was entailed upon them for the ensuing year. At the end of all this military execution, civil *exactions, still more cruel and oppressive, were begun; and under the forms of government and law, the most unprincipled men gave loose to their avarice and rapacity, till Switzerland has sunk at last under the complication of her misfortunes, reduced to the lowest ebb of misery and despair.

SIDNEY SMITH

LESSON CLII.

BATTLE OF TALAVERA.

THIS battle was fought in the year 1811, at Talavera, in Spain, by the armies of England and Spain, on the one side, commanded by the Duke of Welling ton, and that of France on the other, under Bonaparte's generals. In this battle the French were defeated.

1. HARK! heard you not those hoofs of dreadful note ?
Sounds not the clang of conflict on the heath?
Saw ye not whom the reeking saber smote?
Nor saved your brethren ere they sunk beneath
Tyrants and tyrants' slaves? the fires of death,
The bale-fires flash on high; from rock to rock,
Each volley tells that thousands cease to breathe;
Death rides upon the sulphury + Siroc,

Red battle stamps his foot, and nations feel the shock.

2. Lo! where the giant on the mountain stands,
His blood-red +tresses deepening in the sun,
With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
And eye that scorcheth all it looks upon;
Restless it rolls, now fixed, and now anon
Flashing afar; and, at his iron feet,

Destruction cowers to mark what deeds are done;

For, on this morn, three potent nations meet,

To shed before his shrine the blood he deems most sweet.

3. Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;

Three tongues prefer strange torisons on high;

Three gaudy standards +flout the pale, blue skies;
The shouts are France! Spain! Albion! Victory!
The foe, the victim, and the proud ally,
That fights for all, but ever fights in vain,
Are met, as if at home they could not die,
To feed the crow on Talavera's plain,

And fertilize the field that each pretends to gain.

4. There shall they rot, Ambition's honored fools! Yes, honor decks the turf that wraps their clay ! Vain sophistry! In these, behold the tools,

+

The broken tools that tyrants cast away

By myriads, when they dare to pave their way
With human hearts, to what? a dream alone.

+

Can despots compass aught that hails their sway?

Or call with truth, one span of earth their own,

Save that wherein, at last, they crumble bone by bone?

LESSON CLIII.

THE WARRIOR'S WREATH.

1. BEHOLD the wreath which decks the warrior's brow!
Breathes it a balmy fragrance sweet? Ah, no!
It rankly savors of the grave;

'Tis red, but not with roseate hues;
'Tis crimson'd o'er
With human gore!

'Tis wet, but not with heavenly dews.

2. 'Tis drench'd in tears, by widows, orphans shed.
Methinks in sable weeds I see them clad,

And mourn in vain, for husbands slain,
Children beloved, or brothers dear;
The fatherless,

In deep distress,

Despairing, shed the scalding tear.

3. I hear, 'mid dying groans, the cannon's crash; I see, 'mid smoke, the musket's horrid flash;

Here, famine walks; there,

Hell in her fiery eye, she stains

With purpled blood

The crystal flood,

carnage stalks,

Heaven's altars, and the verdant plains!

4. Scenes of domestic peace and social bliss
Are changed to scenes of woe and wretchedness;
The votaries of vice increase;

Towns sack'd, whole cities wrapped in flame!
Just Heaven! say,

Is this the bay,

Which warriors gain!-Is this call'd Fame?

BYRON.

ANONYMOUS.

LESSON CLIV.

EVILS OF WAR.

+

1. NOBODY sees a battle. The common soldier fires away, amid a smoke-mist, or hurries on to the charge in a crowd, which hides every thing from him. The officer is too anxious about the performance of what he is specially charged with, to mind what others are doing. The commander can not be present every where, and see every wood, watercourse, or ravine, in which his orders are carried into execution; he learns, from reports, how the work goes on. It is well; for a battle is one of those jobs which men do, without daring to look upon. Over miles of country, at every field-fence, in every gorge of a valley, or entry into a wood, there is murder committing, wholesale, continuous, reciprocal murder. The human form, God's image, is mutilated, deformed, +lacerated, in every possible way, and with every variety of torture. The wounded are jolted off in carts to the rear, their bared nerves crushed into maddening pain at every stone or rut; or the flight and pursuit trample over them, leaving them to writhe and groan, without assistance; and fever and thirst, the most enduring of painful sensations, possess them entirely.

+

+

2. Thirst, too, has seized upon the yet able-bodied soldier, who with blood-shot eye and tongue lolling out, plies his trade; blaspheming; killing, with savage delight; +callous, when the brains of his best-loved comrade are spattered over him! The battle-field is, if possible, a more painful object of contemplation than the combatants. They are in their vocation, earning their bread: what will not men do for a shilling a day? But their work is carried on amid the fields, gardens, and homesteads of men unused to war. They left their homes, with all that habit and happy associations have made precious, to bear its brunt. The poor, the aged, the sick are left in the hurry, to be killed by stray shots or beaten down, as the charge or counter-charge go over them. The ripening grain is trampled down; the garden is trodden into a black mud; the fruit-trees, bending beneath their luscious load, are shattered by the cannon-shot; churches and private dwellings are used as fortresses, and ruined in the conflict; barns and +granaries take fire, and the conflagration spreads on all sides.

3. At night, the steed is stabled beside the altar, and the weary +homicides of the day complete the wrecking of houses, to make their lairs for slumber. The fires of the +bivouac complete what the fires kindled by the battle have not consumed. The surviving

soldiers march on, to act the same scenes over again, elsewhere; and the remnant of the scattered inhabitants return, to find the mangled bodies of those they had loved, amid the blackened ruins of their homes; to mourn, with more than agonizing grief, over the missing, of whose fate they are uncertain; to feel themselves bankrupts of the world's stores, and look from their children to the desolate fields and garners, and think of famine and pestilence, engendered by the rotting bodies of the half-buried myriads of slain.

4. The soldier marches on, and on, inflicting and suffering, as before War is a continuance of battles, an epidemic, striding from place to place, more horrible than the typhus, pestilence, or cholera, which, not unfrequently, follow in its train. The siege is an aggravation of the battle. The peaceful inhabitants of the +beleaguered town are cooped up, and can not fly the place of conflict. The mutual injuries, inflicted by assailants and assailed, are aggravated; their wrath is more frenzied; then come the storm and the capture, and the riot and excesses of the victor soldiery, striving to quench the drunkenness of blood in the drunkenness of wine.

5. The eccentric movements of war, the marching and countermarching, often repeat the blow on districts, slowly recovering from the first. Between destruction and the wasteful consumption of the soldiery, poverty pervades the land. Hopeless of the future, hardened by the scenes of which he is a daily witness, perhaps, goaded by revenge, the peasant becomes a plunderer and assassin. The families of the upper classes are dispersed; the discipline of the family circle is removed; a habit of living in the day, for the day, of drowning the morrow in transient and illicit pleasure, is engendered. The waste and desolation which a battle spreads over the battle-field, is as nothing, when compared with the moral desolation which war diffuses through all ranks of society, in the country which is the scene of war.

ANONYMOUS.

LESSON CLV.

ON THE REMOVAL OF THE BRITISH TROOPS. [EXTRACT from Lord Chatham's speech, in favor of the removal of the British troops from Boston, delivered in the House of Lords, Jan. 20, 1775.]

1. MY LORDS: When I urge this measure of recalling the troops from Boston, I urge it on the pressing principle, that it is necessarily preparatory to the restoration of your peace, and the establishment of your prosperity. It will then appear, that you

are disposed to treat amicably and equitably; and to consider, revise, and repeal those violent acts and declarations which have +disseminated confusion throughout your empire.

2. Resistance to your acts was necessary, as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince, or to enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel, that tyranny, whether exercised by an individual part of the legislature, or by the bodies which compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects. I therefore urge and conjure your lordships, immediately to adopt this conciliating measure. I will pledge myself for its immediately producing conciliating effects, by its being thus well-timed; but, if you delay till your vain hope shall be accomplished, of triumphantly dictating terms of reconciliation, you delay forever.

3. But, admitting that this hope (which, in truth, is desperate,) should be accomplished, what do you gain by the interposition of your victorious amity? You will be untrusted and unthanked. Adopt this measure, then, and allay the ferment prevailing in America, by removing the cause; a cause, obnoxious and unserviceable; for the merit of our army can only be in action. Its force would be most disproportionately exerted against a brave, generous, and united people, with arms in their hands, and courage in their hearts; three millions of people, the genuine descendants of a valiant and pious ancestry, driven to those deserts by the narrow maxims of a superstitious tyranny.

4. And is the spirit of persecution never to be appeased? Are the brave sons of those brave forefathers to inherit their sufferings, ns they have inherited their virtues? Are they to sustain the infliction of the most oppressive and unexampled severity, and finally, because it is the wish of the ministry, be condemned unheard? My lords, the Americans have been condemned, unheard. The indiscriminate hand of vengeance has lumped together innocent and guilty; and, with all the formalities of hostility has blocked up the town of Boston, and reduced to beggary and famine, its thirty thousand inhabitants.

5. But, ministers say, that the union in America can not last. Ministers have more eyes than I have, and should have more ears; but, with all the information I have been able to procure, I can pronounce it a union, solid, permanent, and effectual. It is based upon an unconquerable spirit of independence, which is not new among them. It is, and has ever been, their established principle, their confirmed persuasion; it is their nature and their doctrine.

6. I remember, some years ago, when the repeal of the stamp act was in agitation, conversing, in a friendly confidence, with a person