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both these commanders, "with a celerity as censurable as it seems incredible," sprang into the first barge that floated across the dyke, now pierced (at the action on the Kowenstyn, during the great siege of Antwerp), in order that they might, in person, carry the news of the victory to Antwerp, and set all the bells ringing and the bonfires blazing; and how, while the conquerors were thus gone to enjoy their triumph, the conquered, so far from being as yet disposed to accept their defeat, were even ignorant that they were defeated. A magnificent banquet, however, was duly spread in the townhouse to greet the exultant Hohenlo; and he, "placed on high at the head of the banquet-table, assumed the very god of war." He drained huge goblets to the health of Antwerp's fairest dames who sat beside him and near him; and as he drank and feasted, the trumpet, kettle-drum, and cymbal, and merry peal of bells without, did honour to his feat. "So gay and gallant was the victor, that he announced another banquet for the following day, still further to celebrate the happy release of Antwerp, and invited the fair ladies around him again to grace the board." Nevertheless, the gentlewoman next to him sighed forth a misgiving that the morrow would scarcely be so joyous as the present day had been, and could not refrain from expressing her earnest apprehensions that the triumph was premature. Hardly had she spoken, the story goes, when sinister sounds were heard in the streets: the first few stragglers, survivors of the deadly fight, had arrived with the fatal news that all was lost, the dyke regained, the Spaniards victorious, the whole band of patriots cut to pieces. "A few frightfully wounded and dying sufferers were brought into the banqueting-hall. Hohenlo sprang from the feast-interrupted in so ghastly a manner-pursued by shouts and hisses." No wonder that howls of execration saluted

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him outside, and that he was obliged to conceal himself for a time, to escape the fury of the populace.

Hearty in its dry way is the chuckle Anthony Wood enjoys in one passage of his Diary about the "parliament soldiers" and their discomfiture at Oxford in 1645: "On the day before some of the said rebels had been progging for venison in Thame park, I think, and one or two pasties of it were made, and newly put into the oven before the cavaliers entered into the house. But so it was that none of the said rebels were left at eleven of the clock to eat the same pasties," which fell into other hands and were appreciated accordingly.

Colonel Rigby's pride is well said to have had a dramatic fall when his mortar was captured by the garrison, on the very day on which he had invited his friends in the neighbourhood to come and see Lathom House fired.

When the British squadron, doomed to an ignominious repulse, appeared before Carthagena, in 1741, the first step of the officers on board was to hold a Council of War, in order to settle the distribution of their future (paulo-post-future) booty; or, as Earl Stanhope suggests, according to the fable, sell the skin of the living bear.

At that triumph of Prussian discipline, as Mr. Carlyle accounts it, the battle of Mollwitz (1741), Neipperg and his Austrians, running out to rank themselves, cried, "Keep our soup hot a little, till we drive these fellows to destruction"-so contemptuous were the Imperialists of Prussian soldiering. But the soup got very cold indeed before that came about. And the opinion is one which old Fritz's historian assumes them to have renounced, ever since noon that day, for all remaining days and years.

General Hawley, before leaving Edinburgh to fight

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(and lose) the battle of Falkirk, had erected two gibbets whereon to hang the Highlanders who should surrender to him in the victory he expected to achieve. After he returned, as Dr. Chambers says, "in a state so different from that of a conqueror," he had to use these conspicuous monuments of his folly for the hanging of some of his own men. At the time of the fatal reverse at Culloden, Lovat was residing at Gortuleg, and the house had, on the day of the battle, been the scene of "extensive culinary operations," for the purpose of celebrating by a feast the victory which it was expected the Prince would gain over his enemies. The French officer, on the Prince's side, who figures in Addison's Freeholder, amuses himself during the first day's march, after Preston, with considering what post he shall accept under James the Third, and absolutely determines not to be fobbed off with a garter; passing by a noble country seat, of Whig ownership, he resolves to beg it, and pleases himself, the remainder of the day, with several alterations he intends to make in it. "We were indeed so confident of success, that I found most of my fellowsoldiers were taken up with imaginations of the same nature." There had like to have been, for instance, a duel between two subalterns upon a dispute, which of them should be governor of Portsmouth. In short, every man had cut out a place for himself in his own thoughts; so that there might be reckoned up in that little army two or three lord treasurers, half a dozen secretaries of state, and at least a score of lords-justices in Eyre, for each side of Trent.

Napoleon in 1804, projecting and practically discounting his great invasion and subjugation of these isles, directed M. Denon, then at the head of the French mint, to prepare a medal in commemoration of the assured conquest. The die, being made accordingly,

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was ready to be used in London, but owing, as Pitt's latest and ablest biographer remarks, to "the course of events," it was subsequently broken. Only three medals struck from it now remain, it is said; one of them in England, which is described as bearing on one side the usual head of the Emperor crowned with laurel, while on the reverse Hercules appears lifting up and crushing in his arms the monster Antæus; the motto being Descente en Angleterre, and below in smaller letters Frappé à Londres en 1804.

Five years later we have Soult printing a proclamation at his head-quarters, addressed to the generals of divisions, and to be published as an order of the day, in which he announced himself King of Portugal and Algarves, subject only to the approval of the Emperor, of which he entertained no doubt. The printer's ink had not had much more than about time to dry, when Wellington achieved the passage of the Douro, and effected so complete a surprise that, at four o'clock that day he quietly sat down to the dinner and table-service which had been prepared for Marshal Soult.

Such was the confidence which the people of Boston felt, in 1813, as to the success of Captain Lawrence of the Chesapeake, when starting to fight the Shannon, that they had prepared a public supper to greet the victors on their return, with their prisoners, to the harbour. This was the naval action which has been described as so rapid, that fifteen minutes only elapsed from the time the first gun was fired to that of the entire mastery of the Chesapeake by the British. Kihaya Bey and his five thousand Turks at Valtezza were so confident of success against the Greeks, that the soldiers had performed military dances in the streets of Tripolitza, before setting out, in assurance of antedated victory. The topsy-turvy reverses that occur on some of these

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occasions are of a kind to resemble what Shakspeare's Capulet piteously describes :

"All things that we ordainèd festival,

Turn from their office to black funeral:

Our instruments, to melancholy bells,

And all things change them to the contrary."

PROSE

V.

FATAL PROSPERITY.

PROVERBS i. 32.

ROSPERITY, in perhaps a quite equal degree with adversity, is a test of character; tries it, tempts it, and is very often too much for it. "The prosperity of fools shall destroy them.” And the prosperity of those who until they became too prosperous were accounted wise too often brings out the folly that underlay the wisdom, and the weed-like growth of folly chokes the wisdom, so that it becometh unfruitful, and here again prosperity is fatal.

Lord Macaulay's highly finished portrait of Charles Montague, whose career had been, till fortune turned, more splendidly and uninterruptedly successful than that of any other member of the House of Commons, since the House of Commons had begun to exist, includes this characteristic trait,-that with all his ability, he had not the wisdom to avert, by suavity and moderation, that curse, the inseparable concomitant of prosperity and glory, which the ancients personified under the name of Nemesis. "His head, strong for all the purposes of debate and arithmetical calculation [as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer], was weak against the intoxicating influence of success