path. Napoleon hummed
the well-known air, "Marlbrook s'en va a la guerre," when he crossed
the Niemen to commence the Moscow campaign. But in England, the country
which he has made illustrious, the nation he has saved, the land of his
birth, he is comparatively forgotten; and were it not for the popular
pages of Voltaire, and the shadow which a great name throws over the
stream of time in spite of every neglect, he would be virtually unknown
at this moment to nineteen-twentieths of the British people.

It is the fault of the national historians which has occasioned this
singular injustice to one of the greatest of British heroes--certainly
the most consummate, if we except Wellington, of British military
commanders. No man has yet appeared who has done any thing like justice
to the exploits of Marlborough. Smollett, whose unpretending narrative,
compiled for the bookseller, has obtained a passing popularity by being
the only existing sequel to Hume, had none of the qualities necessary to
write a military history, or make the narrative of heroic exploits
interesting. His talents for humour, as all the world knows, were
great--for private adventure, or the delineation of common life in
novels, considerable. But he had none of the higher qualities necessary
to form a great historian; he had neither dramatic nor descriptive
power; he was entirely destitute of philosophic views or power of
general argument. In the delineation of individual character, he is
often happy; his talents as a novelist, and as the narrator of private
events, there appear to advantage. But he was neither a poet nor a
painter, a statesman nor a philosopher. He neither saw whence the stream
of events had come, nor whither it was going. We look in vain in his
pages for the lucid arguments and rhetorical power with which Hume
illustrated, and brought, as it were, under the mind's eye, the general
arguments urged, or rather which might be urged by ability equal to his
own, for and against every great change in British history. As little do
we find the captivating colours with which Robertson has painted the
discovery and wonders of America, or the luminous glance which he has
thrown over the progress of society in the first volume of Charles V.
Gibbon's incomparable powers of classification and description are
wholly awanting. The fire of Napier's military pictures need not be
looked for. What is usually complained of in Smollett, especially by his
young