Others with towering piles may please the sight,1 A nicer touch to the stretch'd canvass give, And fain her godlike sons wou'd disunite But strives in vain to conquer or divide, Fir'd with the name, which I so oft have found That longs to launch into a bolder strain. 1 Others with towering piles, &c. Virgil, whose magnificent description of Italy in the second Georgic, seems to have been running in Addison's head while he was writing several passages of this poem, is very successfully imitated in these lines. Compare the well-known verses of the sixth Æneid, v. 847: Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera, &c.—G. 2 I bridle in my struggling muse, &c. Of this Johnson says, "To bridle a goddess is no very delicate idea; but why must she be bridled? because she longs to launch! an act which was never hindered by a bridle ; and whither will she launch? into a nobler strain. She is in the first line a horse, in the second a boat; and the care of the poet is to keep his horse or his boat from singing." Blair takes nearly the same view. "It is surprising how the following inaccuracy should have escaped Mr. Addison in his letter from Italy-'I bridle, &c.' The muse, figured as a horse, may be But I've already troubled you too long, And lines like Virgil's, or like yours, shou'd praise. bridled; but when we speak of launching, we make it a ship; and by no force of imagination can it be supposed both a horse and a ship at one moment; bridled to hinder it from launching.”—G. 1 To one My humble verse. Sed ne relictis, musa procax, jocis, &c. who travelled with the Latin poets for his guide books, it is more than probable that the closing stanza of the first ode of Horace's 2d book suggested this graceful close.-G. VOL. I.-8 THE CAMPAIGN, A Poem; TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. -Rheni pacator et Istri. Omnis in hoc uno variis discordia cessit Ordinibus; lætatur eques, plauditque senator, CLAUD. DE LAUD. STILIC. Esse aliquam in terris gentem quæ suâ impensâ, suo labore ac periculo bella gerat pro libertate aliorum. Nec hoc finitimis, aut propinquæ vincinitatis hominibus, aut terris continenti junctis præstet. Maria trajiciat: ne quod toto orbe terrarum injustum imperium sit, et ubique jus, fas, lex, potentissima sint. LIV. HIST. lib. 33. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. [THE best authorities very nearly agree in the following account of the origin of this poem:-"The victory at Blenheim" (1704), says Johnson, "spread triumph and confidence over the nation; and Lord Godolphin lamenting to Lord Halifax, that it had not been celebrated in a manner equal to the subject, desired him to propose it to some better poet. Halifax told him that there was no encouragement for genius; that worthless men were unprofitably enriched with public money, without any care to find or employ those whose appearance might do honor to their country. To this Godolphin replied, that such abuses should in time be rectified: and that if a man could be found, capable of the task then proposed, he should not want an ample recompense. Halifax then named Addison, but required that the treasurer should apply to him in his own person. Godolphin sent the message by Mr. Boyle, afterwards Lord Carleton; and Addison having undertaken the work, communicated it to the treasurer, while it was yet advanced no farther than the simile of the angel, and was immediately rewarded by succeeding Mr. Locke in the place of Commissioner of Appeals." Of the work itself, Johnson remarks:-"The next composition is the far-famed Campaign, which Dr. Warton has termed a 'Gazette in rhyme,' with harshness not often used by the good nature of his criticism. Before a censure so severe is admitted, let us consider that war is a frequent subject of poetry, and then inquire who has described it with more greatness and force. Many of our own writers tried their powers upon this year of victory; yet Addison's is confessedly the best performance: his poem is the work of a man not blinded by the dust of learning; his images are not borrowed merely from books. The superiority which he confers upon his hero is not personal prowess and 'mighty bone,' but deliberate intrepidity, a calm command of his passions, and the power of consulting his own mind in the midst of danger. The rejection and contempt of fiction is rational and manly.” Macaulay's remarks are an amplification and illustration of the last sentence of Johnson's. “The ‘Campaign' came forth and was as much admired by the public as by the minister. It pleases us less on the whole than the 'Epistle to Halifax. Yet it undoubtedly ranks high among the poems during the interval between the death of Dryden and the dawn of Pope's genius. The chief merit of the 'Campaign,' we think, is that which was noticed by Johnson--the manly and rational rejection of fiction.” And after a lively passage upon the ridiculous imitation of the Homeric style of combat in descriptions of battles fought on entirely different military principles, he adds:-"Addison, with excellent taste and judgment, departed from this ridiculous fashion. He reserved his praise for the qualities which made Marlborough truly great: energy, sagacity, military science. But above all, the poet extolled the firmness of that mind, which, in the midst of confusion, uproar and slaughter, examined and disposed every thing with the serene wisdom of a higher intelligence." The " Campaign" of this poem is the campaign of 1704. When this poem was written all the incidents of the campaign of 1704 were as familiar as Quatre Bras and Waterloo. For the modern reader they require an explanation, and I translate the following admirable sketch from a French historian: "The Elector of Bavaria and Marshal Villars had quarrelled openly, and the operations were suffering from it. Villars asked to be recalled, and the king, to preserve an ally so important as the elector, sent Marshal Marsin to replace him. Germany was still paralyzed by the victory of Hochstadt (gained by Villars, Sept. 20, 1703). The elector took advantage of it to seize Augsburgh, and march upon Passau, which he took on the 9th Jan., 1704. Vienna was struck with terror; the Hungarian insurgents pushed their bands up to the suburbs; the emperor prepared to flee into Moravia. Eugene, Marlborough and Heinsius resolved to save Austria by the boldest of plans. As the French line of operations extended from Strasburgh to Passau, it seemed easy to cut it in the middle and crush the elector, whom the coalition had sworn to ruin entirely. The three great generals of the allies united to put this plan in execution. Louis of Baden resumed the offensive in Franconia. Eugene collected the remnants of the defeat of Spire, and undertook the defence of the lines of Stolhofen. Marlborough, who had Villeroy and Boufflers before him, left in a camp near Maestricht twenty-five thousand Dutch troops, to hold them in check, and marched, with twenty thousand men, towards the Danube. First he moved as if he were going to march upon the Moselle, then turning rapidly towards the Rhine, crossed it at Cologne, formed a junction before Mayence with the contingents of the Palatinate and Brandenburgh, and passed the Neckar at Heilbronn. (Here he met Eugene.) At the news of this march, Villeroy set out with thirty thousand men in pursuit of the English general. Tallard advanced upon the Moselle, then fell back upon the Lauten, joined Villeroy, and prepared to attack Stolhofen, in order to relieve the elector. But the elector, instead of turning upon Louis of Baden, and crushing him, directed his march towards the left bank of the Danube, and fortified Donauwerth on the Schellenberg, where he awaited the arrival of Tallard. Marlborough and Louis of Baden were thus left free to form a junction at Ulm (July 2), then marched directly to the Schellenberg, carried the position of Donauwerth, and drove back the Bavarians to the right bank of the Danube. This bloody combat, in which the Bavarians lost eight thousand men, and the allies six thousand, freed the passage of the Lech, and laid open Bavaria, which was ravaged as fearfully as the Palatinate had been a few years before. The vanquished army fortified themselves at Augsburgh, where they waited the arrival of Tallard, in order to resume the offensive. Tallard, by order of the court, advanced rapidly with thirty-five thousand men, from the lines of Lautenburgh, leaving Villeroy to hold Eugene in check at Stolhofen, passed the Rhine at Huningen, crossed the defiles of the Black Forest, and reached Augsburgh the 3d of August, forming with the troops of the elector an army of fifty-six thousand men. Eugene quitted the line of Stolhofen with equal rapidity; but being threatened by Villeroy, was unable to stop Tallard on his march, and reached Hochstadt the same day that his adversary reached Augsburgh. This was a fine opportunity for the French to march upon the corps of Eugene, only twenty thousand men strong, and crush it; but they lost time. Marlborough advanced rapidly to his colleague's support, and the two armies uniting at Hochstadt formed a force of fifty-two thousand men. The strategic field of this portion of the basin of the Danube being the right bank of the river, where the communications are easy and the country abundant, while the left bank is wild, without roads, and shut in by mountains which surround the basin, the French ought to have kept on the right bank, refused battle, and waited for the enemy to retreat; and as the allies could not have penetrated into Bavaria without leaving too far behind their magazines of Nordlingen and Nuremberg, they would have |