ast, on the road, and on the sea, amounted to above six thousand.
The survivors were quartered for the winter in the towns and villages of
Ulster. The general fixed his head quarters at Lisburn, [448]

His conduct was variously judged. Wise and candid men said that he had
surpassed himself, and that there was no other captain in Europe who,
with raw troops, with ignorant officers, with scanty stores, having
to contend at once against a hostile army of greatly superior force,
against a villanous commissariat, against a nest of traitors in his own
camp, and against a disease more murderous than the sword, would have
brought the campaign to a close without the loss of a flag or a gun. On
the other hand, many of those newly commissioned majors and captains,
whose helplessness had increased all his perplexities, and who had not
one qualification for their posts except personal courage, grumbled
at the skill and patience which had saved them from destruction. Their
complaints were echoed on the other side of Saint George's Channel. Some
of the murmuring, though unjust, was excusable. The parents, who had
sent a gallant lad, in his first uniform, to fight his way to glory,
might be pardoned if, when they learned that he had died on a wisp of
straw without medical attendance, and had been buried in a swamp without
any Christian or military ceremony, their affliction made them hasty and
unreasonable. But with the cry of bereaved families was mingled another
cry much less respectable. All the hearers and tellers of news abused
the general who furnished them with so little news to hear and to tell.
For men of that sort are so greedy after excitement that they far more
readily forgive a commander who loses a battle than a commander who
declines one. The politicians, who delivered their oracles from the
thickest cloud of tobacco smoke at Garroway's, confidently asked,
without knowing any thing, either of war in general, or of Irish war in
particular, why Schomberg did not fight. They could not venture to
say that he did not understand his calling. No doubt he had been an
excellent officer: but he was very old. He seemed to bear his years
well: but his faculties were not what they had been: his memory was
failing; and it was well known that he sometimes forgot in the afternoon
what he had done in the morning. It may be doubted whether there ever
existed a human being whose mind was quite as firmly toned at eighty
as at forty. But that