bodies of men, women, children, and horses, in every direction. One scene made an impression upon my memory which time will never be able to efface. Near another cart we perceived a stout-looking man and a beautiful young woman, with an infant, about seven months old, at the breast, all three frozen and dead. The mother had most certainly expired in the act of suckling her child; as with one breast exposed she lay upon the drifted snow, the milk to all appearance in a stream drawn from the nipple by the babe, and instantly congealed. The infant seemed as if its lips had but just then been disengaged, and it reposed its little head upon the mother bosom, with an overflow of milk, frozen as it trickled from the mouth. Their countenances were perfectly composed and fresh, resembling those of persons in a sound and tranquil slumber.'" "The following description," he continues," of a field of battle is in the words of one who passed over the field of Jemappe, after Dumourier's victory: 'It was on the third day after the victory obtained by General Dumourier over the Austrians, that I rode across the field of battle. The scene lies on a waste common, rendered then more dreary by the desertion of the miserable hovels before occupied by peasants. Everything that resembled a human habitation was desolated, and for the most part they had been burnt or pulled down, to prevent their affording shelter to the posts of the contending armies. The ground was ploughed up by the wheels of the artillery and wagons; everything like herbage was trodden into mire; broken carriages, arms, accoutrements, dead horses and men, were strewed over the heath. This was the third day after the battle: it was the beginning of November, and for three days a bleak wind and heavy rain had continued incessantly. There were still remaining alive several hundreds of horses, and of the human victims of that dreadful fight. I can speak with certainty of having seen more than four hundred men still living, unsheltered, without food, and without any human assistance, most of them confined to the spot where they had fallen by broken limbs. The two armies had proceeded, and abandoned these miserable wretches to their fate. Some of the dead persons appeared to have expired in the act of embracing each other. Two young French officers, who were brothers, had crawled under the side of a dead horse, where they had contrived a kind of shelter by means of a cloak: they were both mortally wounded, and groaning for each other. One very fine young man had just strength enough to drag himself out of a hollow partly filled with water, and was laid upon a little hillock, groaning with agony; A GRAPE-SHOT HAD CUT ACROSS THE UPPER PART OF HIS BELLY, AND HE WAS KEEPING IN HIS BOWELS WITH A HANDKERCHIEF AND HAT. He begged of me to end his misery! He complained of dreadful thirst. I filled him the hat of a dead soldier with water, which he nearly drank off at once, and left him to that end of his wretchedness which could not be far distant.'" "I hope," concludes Mr. Southey, "I have always felt and expressed an honest and Christian abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them; but my ideas of their immediate horrors fell infinitely short of this authentic picture." Mr. Southey, in his subsequent lives of conquerors, and his other writings, will hardly be thought to have acted up to this "abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them." Nor is he to be blamed for qualifying his view of the subject, equally blameless (surely) as they are to be held who have retained their old views, especially by him who helped to impress them. His friend, Mr. Wordsworth, in the vivacity of his admonitions to hasty complaints of evil, has gone so far as to say that "Carnage is God's daughter," and thereby subjected himself to the scoffs of a late noble wit. He is addressing the Deity himself: "But thy most dreaded instrument, Is man, arrayed for mutual slaughter: is Mr. Wordsworth is a fine poet and a philosophical thinker in spite of his having here paid a tremendous compliment to a rhyme; (for unquestionably the word "slaughter" provoked him into that imperative " Yea," and its subsequent venturous affiliation;) but the judgment, to say no more of it, is rash. Whatever the Divine Being intends by his permission or use of evil, it becomes us to think the best of it; but not to affirm the appropriation of the particulars to Him under their worst appellation, seeing that He has implanted in us a horror of them, and a wish to do them away. What it is right in Him to do, is one thing; what it proper in us to affirm that He actually does, is another. And, above all, it is idle to affirm what He intends to do forever, and to have us eternally venerate and abstain from questioning an evil. All good and evil, and vice and virtue themselves, might become confounded in the human mind by a like daring; and humanity sit down under every buffet of misfortune, without attempting to resist it: which, fortunately, is impossible. Plato cut this knotty point better, by regarding evil as a thing senseless and unmalignant, (indeed, no philosopher regards any thing as malignant, or malignant for malignity's sake;) out of which, or notwithstanding it, good is worked, and to be worked, perhaps finally to the abolition of evil. But whether this consummation be possible or not, and even if the dark horrors of evil be necessary towards the enjoyment of the light of good, still the horror must be maintained, where the object is really horrible; otherwise, we but the more idly resist the contrast, if necessary-and, what is worse, endanger the chance of melioration, if possible. Did war appear to me an inevitable evil, I should be one of the last men to show it in any other than its holiday clothes. I can appeal to writings before the public, to testify whether I am in the habit of making the worst of anything, or of not making it yield its utmost amount of good. My inclinations, as well as my reason, lie all that way. I am a passionate and grateful lover of all the beauties of the universe, moral and material; and the chief business of my life is to endeavour to give others the like fortunate affection. But, on the same principle, I feel it my duty to look evil in the face, in order to discover if it be capable of amendment; and I do not see why the miseries of war are to be spared this interrogation, simply because they are frightful and enormous. Men get rid of smaller evils which lie in their way-nay, of great ones; and there appears to be no reason why they should not get rid of the greatest, if they will but have the courage. We have abolished inquisitions and the rack, burnings for religion, burnings for witchcraft, hangings for forgery, (a great triumph in a commercial country,) much of the punishment of death in some countries, all of it in others. Why not abolish war? Mr. Wordsworth writes no odes to tell us that the Inquisition was God's daughter; though Lope de Vega, who was one of its officers, might have done so-and Mr. Wordsworth too, had he lived under its dispensation. Lope de Vega, like Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey, was a good man, as well as a celebrated poet; and we will concede to his memory what the English poets will, perhaps, not be equally disposed to grant, (for they are severe on the Romish faith,) that even the Inquisition, like War, might possibly have had some utility in its evil, were it no other than a hastening of Christianity by its startling contradictions of it. Yet it has gone. The Inquisition, as War may be hereafter, is no more. Daughter if it was of the Supreme Good, it was no immortal daughter. Why should "Carnage" be, -especially as God has put it in our heads to get rid of it? I am aware of what may be said on these occasions, to "puzzle the will;" and I concede, of course, that mankind may entertain false views of their power to change anything for the better. I concede, that all change may be only in appearance, and not make any real difference in the general amount of good and evil; that evil, to a certain invariable amount, may be necessary to the amount of good, (the overbalance of which, with a most hearty and loving sincerity, I ever acknowledge;) and finally, that all which the wisest of men could utter on any such subject might possibly be nothing but a jargon, -the witless and puny voice of what we take to be a mighty orb, but which, after all, is only a particle in the starry dust of the universe. On the other hand, all this may be something very different from what we take it to be, setting aside even the opinions which consider mind as everything, and time and space themselves as only modifications of it, or breathing-room in which it exists, weaving the thoughts which it calls life, death and materiality. But, be his metaphysical opinions what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely that men will leave off endeavouring to secure themselves against the uneasier chances of vicissitude, even if Providence ordains them to do so for no other end than the preservation of vicissitude itself, and not in order to help them out of the husks and thorns of action into the flowers of it, and into the air of heaven? Certain it is, at all events, that the human being is incited to increase his amount of good; and that when he is endeavouring to do so, he is at least not fulfilling the worst part of his necessity. Nobody tells us, when we attempt to put out a fire, and to save the lives of our neighbours, that Conflagration is God's daughter, or Murder God's daughter. On the contrary, these are things which Chris |