fore the surrender of Saragossa, the deaths daily were from four to five hundred; and as the living could not bury the increasing mass, thousands of carcasses, scattered in streets and court-yards, or piled in heaps at the doors of churches, were left to dissolve in their own corruption, or be licked up by the flames of burning houses. The city was shaken to its foundations by sixteen thousand shells, and the explosion of forty-five thousand pounds of powder in the mines, — while the bones of forty thousand victims, of every age and both sexes, bore dreadful testimony to the unutterable cruelty of War.1

These might seem pictures from the life of Alaric, who led the Goths to Rome, or of Attila, general of the Huns, called the Scourge of God, and who boasted that the grass did not grow where his horse had set his foot; but no! they belong to our own times. They are portions of the wonderful, but wicked, career of him who stands forth the foremost representative of worldly grandeur. The heart aches, as we follow him and his marshals from field to field of Satanic glory,2 finding everywhere, from Spain to Russia, the same carnival of woe. The picture is various, yet the same. Suffering, wounds, and death, in every form, fill the terrible canvas. What scene more dismal than that of Albuera, with its horrid piles of corpses, while all night the rain pours down, and river, hill, and forest,

1 Napier, Book V. ch. 3, Vol. II. p. 46.

2 A living poet of Italy, who will be placed by his prose among the great names of his country's literature, in a remarkable ode which he has thrown on the urn of Napoleon invites posterity to judge whether his career of battle was True Glory.

"Fu vera gloria? Ai posteri

L' ardua sentenza."- MANZONI, Il Cinque Maggio. When men learn to appreciate moral grandeur, the easy sentence will be rendered.

on each side, resound with the cries and groans of the dying? What scene more awfully monumental than Salamanca, where, long after the great battle, the ground, strewn with fragments of casques and cuirasses, was still white with the skeletons of those who fell? What catalogue of horrors more complete than the Russian campaign? At every step is war, and this is enough: soldiers black with powder; bayonets bent with the violence of the encounter; the earth ploughed with cannon-shot; trees torn and mutilated; the dead and dying; wounds and agony; fields covered with broken carriages, outstretched horses, and mangled bodies; while disease, sad attendant on military suffering, sweeps thousands from the great hospitals, and the multitude of amputated limbs, which there is no time to destroy, accumulate in bloody heaps, filling the air with corruption. What tongue, what pen, can describe the bloody havoc at Borodino, where, between rise and set of a single sun, one hundred thousand of our fellow-men, equalling in number the whole population of this city, sank to earth, dead or wounded?3 Fifty days after the battle, no less than thirty thousand are found stretched where their last. convulsions ended, and the whole plain is strewn with half-buried carcasses of men and horses, intermingled with garments dyed in blood, and bones gnawed by dogs and vultures. Who can follow the French army in dismal retreat, avoiding the spear of the pursuing Cossack only to sink beneath the sharper frost and ice,

1 Napier, Book XII. ch. 7, Vol. III. p. 543.

2 Alison, Ch. 64, Vol. VIII. p. 589.

Ibid., Ch. 67, Vol. VIII. p. 871.

4 Ibid., Ch. 68, Vol. VIII. p. 930. Ségur, Hist. de Napoléon, Liv. IX. ch. 7, Tom. II. p. 153. Labaume, Rel. de la Campagne de Russie, Liv. VII.

in a temperature below zero, on foot, without shelter for the body, famishing on horse-flesh and a miserable compound of rye and snow-water? With a fresh array, the war is upheld against new forces under the walls of Dresden; and as the Emperor rides over the field of battle after indulging the night before in royal supper with the Saxon king - he sees ghastly newmade graves, with hands and arms projecting, stark and stiff, above the ground; and shortly afterwards, when shelter is needed for the troops, the order to occupy the Hospitals for the Insane is given, with the words, "Turn out the mad." 1

Here I might close this scene of blood. But there is one other picture of the atrocious, though natural, consequences of war, occurring almost within our own. day, that I would not omit. Let me bring to your mind Genoa, called the Superb, City of Palaces, dear to the memory of American childhood as the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, and one of the spots first enlightened by the morning beams of civilization, whose merchants were princes, and whose rich argosies, in those early days, introduced to Europe the choicest products of the East, the linen of Egypt, the spices of Arabia, and the silks of Samarcand. She still sits in queenly pride, as she sat then, her mural crown studded with towers, - her churches rich with marble floors and rarest pictures, her palaces of ancient doges and admirals yet spared by the hand of Time, - her close streets thronged by a hundred thousand inhabitants, at the foot of the Apennines, as they approach the blue and tideless waters of the Mediterranean Sea,

1 Alison, Ch. 72, Vol. IX. pp. 469, 553.

— leaning her back against their strong mountain-sides, overshadowed by the foliage of the fig-tree and the olive, while the orange and the lemon with pleasant perfume scent the air where reigns perpetual spring. Who can contemplate such a city without delight? Who can listen to the story of her sorrows without a pang?

At the opening of the present century, the armies of the French Republic, after dominating over Italy, were driven from their conquests, and compelled, with shrunken forces, to find shelter under Massena, within the walls of Genoa. Various efforts were made by the Austrian general, aided by bombardment from the British fleet, to force the strong defences by assault. At length the city was invested by a strict blockade. All communication with the country was cut off, while the harbor was closed by the ever-wakeful British watchdogs of war. Besides the French troops, within the beleaguered and unfortunate city are the peaceful, unoffending inhabitants. Provisions soon become scarce; scarcity sharpens into want, till fell Famine, bringing blindness and madness in her train, rages like an Erinnys. Picture to yourselves this large population, not pouring out their lives in the exulting rush of battle, but wasting at noonday, daughter by the side of mother, husband by the side of wife. When grain and rice fail, flaxseed, millet, cocoa, and almonds are ground by hand-mills into flour, and even bran, baked with honey, is eaten, less to satisfy than to deaden hunger. Before the last extremities, a pound of horse-flesh is sold for thirty-two cents, a pound of bran for thirty cents, a pound of flour for one dollar and seventy-five cents. A single bean is soon sold for two cents, and a biscuit of three ounces for two dollars and a quarter,

till finally none can be had at any price. The wretched soldiers, after devouring the horses, are reduced to the degradation of feeding on dogs, cats, rats, and worms, which are eagerly hunted in cellars and sewers. "Happy were now," exclaims an Italian historian, "not those who lived, but those who died!" The day is dreary from hunger, - the night more dreary still, from hunger with delirious fancies. They now turn to herbs, dock, sorrel, mallows, wild succory. People of every condition, with women of noble birth and beauty, seek upon the slope of the mountain within the defences those aliments which Nature designed solely for beasts. Scanty vegetables, with a scrap of cheese, are all that can be afforded to the sick and wounded, those sacred stipendiaries of human charity. In the last anguish of despair, men and women fill the air with groans and shrieks, some in spasms, convulsions, and contortions, yielding their expiring breath on the unpitying stones of the street,· alas! not more unpitying than man. Children, whom a dead mother's arms had ceased to protect, orphans of an hour, with piercing cries, supplicate in vain the compassion of the passing stranger: none pity or aid. The sweet fountains of sympathy are all closed by the selfishness of individual distress. In the general agony, some precipitate themselves into the sea, while the more impetuous rush from the gates, and impale their bodies on the Austrian bayonets. Others still are driven to devour their shoes and the leather of their pouches; and the horror of human flesh so far abates, that numbers feed like cannibals on the corpses about them.1

1 This account is drawn from the animated sketches of Botta (Storia