d are felt in men's pockets to this day: but the English
have more completely forgotten it than any other People. "Battle of
Dettingen, Battle of Fontenay,--what, in the Devil's name, were we ever
doing there?" the impatient Englishman asks; and can give no answer,
except the general one: "Fit of insanity; DELIRIUM TREMENS, perhaps
FURENS;--don't think of it!" Of Philippi and Arbela educated Englishmen
can render account; and I am told young gentlemen entering the Army are
pointedly required to say who commanded at Aigos-Potamos and wrecked the
Peloponnesian War: but of Dettingen and Fontenoy, where is the
living Englishman that has the least notion, or seeks for any? The
Austrian-Succession War did veritably rage for eight years, at a
terrific rate, deforming the face of Earth and Heaven; the English
paying the piper always, and founding their National Debt thereby:--but
not even that could prove mnemonic to them; and they have dropped the
Austrian-Succession War, with one accord, into the general dustbin, and
are content it should lie there. They have not, in their language,
the least approach to an intelligible account of it: How it went on,
whitherward, whence; why it was there at all,--are points dark to the
English, and on which they do not wish to be informed. They have quitted
the matter, as an unintelligible huge English-and-Foreign Delirium
(which in good part it was); Delirium unintelligible to them; tedious,
not to say in parts, as those of the Austrian Subsidies, hideous and
disgusting to them; happily now fallen extinct; and capable of being
skipped, in one's inquiries into the wonders of this England and this
World. Which, in fact, is a practical conclusion not so unwise as it
looks.

"Wars are not memorable," says Sauerteig, "however big they may have
been, whatever rages and miseries they may have occasioned, or however
many hundreds of thousands they may have been the death of,--except when
they have something of World-History in them withal. If they are found
to have been the travail-throes of great or considerable changes,
which continue permanent in the world, men of some curiosity cannot but
inquire into them, keep memory of them. But if they were travail-throes
that had no birth, who of mortals would remember them? Unless
perhaps the feats of prowess, virtue, valor and endurance, they might
accidentally give rise to, were very great indeed. Much greater than
the most were, which came out in that A