mmanders who have stamped themselves upon their age. Although his
method of war-making differed as far as possible from that quality in
common, of the Bearnese, yet the two had one personal insensibility to
fear. But in the case of Henry, to confront danger for its own sake was
in itself a pleasure, while the calmer spirit of Maurice did not so much
seek the joys of the combat as refuse to desist from scientific
combinations in the interests of his personal safety. Very frequently, in
the course of his early campaigns, the prince was formally and urgently
requested by the States-General not to expose his life so recklessly, and
before he had passed his twenty-fifth year he had received wounds which,
but for fortunate circumstances, would have proved mortal, because he was
unwilling to leave special operations on which much was depending to
other eyes than his own. The details of his campaigns are, of necessity,
the less interesting to a general reader from their very completeness.
Desultory or semi-civilised warfare, where the play of the human passions
is distinctly visible, where individual man, whether in buff jerkin or
Milan coat of proof, meets his fellow man in close mortal combat, where
men starve by thousands or are massacred by town-fulls, where hamlets or
villages blaze throughout whole districts or are sunk beneath the
ocean--scenes of rage, hatred, vengeance, self-sacrifice, patriotism,
where all the virtues and vices of which humanity is capable stride to
and fro in their most violent colours and most colossal shape where man
in a moment rises almost to divinity, or sinks beneath the beasts of the
field--such tragical records of which the sanguinary story of mankind is
full--and no portion of them more so than the Netherland chronicles
appeal more vividly to the imagination than the neatest solution of
mathematical problems. Yet, if it be the legitimate end of military
science to accomplish its largest purposes at the least expense of human
suffering; if it be progress in civilisation to acquire by scientific
combination what might be otherwise attempted, and perhaps vainly
attempted, by infinite carnage, then is the professor with his diagrams,
standing unmoved amid danger, a more truly heroic image than
Coeur-de-Lion with his battle-axe or Alva with his truncheon.

The system--then a new one--which Maurice introduced to sustain that
little commonwealth from sinking of which he had become at the age of
seve