allied Europe, and absurdly gained
impossible victories? Who was this new comet of war who possest the
effrontery of a planet? The academic military school excommunicated
him, while bolting, and hence arose an implacable rancor of the old
Caesarism against the new, of the old saber against the flashing sword,
and of the chessboard against genius. On June 18th, 1815, this rancor
got the best; and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua,
Marengo, and Arcola, it wrote--Waterloo. It was a triumph of
mediocrity, sweet to majorities, and destiny consented to this irony.
In his decline, Napoleon found a young Suvarov before him--in fact, it
is only necessary to blanch Wellington's hair in order to have a
Suvarov. Waterloo is a battle of the first class, gained by a captain
of the second.

What must be admired in the battle of Waterloo is England, the English
firmness, the English resolution, the English blood, and what England
had really superb in it, is (without offense) herself; it is not her
captain, but her army. Wellington, strangely ungrateful, declares in
his dispatch to Lord Bathurst that his army, the one which fought on
June 18th, 1815, was a "detestable army." What does the gloomy pile of
bones buried in the trenches of Waterloo think of this? England has
been too modest to herself in her treatment of Wellington, for making
him so great is making herself small. Wellington is merely a hero,
like any other man. The Scotch Grays, the Life Guards, Maitland and
Mitchell's regiments, Pack and Kempt's infantry, Ponsonby and
Somerset's cavalry, the Highlanders playing the bagpipes under the
shower of canister, Ryland's battalions, the fresh recruits who could
hardly manage a musket, and yet held their ground against the old
bands of Essling and Rivoli--all this is grand. Wellington was
tenacious; that was his merit, and we do not deny it to him, but the
lowest of his privates and his troopers was quite as solid as he, and
the iron soldier is as good as the iron duke. For our part, all our
glorification is offered to the English soldier, the English army, the
English nation; and if there must be a trophy, it is to England that
this trophy is owing. The Waterloo column would be more just, if,
instead of the figure of a man, it raised to the clouds the statue of
a people.

But this great England will be irritated by what we are writing here;
for she still has feudal illusions, after her 1688 and the French
1789. This