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rious German states of the Austrian Empire, was approaching Saxony, and threatening to fall on Frederick's rear. It had already reached Gotha, when, leaving his lieutenant, the Duke of Bevern, to oppose the Austrians, with about half their numbers, he moved with the rest of his army through Saxony towards the French.

The year, which had been in its spring when Frederick opened this campaign, was now fading into winter when he came upon the French army on the Saal. In defiance of their superior numbers, in defiance even of prudence and precedents, he crossed that river in their presence, on several points far distant from each other, and was allowed, beyond expectation, to effect a concentration unmolested. Advancing, as was his custom, to attack, he found them so strongly posted that he paused, and took up a position wherein to await a better opportunity. It appeared to the enemy that this was a favourable juncture at which to practise on him his own tactics; and they began, though in array very different from that of the Prussian army, to march round his flank. Half-curious, probably halfamused, Frederick, from his position on an elevated table-land, watched this attempt in progress in the plain.

Now, it is evident, on a little consideration, that if an army fronting north, let us say, is in process of being turned on its left flank, it can, by moving to that flank in the line of its present front-that is to say, by facing and moving westanticipate the enemy who is marching in a circle, and cross his line of march, so that he suddenly finds himself the outflanked, and not the outflanker. Of course, this mode of meeting such attacks had been open to the Austrians at Prague and Kolin; but Frederick, besides his confidence in Austrian slowness and indisposition to quit a strong position, also performed the like manoeuvre in such order that, had he

been attacked at any moment during its progress, he could have at once made head on good terms against the enemy. Against a foe well-handled and quick of movement, the matter was different. He soon showed them that they were playing on his fiddle without his fiddlestick. As soon as their movement was pronounced, he shot out his left (nearest) wing under cover of the high ground, to draw up across their line of march. Seeing this movement indistinctly, and interpreting it to mean retreat, they hastened to intercept him, if possible, before he should reach the river. The battle was an affair of minutes only. The head of their march was met and enveloped by the force just despatched by Frederick. In vain did the straggling array try to open out and come fairly to blows. Every attempt at formation was in a moment met and defeated, and the whole lengthened column finally broke, and fled in utter rout, and with great loss, no more to appear on that theatre of war.

In the meanwhile, Bevern, left to confront the Austrians, was in difficulties. Opposed by a superior army, and having the difficult, almost impossible, problem to protect Berlin and his communications with Frederick on the one hand, and to cover the great bone of contention, Silesia, on the other-with the further condition that he must do this on the wrong side of the mountain-barrier-he had, in making a despairing choice between the alternatives, let go his hold of Frederick and Berlin, and marched into Silesia. Prince Charles and Daun following close, cut him from the fortresses of Upper Silesia, and besieged and took Schweidnitz. Such was the news which Frederick, hastening with his army from Rosbach to aid his lieutenant, heard on the way, and it was followed presently by worse tidings; for, in the battle of Breslau, Bevern and his Prussians were heavily defeated. At Liegnitz, Frederick, after crossing Sax

ony, Lusatia, and Silesia, came into communication with the remnant of Bevern's beaten troops, which joined him under Ziethen at Parchwitz. His circumstances now looked nothing short of desperate. The Austrians, with 80,000 men, occupied Breslau, and stood between him and the Silesian territory he had been fighting for. This Prussian army at Parchwitz, worn down to a stump of 30,000 men, was the last hope of Frederick. Unless he could snatch a victory with it all was over. No general has ever shown resolution of a higher and finer kind than he now displayed. Addressing, in the most inspiriting language, his troops, who nobly responded, he advanced to seek the enemy, and to challenge the issue of a battle, which was not a mere dogged conflict for death or victory, such as many leaders in desperate circumstances might fight, but which is the very finest example of his tactical genius which the history of his wars offers.

The Austrians, issuing at his approach from Breslau, had crossed the Schweidnitz, a narrow muddy stream, on the marshy edges of which their left flank rested. Instead of holding their force in the movable form of columns, ready to move and to deploy, they had drawn up their whole army in order of battle, extending five or six miles, the village of Leuthen in the centre; and three or four miles in front they had drawn up a strong van guard of cavalry. This was encountered and defeated by Frederick with heavy loss in the grey of the morning; and the front thus clear, he advanced to reconnoitre. Before him stretched the long lines of the Austrians. Were he to advance on them in order parallel to their own, they must largely outflank and ruin him. The one chance of success lay in an oblique attack; and the nature of the ground determined Frederick to make it, not on their right flank, which was directly in front of him, but on their left;

and as this rested on a marsh and stream, it would be necessary not to turn, but to pierce it. Reviewed by the light of this battle, the operations of Kolin become perfectly intelligible, for the dispositions and general order of attack were the same. And had the King's plan been as thoroughly executed in the first as in the latter action, the whole aspect of the Seven Years' War would have been different.

As the flying vanguard retreated upon the Austrian right wing, and as Frederick, with the leading horsemen, showed himself on the hill over which it had been driven, it was natural to expect that on that wing his attack would be made. Therefore the Austrians reinforced it, drawing men from the left, and removing them several miles from the real point of attack. Moreover, from the point where Frederick stood a line of low hills extended to the right, which would screen the movement. Favoured by these circumstances, he threw his army into two long columns, bending to the right, and ready at the right moment to form two lines of battle towards the enemy; and the head of the advance was reinforced by a strong advanced-guard, moving between it and the Austrian line.

Attacked in this way, the Austrian left was broken, and the fragments were driven back on the marsh on one side, on the centre on the other. Through the gap poured the cavalry of Ziethen, incessantly charging on the flank, while the line steadily pressed on the front of the disordered enemy; and the artillery, firing on the two sides of the angle formed by the original and the new front, bore on them in the most destructive manner. troops which were now hastily brought up from the Austrian right wing had a long distance to traverse. Disordered by their haste, they arrived on a scene of irretrievable confusion; regiments, instead of deploying, stood in deep formation before the wide-spreading fire

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of the Prussians, whose left wing, in the continual oblique progression of the army, at length arrived within striking distance, and, wheeling round, enclosed the Austrians, and completed their discomfiture. Leaving enormous trophies, they fled in disorder into Breslau, and presently evacuated Silesia. No battle, perhaps, was ever fought so perfectly according to the plan, and where every movement was made so exactly at the time when it would be most effective.

Next spring Frederick advanced into Moravia, and besieged Olmutz, but without capturing it; and the approach of a Russian army towards his dominions, where the Cossacks committed frightful outrages, compelled him to move northward. At his coming the Russians drew together at Zorndorf in a singular barbarous order of battle, which they had adopted in their Turkish warsa kind of oblong quadrilateral, offering a front to all points, and useful, perhaps, against the circling eddies of horse which Turkish armies used to launch on the field; but a method which has the obvious and important defect of rendering it certain that at least two of the faces will be useless in the battle. Owing to this absurd disposition the Russians were beaten; and though, with their wellestablished faculty of dogged passive resistance, they refused to abandon the field except under constant pressure, and with fresh losses to their assailants, yet want of provisions forced them in a few days to quit the country they had ravaged. Frederick then turned towards his old foes, the Austrians, who, under Daun, had entered Saxony. Undervaluing an enemy so often beaten, he maintained a dangerous position within reach; and in the surprise and severe defeat at Hochkirch, Daun taught him again that he was not invincible.

There remained yet other campaigns and other battles; and fortune, sometimes raising, sometimes

depressing him, left still the balance constantly against him. In many skilful marches, and amid many failures-in the terrible defeat of Kunersdorf and the victory of Liegnitz-showing still the same indomitable persistence. It is a picture which wants only a high just cause in the background to render it heroic; failing that, we have the image only of a valiant bulldog, who, having stolen bone, fights for it, lies gasping and growling on it, shakes his torn ears, winks his bleeding eyes, and will surrender it only with his life.

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When matters were at their worst with him, they began to mend. In 1762 his great enemy, the Czarina Catherine, died, and her successors ceased hostilities against him. In the following year Austria and France, wearied of fruitless campaigns and the infliction of mutual damage, made peace with Prussia, and the last of Frederick's wars ended. He remained a conqueror, not so much by reason of any signal successes, for the later campaigns of the war had been generally disastrous to him, but because the league against him, in the absence of a supreme directing spirit, could not bear the stress of a protracted and exhausting struggle. He had made good his hold on his bootyhe and Prussia had gained a military reputation transcendent in that age and henceforth there was a new German Power standing in the front rank in Europe. Other nations, seeing how completely successful the Prussian military system had been, conformed to it. Minute precision of movement, extreme steadiness in manoeuvring, severity of discipline, and regularity in delivering fire, became the characteristics of modern armies. At the close of the last century other nations possessed infantry equal, if not to the veterans of Frederick, yet to any that Prussia then possessed. But the cavalry trained in his school, under such unrivalled

officers as Seidlitz and Ziethen, was better than any which the world has seen since. The armies of Europe still exhibit, both in their excellences and their defects, the influence of the Prussian system. Good officers have reproduced in their troops the steadiness and precision-pedants and martinets of the stamp of the old King Frederick-William have perpetuated the observance of vexatious and wearisome trifles. But the change that has taken place in weapons, rendering the soldier more effective as an individual, and less so as the unit of a mass, and diminishing the value of regularity and precision of movement, has already greatly modified the influence of the traditions of a former age.

Frederick was fifty-one when his wars were finished. For twentythree years he continued to rule in the country which his martial genius and superhuman determination had raised to greatness. Excepting the partition of Poland, there was no act of this part of his reign to call for special notice. The great soldiers who had gathered round him in the stirring portion of his career were dead-Schwerin, Winterfeld, Keith, slain in battle-Ziethen laid in old age in a peaceful grave; --and the King was not of a nature to supply by new intimacies the loss of those paladins of his youth. Aged, solitary, and cheerless, he met his end sternly and drearily, a few years before the old order of things passed away and the new era commenced with the French Revolution.

It would be superfluous at this time of day to attempt to give an estimate of Carlyle's merits as an historian. All the world is familiar with his oddities and his genius, and the circle must be dull and unlettered indeed where there cannot be found critics ready to praise or to denounce him. Setting aside the mere quips and cranks of his style as what no longer offends

us, there is graver reason for objection in the prevailing tone of grotesqueness which marks his treatment of events and characters. No historian was ever more picturesque, none ever studied more how, by carefully chosen or carefully invented epithets, to give force and individuality to a scene or a character. But the result of habitually treating everything and everybody, except a few oddly selected heroes and their doings, in a jeering, semicontemptuous way, is to produce an effect which resembles life only in the same way as the work of medieval carvers in gargoyles, brackets, and church-doors resembles nature. Everywhere there is exaggeration and distortion, as if we were looking at things in a convex mirror. But in parting with Carlyle we prefer rather to touch on those characteristics which spring from the force and fertility of his genius. The jeering tone is, after all, only a strange habit, not of heart, but of fancy; for no reader can doubt that the writer in his most contemptuous mood still wishes heartily well to humanity, and studies with a kindly as well as lively interest the faults and failings of his fellowmen,-just as it is the humour of some good-natured people to do favours in a rough way, as if their benevolence needed cynicism on the outside to excuse it. Throughout this extensive work there is the same unwearied imagination at work, seeking to penetrate into the nature of men and things, and imparting to them life and motion. But let those who admire Carlyle's style, and covet a share of his celebrity, beware of making him their model. No great writer is more easy and more perilous to imitate. Nothing but derision can await the disciple who may attempt to charm the public by reproducing those singularities which only the most affluent imagination and rare descriptive power could exalt into distinctions.

SIR BROOK FOSSBROOKE.

PART III.

CHAPTER IX.-A BREAKFAST AT THE VICARAGE.

On the day after the picnic Sir Brook went by invitation to breakfast with the Vicar.

"When a man asks you to dinner," said Fossbrooke, "he generally wants you to talk; when he asks you to breakfast, he wants to talk to you."

Whatever be the truth of this adage generally, it certainly had its application in the present case. The Vicar wanted very much to talk to Sir Brook.

As they sat, therefore, over their coffee and devilled kidneys, chatting over the late excursion, and hinting at another, the Vicar suddenly said, "By the way, I want you to tell me something of the young fellow who was one of us yesterday. Tobin, our doctor here, who is a perfect commission-agent for scandal, says he is the greatest scamp going; that about eight or ten months ago the Times' was full of his exploits in bankruptcy; that his liabilities were tens of thousands-assets nil. In a word, that notwithstanding his frank, honest look, and his unaffected manner, he is the most accomplished scapegrace of the age."

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"And how much of this do you believe?" asked Sir Brook, as he helped himself to coffee.

"That is not so easy to reply to; but I tell you, if you ask me, that I'd rather not believe one word of it."

"Nor need you. His Colonel told me something about the young fellow's difficulties; he himself related the rest. He went most recklessly into debt; betted largely on races, and lost; lent freely, and lost; raised at ruinous interest, and renewed at still more ruinous but his father has paid every shilling of it out of that fortune which one day was to have

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come to him, so that Lionel's thirty thousand pounds is now about eight thousand. I have put the whole story into the fewest possible words, but that's the substance of it."

"And has it cured him of extravagance ?"

"Of course it has not. How should it? You have lived some more years in the world than he has, and I a good many more than you, and will you tell me that time has cured either of us of any of our old shortcomings? Non sum qualis eram means, I can't be as wild as I used to be."

"No, no; I won't agree to that. I protest most strongly against the doctrine. Many men are wiser through experience, and consequently better."

"I sincerely believe I knew the world better at four-and-twenty than I know it now. The reason why we are less often deceived in after than in early life is not that we are more crafty or more keeneyed. It is simply because we risk less. Let us hazard as much at sixty as we once did at six-andtwenty, and we'll lose as heavily."

The Vicar paused a few moments over the other's words, and then said, "To come back to this young man, I half suspect he has formed an attachment to Lucy, and that he is doing his utmost to succeed in her favour."

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And is there anything wrong in that, Doctor?"

"Not positively wrong; but there is what may lead to a great deal of unhappiness. Who is to say how Trafford's family would like the connection ? Who is to answer for Lendrick's approval of Trafford?"

"You induce me to make a con

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