dynasties, the individual achievements and noblest deeds of the favorites of history. Let us study the actual biography of earth's greatest legislators, philosophers and warriors. In the earlier ages, the style of general history gives undue prominence to military affairs. The annals of the various conflicts of nations from the rude combats of the ancients, until the invention of gunpowder and steam batteries, and the modern field tactics and the coup de main of Napoleon, present a melancholy picture of human implacability. If we call up from the history of past ages the actual scenes, the continuous pageants which have passed like fleeting dramas over the theatre of the ancient nations, we shall often observe the chosen seats of civilization crowded with the march of armies from far countries, and echoing with the triumphs of hostile barbarians. Let us with due reverence domesticate ourselves with the Solons and Platos, the Lycurguses and Numas of antiquity. Let us accompany Alexander in his expedition to the Indus, attach ourselves to Cæsar in his conquest of Gaul, and make with Napoleon the campaigns of Italy, of Egypt, and of Russia. The undated pyramids of Egypt looked down twenty centuries ago, on the hosts of the young and impetuous Alexander, whose ardent and invincible soldiers, wasted by fatigue and battle, in a few short years, had strown their bones from the valleys of their birth-place, to the rivers of India; and only a few surviving veterans bereft of their leader, in the prime of manhood, returned to grow old by the tombs of their fathers. And when the lapse of sixty generations had dropped the curtain on oft-succeeding groups of less imposing and distinguished actors, the army of the French republic, the men of the revolution, the same who had dragged their artillery with untiring energy across the Alpine ravines, the conquerors of Italy, the companions of Napoleon, encountered beside these same pyramids, amid echoing trumpets, the fierce charges of the Arab lancers. If we change our cosmorama to Greece, we shall see the halls of her classic temples, trodden successively by warlike barbarians; the verdant acclivities of her delightful valleys have alternately resounded, during thousands of years, the bleating of the flock, and the lowings of the herd, the pipe of the love-lorn shepherd and the din of war. The finest exhibitions of manly strength, the brightest visions of feminine beauty, the spells of ambition, of love, and of devotion, have existed in rapid and wondrous succession; and all that was terrestrial of her "godlike” valor, mouldered by the frosts of three thousand winters, and successively mingled with the ashes of heroes and barbarian soldiers, which succeeding ages have added to the soil, still give luxuriant vigor to the vine and the olive. Further west, on the Latian peninsula, where the sons of Mars founded the seven-hilled city of the Cæsars, military glory was the star of the ascendant, and war became the absorbing occupation of the Romans; the portals of the temple of Janus were not shut during seven hundred years of perpetual war; and Rome became mistress of the world; but the days of her glory passed-Rome degenerated in her patricians and the undisciplined hordes of the northern forests trampled the proud palaces of her emperors, and scaled the rock-built citadel of the Tarquins. "O Rome, my country! city of the soul, Lone mother of dead empires, and control In their shut breasts their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance! Come and see The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye, whose agonies are evils of a day." Let us study in detail the generalizations of history, and occasionally concentrate our imagination on the most impressive scenes and eras of human annals. Let us contemplate these, not only in their aggregate effect upon the history of nations, but in their influence on individual man. Let us picture to ourselves France during the twenty-five years previous to the battle of Waterloo; her internal dynasties and her relations to Europe. Let us study the biography of the Men of the Revolution, in all their details which illustrate the progress of the nation through that most exciting era. Let us follow the diary of Napoleon from his maternal nurture, amid the civil wars of his native island, through all the presages of his youthful predilections, his loves, his rejection by a merchant's daughter, his earliest fortunes and friendship with Madame Beauharnois, his triumph at the siege of Toulon, his appointment as General of the Army of the Republic, his meteor-like glories in the campaign of Italy, his successes at Marengo, at the Pyramids, and at Borodino, till the star of his glory waned amid the smouldering ruins of Moscow. Let us instance, somewhat at our leisure, the immense preparations, the advance, the retreat, of the grand army of the Moscowa! Let our panorama embrace the topography of Europe the confederacy of the Rhine-the entire empire from the Danube to the Baltic. Let us trace upon it every river from its streamlet-sources in the Alps and the Pyrenees, on the plains of Poland, and of Russia, and particularize throughout the whole scene, amid intersecting valleys sloping to the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, every city and village, and cottage,-amid its varied culture and real life. Let us observe five hundred thousand men, each agitated by the spirit of the era,-by the hopes, the sympathies, the individualized emotions of our common nature, taking leave of their loves, their wives and children, their mothers, their gray haired sires, and assuming the pageant costumes of war, at every hamlet in la belle France, in Germany, in Switzerland, in Italy, in Austria, in Prussia, and in Poland— tearing themselves from home's endearments and requited love, hastening to that proud, ill-fated campaign; joining their comrades at the nearest villages, and thence in escadrons, battalions and divisions along the main roads, till having joined like the tributary streams of a mighty river, they advance irresistibly on the fields of Russia. Let us watch the day's dawn on the field of Borodinosee Napoleon grouped amid his staff on an elevation overlooking the scene-hear him exclaim as the sun rises cloudlessly—"yonder is the sun of Austerlitz”—observe the opposing armies deploying upon the broad plain in silence, until the roar of two thousand pieces of cannon commences the wide line of battle! Napoleon directs the coup de main on the Russian centre. The Russian peasant soldiers, enforced by the invocations of patriotism and religion, sustain the successive shocks with the most obstinate intrepidity. Napoleon continued to order forward fresh divisions. There perishes at the head of his column, Le Brun, the favorite of the army. The slaughter is tremendous. The wide struggle of the battle is impeded by a quivering rampart of the wounded and the dying-charge succeeds charge, clambering over their fallen comrades. There falls amid the melee the young and gallant Caulaincourt. At length the French columns obtain possession of the first line of redoubts; but the Russian masses still rallying amid the fire of their opponents, returned with indomitable courage, till night terminated the conflict, leaving the French in possession of the field, on which thirty thousand Frenchmen, forty-five thousand Russians, and twentyfive thousand horses, were hors du combat. Let us observe the onward march of the French till they possess themselves of the vast suburbs of Moscow, and the venerable battlements of the Kremlin-till lighted by the unsparing torches of her own citizens, the vast city curled into billows of flame, and the stormy winds howled over the black, desolate, inhospitable ruins of the ancient city. Let us follow with absorbed attention the sad retreat of that mighty army, till the bones of its bravest legions are strewn over deserts of snow, or engulfed in the frozen current of the Beresina, till English vessels brought away their collected bones by shiploads, for the commonest purposes of manufacture, and their proud commander brooded over his eventful life and the fallen grandeur of his empire, on the barren mountain-rock of St. Helena. THE RETREAT ON THE BERESINA. The glare that lit the northern sky, Where Moscow's fires arose to heaven; Thence gazing o'er the billowy flame |