charge go over them. 4. The ripening grain is trampled down; the garden is trodden into a black mud; the fruit-trees, bending beneath their luscious load, are shattered by the cannon-shot. Churches and private dwellings are used as fortresses, and ruined in the con flict. Barns and stack-yards catch fire, and the conflagration spreads on all sides. At night the steed is stabled beside the altar; and the weary homicides of the day complete the wrecking of houses to make their lairs for slumber. The fires of the bivouac complete what the fires kindled by the battle have left unconsumed. 5. The surviving soldiers march on to act the same scenes over again elsewhere; and the remnant of the scattered inhabitants return to find the mangled bodies of those they had loved, amid the blackened ruins of homes; to mourn with more agonizing grief over the missing, of whose fate they are uncertain; to feel themselves bankrupts of the world's stores, and look from their children to the desolate fields and garners, and think of famine, and pestilence engendered by the rotting bodies of the half-buried myriads of slain. 6. The soldier marches on and on, inflicting and suffering as before. War is a continuance of battles - an epidemic striding from place to place, more horrible than the typhus, pestilence or cholera, which not unfrequently follow in its train. The siege is an aggravation of the battle. The peaceful inhabitants of the beleaguered" town are cooped up, and cannot fly the place of conflict. The mutual injuries inflicted by the assailant and assailed are aggravated - their wrath is more frenzied; then come the storm and the capture, and the riot and lustful excesses of the victor soldiery, striving to quench the drunkenness of blood in the drunkenness of wine. 7. The eccentric movements of war -the marching and countermarching—often repeat the blow on districts slowly recovering from the first. Between destruction and the wasteful consumption of the soldiery, poverty pervades the land. Hopeless of the future, hardened by the scenes of which he is a daily witness, perhaps goaded by revenge, the peasant becomes a plunderer and assassin. The horrible cruelties perpetrated by Spanish peasants on the French soldiers who fell into their power were the necessary consequences of war. 8. The families of the upper classes are dispersed; the discipline of the family circle is removed; a habit of living in the day EI for the day-of drowning the thoughts of the morrow in transient and illicit pleasure is engendered. The waste and desolation which a battle spreads over the battle-field is as nothing when compared with the moral blight which war diffuses through all ranks of society, in the country which is the scene of war 9. Such is war, with its sufferings and consequential sorrows Such is war in Christian and civilized Europe. war in an age and countries in which most has been done to subject it to regular laws, and to alleviate its horrors by the moral selfcontrol and refinement of its agents. 10. Whitewash it as we will, it still remains full of dead men's bones and rottenness within. And they who trust most to it will be sure to feel most severely that it is an engine the direction and efficacy of which defy calculation—which is as apt to recoil upon those who explode it as to carry destruction into the ranks of their adversaries. London Spectator. CXXX. ON THE CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. 1. NAPOLEON understood his business. Here was a man who, in each moment and emergency, knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and, after each action, wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the world, if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action. 2. He is firm, sure, self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing everything to his aim-money, troops, generals, and his own safety also; not misled, like common adventurers, by the splen dor of his own means. "Incidents ought not to govern policy," he said, "but policy incidents." To be hurried away by every event, is to have no political system at all." His victories were only so many doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of the present circum 66 stance. He knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He would shorten a straight line to come at his object. 3. Horrible anecdotes may, no doubt, be collected from his history, of the price at which he bought his successes; but he must not therefore be set down as cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not blood-thirsty, not cruelbut woe to what thing or person stood in his way; not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood, and pitiless. He saw only the object the obstacle must give way. "Sire, General Clarke cannot combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Austrian battery." -"Let him carry the battery." —“ Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy artillery is sacrificed. Sire, what orders?" 166 Forward, forward!" ΕΙ 4. In the plenitude of his resources every obstacle seemed to vanish. "There shall be no Alps," he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France. Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put out all his strength. He risked everything and spared nothing neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself. -- 5. If fighting be the best mode of adjusting national differences (as large majorities of men seem to agree),* certainly Bonaparte was right in making it thorough. "The grand principle of war," he said, "was, that an army ought always to be ready, by day and by night, and at all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of making." He never economized his ammunition, but on a hostile position rained a torrent of iron, shells, ball, grape-shot, to annihilate all defence. He went to the edge of his possibility, so heartily bent was he on his object. 6. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and all that he could; he came several times within an inch of ruin, and his own person was all but lost. He was flung into the marsh at Ar'cola. The Austrians were between him and his troops, in the mêlée, and he was brought off with desperate efforts. At * As intelligence increases, and Christian principles prevail, it is to be hoped that men will not be so unanimous in this agreement. |