waves of the Grecian seas so far equalized the power of the
combatants as to enable the Greeks, who fought for us as well as for
themselves, to roll back the tide of Oriental conquest. We might not
have had even the Secession War, if there had been no storms in the
Thracian seas in a summer the roses of which perished more than two
thousand three hundred years ago.[A]

[Footnote A: When the Athenian patriots under Thrasybulus occupied
Phyle, they would have been destroyed by the forces of the Thirty
Tyrants, had not a violent snow-storm happened, which compelled
the besiegers to retreat. The patriots characterized this storm as
Providential. Had the weather remained fair, the patriots would have
been beaten, the democracy would not have been restored, and we should
never have had the orations of Demosthenes; and perhaps even Plato might
not have written and thought for all after time.]

The modern contest which most resembles that which was waged between the
Greeks and the Persians is that war between England and Spain which
came to a crisis in 1588, when the Spanish Armada was destroyed by the
tempests of the Northern seas, after having been well mauled by the
English fleet. The English seamen behaved well, as they always do; but
the Spanish loss would not have been irreparable, if the weather had
remained mild. What men had begun so well storms completed. A contrary
wind prevented the Spanish Admiral from pursuing his course in a
direction that would have proved favorable to his second object, which
was the preservation of his fleet. He was forced to stand to the North,
so that he rushed right into the jaws of destruction. He encountered
in those remote and almost unknown waters tempests that were even more
merciless than the fighting ships and fireships of the island heretics.
Philip II. bore his loss with the same calmness that he bore the victory
of Lepanto. As, on hearing of the latter, he merely said, "Don John
risked a great deal," so, when tidings came to him that the Invincible
Armada had been found vincible, he quietly remarked, "I sent it out
against men, and not against the billows." Down to the very last year,
it had been the common, and all but universal opinion, that, if the
Spaniards had succeeded in landing in England, they would have been
beaten, so resolute were the English in their determination to oppose
them, and so extensive were their preparations for resistance. Elizabeth
at Tilbury had been