ment, and when the day was already verging into twilight, one of the most desperate conflicts thatever took place with European cavalry, occurred by the collision of the Austrian and French cuirassiers. The French infantry having, after a long action, forced the Austrian columns to take up a new position, and preparing to follow them into the plains bordering the Danube, the Archduke placed twelve squadrons of the Imperial cuirassiers, with a large body of hussars, on the road in front of Eglassheim, in which were posted some bat talions of grenadiers, supported by several heavy batteries. As the French infantry approached this mass of cavalry, they halted for the advance of their own horse. A succession of charges followed; but at length the Austrian cuirassiers advanced, broke through the French hussars, and poured down upon their cuirassiers. The conflict now became actually so awful, that the infantry ceased their fire; the artillery paused; and "in the melée was heard only, as from the battles of the knights of old, the clang of the swords ringing on the helmets and cuirasses of the dauntless antagonists. The sun set while the contest was still undecided; the moon rose on the strife, and amidst her rays, fire was struck on all sides by the steel upon the armour, as if a thousand anvils were ringing at once under the blows of the forgers."

to fight the battle over again, gave orders for the troops to bivouac on the ground where they stood.

This cavalry fight had no equal, except the final collision of the English and French heavy cavalry at Waterloo. But then the conflict, in point of defence, was more unequal still, for the British were wholly without armour; but they had strong swords and bold hearts, and they broke down their antagonists, cuirassed as they were. The cuirass has since been adopted in our service by the Life Guards, and the adoption has been rational and serviceable; for why should the lives of brave men be exposed the more carelessly for their bravery? But the expedient ought to be adopted in every regiment of cavalry, and even in every battalion of infantry. Of course, the weighty cuirass of the Life Guards would be unsuited for the lighter services; but a slight, yet highly effective cuirass, or simple plate of thin iron, might be adapted to the entire cavalry and infantry services. Many a dangerous wound might be averted, and many a valuable life might be saved by this easy expedient, which, without adding more than a few ounces to the weight of the soldier's equipment, and not at all embarrassing his movements, would add, in a most important degree, to his security. If we should embark in another war, humanity and common sense, and even policy, would equally urge some contrivance of this kind.

ingly, armed the troops with half the cuirass in front, the back being exposed. This theory, which might have answered sufficiently well for the charge, had forgotten the existence of the melée; and when the squadrons became mingled, the French, whose bodies were defended all round, had a palpable advantage over their opponents. The result was, that, after a long and various struggle, the Austrians were repulsed, leaving two thirds of their number on the field. But this gallant struggle gave time for the retreat of the army. During its continuance, the artillery and infantry were withdrawn to the rear. The reserve had time to advance, and Napoleon, seeing that he might have

The battle of Eckmuhl, though still exhibiting the unparalleled fortune

on the part of his opponents, signs which might well have startled him with fears of change. In this desperate conflict, the Austrians had not only fought with gallantry, but with skill. When driven from their position by the masses of the French, they had retreated without confusion; and even in discomfiture had presented so firm a countenance as to stop pursuit. Night fell, and Napoleon himself, himself. full of eagerness to finish the war at a blow, and flushed with success, dared not press the retreating lion too closely. This new sense of their power saved the Austrian army. They had lost in killed, wounded, and prisoners, twelve thousand men, a horrible evidence of one day's work of war. Their position, lying against a great river, without one bridge for its passage, was dangerous, and the Archduke resolved on passing the Danube during the night. A bridge of boats was thrown over the stream, and by this and the bridge of Ratisbon the whole force moved. With such silence, expedition, and dexterity, was this great operation effected, that, when the French stood to their arms in the morning, expecting a great battle, they saw nothing before them but a vast empty plain, with, in the extreme distance, the rearguard of cavalry escorting the last guns within the walls of Ratisbon. The French cavalry now pushed forward without delay; Napoleon was at their head, and, in his haste to strike a final blow by the capture of the town, exposed himself so much to the fire from the ramparts, that he was struck by a musket-shot. The wound was only in the foot, and inconsiderable; but the sight of the Emperor compelled to dismount from his horse spread alarm through the army, followed by exultation equally vivid when they saw him suddenly mount again, and exultingly felt that they were still under the protecting genius of Napoleon.

Under this impulse they were irresistible by any troops that the Continent could oppose to them. A new race of soldiership, a new order of men, and a new spirit of gallantry, determination, and defiance, was yet to tear down the laurels which had grown so thickly round the pyramid of the great conqueror's fame. But that time was not to be yet; and there was nothing to supply the place of the future deliverers in even the practised discipline and devoted intrepidity of the German. We hope that Mr Alison, before the completion of his history, will indulge indulge us with some striking speculations in the philosophy of this distinction. It is remarkable that the conquering periods of the modern military nations, have always been preceded by some powerful public impulse; that some impression has been made upon the nation, penetrating enough to descend to its lowest ranks; and that it is this newlyawakened, deeply-infused sense of character, which has turned the popu. lation into warriors, and the warriors into conquerors. Are we not to trace

to this sudden consciousness, to this new-born pride, to this general advance into the sunlight, however imperfect, and however remote, the change from national torpidity and individual indifference to that new life, which evidently has marked the successive leading sovereignties for power and renown? And is it not the absence of institutions calculated to sustain this popular sense of character, which accounts for their disinheritance of that distinction? No man who knows human nature can believe that even the promises of the Mahometan paradise, formed as they were to inflame the passions of the Arab and the Turk, ever had the power to stimulate them into that gallant perseverance of conquest, which carried them, like so many torrents of fire, at once to east and west, north and south. A first impulse might have sent them forth full of dreams of wealth and possession; but the conquests of three centuries must have had a more powerful stimulant than the dreams of devotees. All the brilliancy of all the houris, and all the fountains of wine that flowed through the palaces of paradise, would have been forgotten in the first campaign of the burning desert of the Houran, or the sterile mountains of Syria. The true stimulant which turned a nation of shepherds successively into a nation of conquerors, of sages, and of sovereigns, was the newborn sense of superiority over the loose and fugitive Greek, the consciousness of a new faculty, and that faculty fame.

We find the same principle acting in the same direction every where. The armies of Spain, once the terror and the admiration of Europe, were formed less by the long discipline of the Moorish wars, than by that sense of triumph over a daring antagonist, which elevated the estimate of himself in the bosom of every peasant from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean. The early terror of the Moslem to all European nations, augmented the renown of their conquerors; and from the moment in which the crescent was lowered on the battlements of Granada, the Spanish peasant felt himself the first peasant of Europe. The defeat of the famous chivalry of Austria by the Swiss at Morgarten, turned every mountaineer of the Cantons into a soldier, and made them the champions

fo

of Europe till they degenerated into the mercenaries. Down to Marignano was their day of invincibility. But from that period they were only an army of policemen, and they fought like policemen. It was neither republican discipline nor revolutionary enthusiasm that made the whole po. pulation of France pour into the field, and fight the battles that swept Europe in the early part of the war. Such motives were insufficient for an effect so ardent, vast, and inflexible. It was the new feeling in the French peasant that he could be a man the discovery that the serf who lived from generation to generation, unknowing and unknown beyond the edge of his village, might be talked of and thought of throughout his province-that the hewer of wood and drawer of water, to whom the external world was as little an object of contemplation as the depths of science, might suddenly stand on a ground to which he, till then, had never thought of lifting his eye; it was a new access of sensibility to the opinion of men a sudden influx of the hope of distinction-a keener consciousness of the love of applause, which is born with every man, but which decays in the obscure life of the peasant, and dies in the total depression of the slave.

It is thus that the organs of publicity-journals, pamphlets, harangues, stir and strike public character. Even the furious falsehoods of the French journals less operated on the Revolution by exciting the popular revenge, than exhibiting a rapid way to all men to take the rank of public characters. Who can doubt the influence of this

publicity among a wild population, when a journal might raise such a compound of mendicant and miscreant as Marat into the universal talk of France? What must be the stimulant of the power of conferring the loftiest names of ancient heroism on the obscure villainy of Paris; and lifting on the shoulders of the multitude men, who, until that hour of convulsion, never dreamed of looking above the ditch in which they were born, and in which they expected to die? But it is this sense of character which a great legislator would study as the most powerful security for national eminence, and which a great people should preserve as the most productive source of public energy. And, rude

an exemplification as soldiership must furnish of the civil virtues, it is to this sense of personal character that we should largely attribute the habitual superiority of the soldier in that country, which, above all others that ever existed, makes character essential, gives opportunities to the individual of becoming known, and practically, by its numberless means of publicity, may be said to keep every class, and almost every individual of every class, before the eye of the nation.

At this crisis of the war of 1809, the true pivot of Napoleon's supremacy, Mr Alison gives an admirably written and perfectly true sketch of the labours of that extraordinary being. "The road to Vienna lay open to the conqueror. It was a matter of mere convenience when he should step forward and seize the capital of the monarchy." The rapidity of his operations had not been less astonishing than their completeness; within twelve days from his leaving Paris, he had broken up the Austrian plan of the campaign; had fought the main army for four days in other words, four great battles; had forced one Austrian army which threatened his flank into the Tyrol, had driven another, under his old and gallant antagonist the Archduke Charles, into the defiles of Bohemia. The loss of the Austrians had been dreadful, 30,000 men killed or taken, a hundred guns, six hundred ammunition waggons, baggage incalculable. The French, too, had suffered fearfully; they had lost 20,000 men in front of the enemy-what they had lost in their rapid marches, or were hourly to lose in the hospitalsthose lazar-houses of the field-no document has attempted to detail. If ever the words "veni, vidi, vici," were applicable to a modern queror, they might now have been used by Napoleon.

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But with what solemn awe at the depravity of human nature, and what sacred astonishment at the infatuation of the human understanding, must not the moralist, nay, the man of common reason and common humanity, con. template this scene of madness, reck.. lessness, and ruin! Fifty thousand human beings - perhaps twice the number-utterly cut off from all their uses in the world, within four days! And for what? to enable one man to call himself a victor. The lives thrown

in the preceding day's fight. Aspern was lost; Essling was surrounded; the line in the centre had been forced back; the enemy slept among the dead bodies of the French; while the multitude of slain, even in the farthest reserves of their own lines, showed how completely the enemy's batteries had reached every part of their position. The Austrians, on the other hand, were justly elated by their unwonted and glorious success. For the first time, Napoleon had sustained a decided defeat in the field; his best troops had been baffled in a pitched battle; his position was critical beyond expression; and the well-known hazard of the bridges diffused the hope that, on the morrow, a decisive victory would rescue the country from the oppressor, and at one blow work out the deliverance of Germany. It is certainly highly to the honour of Austrian courage, that so great a battle should have been fought after the capture of the capital. But the fall of Vienna had already placed a power in the hands of the conqueror, which could be resisted by nothing short of a miracle."

Mr Alison here makes some very striking remarks on the necessity of fortifying the great European capitals, or at least of giving them citadels capable of containing twenty or thirty thousand soldiers, and serving as a deposit for the national archives and stores, till the national strength can be fairly roused for their rescue. He justly observes, that, had Austria possessed such a fortress, either in or adjoining to Vienna, the invasions of 1805 and 1809 must have ruined the invaders; that, had Berlin been as strong as Dantzic, the French would have been detained round it until the arrival of the Russians, and thus six years of misery and plunder would have been saved to Prussia; that, had the Kremlin been capable of holding out six weeks, the terrible sacrifice of Moscow would not have been required. The examples on the other side are equally strong. Torres Vedras, the gigantic work, less even of the labours of the British army, than of the genius of Wellington, saved Portugal. In earlier days, the fortifications of Vienna saved not only Austria, but perhaps Christendom, from the Turks. In still more remote times, the fortunes of the West lay within the walls of Rome. "If," as Burke says, "the conqueror of Cannæ had not been frowned away by the armed majesty" of the Republic on his advance to these walls, the history of the Repub

lic, the empire, and the world, would have been changed. A dusky dynasty of African merchants would have ruled Italy, until some of their own mercenaries would have subverted their narrow and selfish sovereignty, and some fierce Ethiopian, with his horde of fellow savages, would have been lord over the temperate zone.

There must be difficulties, as the writer himself remarks, in attempting to circumscribe any of the great capitals by fortifications. Their enormous extent, the consequent expense of formation and repairs, the almost necessary weakness of some part, and the infinite mischief to be produced to the citizens and the state by exposing the metropolis to a siege, are serious obstacles. But, to the project of erecting a great citadel near enough to be regarded as the protector of the metropolis, yet not involving it in the chances of assault or bombardment, no objection can be easily foreseen. The power of withdrawing the most important materials of the national strength, the essential property of the state, all that constitute the actual instruments of the general government, from the chance of seizure by the first rush of invasion, must be of the very highest importance. In fact, it must generally decide the question whether the nation is to be conquered or saved; because, from the magnitude of the present European king. doms, the actual population is always adequate to destroy any hostile force that in the existing circumstances can be thrown into any kingdom of Europe, with, perhaps, the exception of Denmark. Even Sweden has four millions of people. And what invading force could resist the fourth part of this population, a million of men, armed, disciplined, and determined to fight for their own fields, and in their own fields? The true point is the time to prepare and summon the whole population; and this time is to be given only by providing the means of retarding the advances of the invader, and of securing the government from being seized, and forced to compromise the national cause by closing the national resistance. In England, our constitutional jealousy might justly prohibit the erection of a great fortress in sight of London, and the nature of our true force, the Fleet, renders this hazardous precaution unnecessary. But how the great