is the representative in repose of all who live in duty, or squander in leisure: to whom alike are the capacities and the opportunities for sharing the pleasures made exquisite in dreams by the other eyes unsealed. There is not a dullard anywhere who may not be a prophet in the night, or a poet always if he choose, by the stimulation of dreams. It is the function of the apocalypse to which all flesh is heir when the sun westerns, to give to each his portion of the seductive valleys that roll between the dominating crests of Pisgah and Patmos. Continents may divide, and oceans may sunder ; death itself, we know only too well, may wrench the filial ties. It is dreams alone that keep the roof-tree unviolated by either the coffin at the door or mortality advancing, thereby elevating themselves into the sovereignty of always giving us our own old folk back again. The utmost power of the volition, as if to clinch the contrast, can bring nothing tangible from even the other side of the hill. It is because instinct has been a steadfast believer from the beginning that extinction has always been incredible. The condescension of the intellect is able only for a few matters of fact that may be carried in a saucer and classified by a trifling audit. Those foundations are too slender to bear any superstructure of dogma. The more especially is that so because the libraries of all lands and ages, with their portents, omens, and visions, sternly refuse assistance. The angels fear to tread abashed even in 'The Little Pilgrim,' the farthest-going prescience of this century; and where its author, the wonder-working Mrs. Oliphant, retreated, no one may presume. But the condition precedent to stupid unbelief may be said to be dreamless sleep. The man has no working tools for the day who does not toss in the night. A merciless tranquillity leaves the unfortunate to himself. The moral law suspended in dreams is mainly remarkable for its continuing in operation outside of them. It there indifferently well fulfils the social purpose of Cosmos. The conscience that makes cowards of us all has its not less effectual and more deplorable counterpart in the torpor that sheaths its dagger. It is necessary, to correct the action of obdurate self-sufficiency, to be chastised by dreams. The dual life in the infidel makes both a woe for which reason the lost Atlantis is required to attest the sincere happiness of any spirit so forsaken. The card about that is white all over biography where scoffers have resided. The sabbath of the soul is never in any Materialist's week, owing to his maximum wage being unequal as any reward to the hideous unrest of Tantalus. It takes classical fare for classical ordeals; but manna falls no longer on miraculous impiety. A sovereign remedy for misgiving is concord with the balance of probabilities, about which valuable hints are given in the solitude that is most frequented. The man in doubt who plays dreams will have, for failure in the consequence, the excellent precedent that even in historical days the fortunes of nations : were lost and won by dreams. In Rome, when the sum of the virtues was courage, Calphurnia's dreams occasioned to Cæsar the noble soliloquy If I am to die to-morrow, that is what I am to do to-morrow. It will not be then because I am willing it shall be then, nor shall I escape it because I am unwilling. It is in the gods when, but in myself how, I am to die. If Calphurnia's dreams are fumes of indigestion, how shall I behold the day after to-morrow? If they are from the gods, their admonition is not to prepare me to escape from their decree, but to meet it. Cæsar has not yet died; Cæsar is prepared to die.' The dreams were true, for with to-morrow went Cæsar to the gods. Accumulated experience has not as yet, in formulæ, substituted dreams for any creed; but in attendance are the comparatively neglected imagination to be fired and the cloudland of faithful endurance to be cheered. The controlling family party of unseen and unwritten laws by which careers have, on reflection, very little to do with themselves, are often at our feet-in our armswhen least observed. You give it space, for example, and the biased bowl comes home. Lot's wife was caught into salt in the act of yearning for the old tent. It is this predilection of the affections that makes them reasonably immortal. He who objects to the word as too strident forgets that human speech is incommensurate with the still faint but always pursuing human longing. Egyptian philosophy had shared that aspiration before as yet the religious form of it in the West had put limitations upon its range. In its transmigration of souls is found the divine charity which embraces all animated beings as fellow creatures having more than this transient life. The dog dreaming of happy hunting-grounds on the generous hearth, and his companion, the horse, dozing in the stall over fresh pastures on remote meadows the vision of Pythagoras in distant ages—are of the larger brotherhood by whom the whole creation groaneth in the pain that never is but always to be blest.' It is Dryden who for the common folk makes all kin from the stately Latin of those ancient days. All things are but alter'd, nothing dies, And here and there th' unbodied spirit flies, Finally, the authority of Milton is to be quoted for the introduction, in a dream, of Eve to Adam before she was made by which is the conjecture flattered that rehabilitation from the results of her subsequent misconduct may be foreshadowed to her posterity_through the same continuing medium. If that way Paradise was Lost; in that way is Paradise always being Regained. BY JUDGE O'CONNOR MORRIS MUST glance at the state of the Art of War, and of the conditions relating to it, during the period between the close of the Seven Years War and the appearance of Napoleon on the stage of events. Thirty years elapsed from the Peace of Hubertsburg to the beginning of the tremendous conflict in which the French Revolution involved Europe. On the Continent this was, for the most part, a season of repose; tranquillity generally prevailed from the Seine to the Po, and from the Rhine to the Vistula. Central Germany was threatened, indeed, for a moment by the long quarrel between the Austrian and Prussian Monarchies; but Frederick made, in 1778, his last essay in arms, and was driven out of Bohemia by Loudon and Lacy; Russia advanced to the Euxine and beyond the Tanais, steadily carrying out the policy of Peter the Great; Austria maintained, for years, a fitful struggle with the Turk; a great contest was witnessed across the Atlantic, as the American Republic came into being. But these wars, as a rule, were outside the theatres of the great wars of the preceding centuries; and France, the Bellona of Europe, took no part in them, except in her maritime strife with England. During this period of comparative peace few changes were made in the composition or the size of armies, and in the theory or the practice of war, as these were understood in the highest places; the military routine of the past prevailed, as was seen after the long Peace which followed 1815. The armed strength of Russia, indeed, was greatly augmented; her armies, though still inferior to those of the other great Powers in organisation and skill in manoeuvre, became very different, under a real chief, Suvoroff, from the armed hordes which had opposed Frederick; her artillery had distinctly improved. The French army, too, though still in decline, and revealing the weakness and decay of the State, was made better than the army of Soubise and Clermont, which had disgraced itself at Rossbach and Minden; it was still preyed upon by an effete aristocratic caste: but it had learned something in the American War; progress was apparent in the three arms; its artillery had regained, in some degree, its ancient renown. Still, on the whole, the armed forces of Europe, leaving out of account the Russian army, remained very much as they had been when Frederick disappeared from the scene, and, in some instances, had shown symptoms of decline. The Austrian army, with its fine cavalry, its bad infantry, and its good artillery, continued unchanged. The British army, after Saratoga and Yorktown, was of little account in the opinion of Europe; and, though its soldiery retained the high qualities of the race, the abuses in it were many and grave. The great Prussian army, which had risen to the topmost height of fame, in the desperate trial of the Seven Years War, was still certainly the best of European armies; but it had felt the loss of its master-spirit, Frederick, and it was already living on the traditions of a glorious past. For the rest, the generals of this period were nearly all veterans of the Seven Years War; their ideas and conceptions of the military art were those formed in that great contest; the strategy of Frederick, and his tactics, especially his peculiar system of attack, were deemed the perfection of skill in war; and no change had been effected in the methods by which armies were maintained and moved in the field. It was still thought necessary to accumulate huge magazines on lines of operations, even in the most fertile lands; and the impedimenta of every army, on a march, were enormous. During this period of European repose, great changes, important although normal, arose in the different States of the Continent, and even, to a certain extent, in England, which ultimately were deeply to affect war. Under the influences of peace, of expanding commerce, of the growth of inventions of many kinds, the population of every country increased; this was seen notably in Germany, and even in France, wasted as both nations had long been by the terrible strife of nearly two centuries. The means of communication, at the same time, were multiplied and remarkably improved; and agriculture, sustained by the industry of the great towns, made rapid and very striking progress. These phenomena were noticed by many observers of the day; experience was before long to show what effects they might produce as regards the military art; and they did not escape the attention of writers on the theory and the practice of contemporaneous war. These commentators, however, were inferior men; they did not distinctly perceive how these changes could be turned to account in the conduct of armies, and generally in operations in the field. The armed strength of States, they felt, would be much augmented; but it was likely that the number of separate armies would increase, rather than that individual armies would grow in size. The opening of new roads and the frequent bridging of rivers would not so much facilitate decisive movements as make lines of operations more numerous; the development of agriculture and of the means of subsistence would not dispense with the necessity of great magazines for the support of armies. A theory for the large operations of war was formed, and even had many advocates, which no great commander has ever followed, a theory the errors of which were to become manifest. War, as far as possible, was to be conducted by separate armies, acting apart, and operating on a great variety of points; certain lines were to be assailed and defended; dispersion rather than concentration was to be an object upon the theatre; what was called the cordon system was to be adopted; decisive movements were not to be much regarded; yet generals were to be hampered and burdened, as had been the case when they had had to advance through waste tracts that could not feed their troops. This theory, founded on principles essentially false, tended to make strategy feeble and timid; this tendency was strengthened by a widespread belief that the era of wars was coming to an end; and these ideas found not a little support among the younger soldiers of the time, if not much recognised in the highest places. As regards tactics, the attack in oblique order invented by Frederick still held the field; and the Prussian order of battle, discipline, and drill, were still adopted in nearly all European armies. Speculation, however, had here too been not wanting; and the experience of the American war had suggested that Frederick's outflanking movement in line might be successfully encountered by flexible close columns, preceded and covered by swarms of skirmishers. In 1792 the French Revolution burst on a terrified world, threatening to overthrow the old order of Europe. Reckless audacity was the characteristic of the men in power in Paris; and in the tremendous stirring of the human mind that followed, wild theories prevailed in most spheres of thought and of action. In 1793-94, while the allied hosts were gathering slowly round France, the Regicide Republic, turning to account the growth of the population within late years, flung its fourteen armies upon the menaced frontier; an armed nation, fired with enthusiastic ardour, defied the trained armies of the League of Europe. The spectacle was amazing and grand; but had the Coalition really acted in concert, and had its forces been rightly directed, the efforts of wild patriotism would have proved fruitless. Paris must have fallen soon after Neerwinden. But the allies were divided in mind and in policy. The German Powers had their eyes set on Poland; England was thinking of reconquering Dunkirk; Austria and Prussia regarded each other with distrust. The League did not nearly put forth its strength. The military operations of the invaders, above all, were tentative, feeble, halting, slow; they were powerfully affected, too, by the new strategic theories. The theatre of the war was, no doubt, vast: it extended along the whole borders of France. But, though the forces of the Coalition were very large, they were much too widely disseminated to strike with decisive results. The armies of the League were split into fractions, acting on separate and distant lines, without easy communication and mutual support; they advanced in comparatively small bodies, each selecting different points of attack; they were never concentrated for a determined movement; they wasted their power in disconnected efforts. As of old, too, they were embarrassed by immense magazines, unnecessary in an open and fertile country; the impedimenta that kept them back were enormous; accordingly, their marches were extremely |