His character

with the energy which so speedily repairs any disaster. Frederic wisely and magnanimously laid aside the sword when he resumed the pacific scepter. His subsequent reign was almost entirely spent in tranquillity; all the wounds of war were speedily healed under his sage and beneficent administration. Before his death, his subjects had been doubled, the national wealth had been made triple of what it had been at the commencement of his reign, and Prussia now boasts of sixteen millions of inhabitants, and a population increasing faster in numbers and resources than that of any other state in Europe. No labored character, no studied eulogium, can paint Frederic like this brief and simple narrative of his ex- 55. ploits. It places him at once at the head of mod- as a geral. ern generals; if Hannibal be excepted, perhaps of ancient and modern. He was not uniformly successful; on the contrary, he sustained several dreadful defeats. But that arose from the enormous superiority of force by which he was assailed, and the desperate state of his affairs, which were generally so pressing, that even a respite in one quarter could be obtained only by a victory instantly gained, under whatever circumstances, in another. What appears rashness was often in him the height of wisdom. He had no Parliament or coalition to consider, no adverse faction was on the watch to convert casual disaster into the means of ruin. He was at liberty to take counsel only from his own heroic breast. He could protract the struggle, however, by no other means but strong and vigorous strokes, and the luster of instant success, and they could not be dealt out without the risk of receiving as many. The fact of his maintaining the struggle against such desperate odds proves the general wisdom of his policy. No man ever made more skillful use of an interior line of communication, or flew with such rapidity from one threatened part of his dominions to another. None ever, by the force of skill in tactics and sagacity in strategy, gained such astonishing successes with forces so inferior. And if some generals have committed fewer faults, none were impelled by such desperate cir

cumstances to a hazardous course, and none had ever greater magnanimity in confessing and explaining them for the benefit of future times.

56.

Frederic and

The only general in modern times who can bear a comparison with Frederic, if the difficulties of his situaComparison of tion are considered, is Napoleon. It is a part only Napoleon. of his campaigns, however, which sustains the analogy. There is no resemblance between the mighty conqueror pouring down the valley of the Danube, at the head of one hundred and eighty thousand men, invading Russia with five hundred thousand, or overrunning Spain with three hundred thousand, and Frederic the Great, with thirty thousand or forty thousand, turning every way against quadruple the number of Austrians, French, Swedes, and Russians. Yet a part, and the most brilliant part of Napoleon's career, bears a close resemblance to that of the Prussian hero. In Lombardy in 1796, in Saxony in 1813, and in the plain of Champagne in 1814, he was, upon the whole, inferior in force to his opponents, and owed the superiority which he generally enjoyed on the point of attack to the rapidity of his movements, and the skill with which, like Frederic, he availed himself of an interior line of communication. His immortal campaign in France in 1814, in particular, where he bore up with seventy thousand men against two hundred and fifty thousand enemies, bears the closest resemblance to those which Frederic sustained for six years against the forces of the coalition. Both were often to appearance rash, because the affairs of each were so desperate that nothing could save them but an audacious policy. Both were indomitable in resolution, and preferred ruin and death to sitting down on a dishonored throne. Both were from the outset of the struggle placed in circumstances apparently hopeless, and each succeeded in protracting it solely by his astonishing talent and resolution. The fate of the two was widely different: the one transmitted an honored and aggrandized throne to his successors; the other, overthrown and discrowned, terminated his

days on the rock of St. Helena. But success is not always the test of real merit; the verdict of ages is often different from the judgment or fate of present times. Hannibal conquered, has left a greater name among men than Scipio victorious. In depth of thought, force of genius, variety of information, and splendor of success, Frederic will bear no comparison with Napoleon. But Frederic's deeds, as a general, were more extraordinary than those of the French emperor, because he bore up longer against greater odds. It is the highest praise of Napoleon to say, that he did in one campaign—his last and greatest-what Frederic had done in six.

If the campaigns of Eugene and Frederic suggest a comparison with those of Napoleon, those of Marlbor- 57, Of Marlborough ough challenge a parallel with those of the other and Wellington. great commander of our day-Wellington. Their political and military situations were in many respects alike. Both combated at the head of the forces of a coalition, composed of dissimilar nations, actuated by separate interests, inflamed by different passions. Both had the utmost difficulty in soothing the jealousies and stifling the selfishness of these nations; and both found themselves often more seriously impeded by the allied cabinets in their rear, than by the enemy's forces in their front. Both were the generals of a nation which, albeit covetous of military glory, and proud of warlike renown, is to the last degree impatient of previous preparation; which ever frets at the cost of wars that its political position renders unavoidable, or that in its ambitious spirit it had readily undertaken. Both were compelled to husband the blood of their soldiers, and spare the resources of their governments, from the consciousness that they had already been strained to the uttermost in the cause, and that any further demands would render the war so unpopular as speedily to lead to its termination. The career of both occurred at a time when political passions were strongly roused in their country; when the war in which they were engaged was waged against the inclination, and, in appearance at least, against the interests, of a

large and powerful party at home, who sympathized from political feeling with their enemies, and were ready to decry every success and magnify every disaster of their own arms, from a secret feeling that their party elevation was identified rather with the successes of the enemy than with those of their own countrymen. The Tories were to Marlborough precisely what the Whigs were to Wellington. Both were opposed to the armies of the most powerful monarch, led by the most renowned generals of Europe, whose forces, preponderating over those of the adjoining states, had come to threaten the liberties of all Europe, and against whom there had at last been formed a general coalition, to restrain the ambition from which so much detriment had already been experienced. But while in these respects the two British heroes were

their situations

58. placed very much in the same circumstances, in Points in which other particulars, not less material, their situadiffered. tions were widely different. Marlborough had never any difficulties in the field to struggle with, approaching those which beset Wellington. By great exertions, both on his own part and that of the British and Dutch government, his force was generally almost equal to that with which he had to contend. It was often exactly so. War at that period, in the Low Countries at least, consisted chiefly of a single battle during a campaign, followed by the siege of two or three frontier fortresses. The number of strongholds with which the country bristled, rendered any further or more extensive operations, in general, impossible. This state of matters at once rendered success more probable to a general of superior abilities, and made it more easy to repair disaster. No vehement passions had been roused, bringing whole nations into the field, and giving one state, where they had burned the fiercest, a vast superiority in point of numbers over its more pacific or less excited neighbors. But in all these respects, the circumstances in which Wellington was placed were not only not parallel-they were contrasted. From first to last, in the Peninsula, he was enormously outnumbered by

the enemy. Until the campaign of 1813, when his force in the field was, for the first time, equal to that of the French, the superiority to which he was opposed was so prodigious, that the only surprising thing is, how he was not driven into the sea at the very first encounter.

Great superior

which Welling

While the French had never less than two hundred thousand effective troops at their disposal, after pro- 59. viding for all their garrisons and communications, ity of force with the English general had never more than thirty ton had to conthousand effective British, and twenty thousand tend. Portuguese around his standard. The French were directed by the emperor, who, intent on the subjugation of the Peninsula, and wielding the inexhaustible powers given by the conscription for the supply of his armies, cared not though he lost a hundred thousand men in every campaign, provided he purchased success by their sacrifice. Wellington was supported at home by a government which, raising its soldiers by voluntary enrollment, could with difficulty supply a drain of fifteen thousand men a year from their ranks for service in every quarter of the globe. He was watched by a party which decried every advantage and magnified every disaster, in order to induce the entire withdrawal of the troops from the Peninsula. Napoleon sent into Spain a host of veterans trained in fifteen years' combats, who had carried the French standards into every capital of Europe. Wellington led to their encounter troops admirably disciplined indeed, but almost all unacquainted with actual war, and having often to learn the rudiments even of the most necessary field operations in presence of the enemy. Marlborough's troops, though heterogeneous and dissimilar, had been trained to their practical duties in the preceding wars under William III., and brought into the field a degree of experience noways inferior to that of their opponents. Bolingbroke tells us that, from the very outset of his command, in the wars of the Succession, Marlborough placed his main reliance on this circumstance. Whoever weighs with impartiality those different circum