The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - Various 4 стр.

(Herlig er Krigerens Faerd.)

But our material threatens the space we have at command. Four more specimens must suffice for the present. They are all favorite soldier-songs. The first is by Chamisso, known popularly as the author of "Peter Schlemihl's Shadow," and depicts the mood of a soldier who has been detailed to assist in a military execution:

The next is by Von Holtei:

The next one is taken from a student-song book, and was probably written in 1814:

And finally, a song for all the campaigns of life:

FROUDE'S HENRY THE EIGHTH

The spirit of historical criticism in the present age is on the whole a charitable spirit. Many public characters have been heard through their advocates at the bar of history, and the judgments long since passed upon them and their deeds, and deferentially accepted for centuries, have been set aside, and others of a widely different character pronounced. Julius Caesar, who was wont to stand as the model usurper, and was regarded as having wantonly destroyed Roman liberty in order to gratify his towering ambition, is now regarded as a political reformer of the very highest and best class,as the man who alone thoroughly understood his age and his country, and who was Heaven's own instrument to rescue unnumbered millions from the misrule of an oligarchy whose members looked upon mankind as their proper prey. He did not overthrow the freedom of Rome, but he took from Romans the power to destroy the personal freedom of all the races by them subdued. He identified the interests of the conquered peoples with those of the central government, so far as that work was possible,thus proceeding in the spirit of the early Roman conquerors, who sought to comprehend even the victims of their wars in the benefits which proceeded from those wars. This view of his career is a sounder one than that which so long prevailed, and which enabled orators to round periods with references to the Rubicon. It is not thirty years since one of the first of American statesmen told the national Senate that "Julius Caesar struck down Roman liberty at Pharsalia," and probably there was not one man in his audience who supposed that he was uttering anything beyond a truism, though they must have been puzzled to discover any resemblance between "the mighty Julius" and Mr. Martin Van Buren, the gentleman whom the orator was cutting up, and who was actually in the chair while Mr. Calhoun was seeking to kill him, in a political sense, by quotations from Plutarch's Lives. We have learnt something since 1834 concerning Rome and Caesar as well as of our own country and its chiefs, and the man who should now bring forward the conqueror of Gaul as a vulgar usurper would be almost as much laughed at as would be that man who should insist that General Jackson destroyed American liberty when he removed the deposits from the national bank. The facts and fears of one generation often furnish material for nothing but jests and jeers to that generation's successors; and we who behold a million of men in arms, fighting for or against the American Union, and all calling themselves Americans, are astonished when we read or remember that our immediate predecessors in the political world went to the verge of madness on the Currency question. Perhaps the men of 1889 may be equally astonished, when they shall turn to files of newspapers that were published in 1862, and read therein the details of those events that now excite so painful an interest in hundreds of thousands of families. Nothing is so easy as to condemn the past, except the misjudging of the present, and the failure to comprehend the future.

Men of a very different stamp from the first of the Romans have been allowed the benefits that come from a rehearing of their causes. Robespierre, whose deeds are within the memory of many yet living, has found champions, and it is now admitted by all who can effect that greatest of conquests, the subjugation of their prejudices, that he was an honest fanatic, a man of iron will, but of small intellect, who had the misfortune, the greatest that can fall to the lot of humanity, to be placed by the force of circumstances in a position which would have tried the soundest of heads, even had that head been united with the purest of hearts. But the apologists of "the sea-green incorruptible," it must be admitted, have not been very successful, as the sence of mankind revolts at indiscriminate murder, even when the murderer's hands have no other stain than that which comes from blood,for that is a stain which will not "out"; not even printer's ink can erase or cover it; and the attorney of Arras must remain the Raw-Head and Bloody-Bones of history. Benedict Arnold has found no direct defender or apologist; but those readers who are unable to see how forcibly recent writers have dwelt upon the better points of his character and career, while they have not been insensible to the provocations he received, must have read very carelessly and uncritically indeed. Mr. Paget has all but whitewashed Marlborough, and has shaken many men's faith in the justice of Lord Macauley's judgement and in the accuracy of his assertions. Richard III., by all who can look through the clouds raised by Shakespeare over English history of the fifteenth century, is admitted to have been a much better man and ruler than were the average of British monarchs from the Conquest to the Revolution, thanks to the labors of Horace Walpole and Caroline Halsted, who, however, have only followed in the path struck out by Sir George Buck at a much earlier period. The case of Mary Stuart still remains unsettled, and bids fair to be the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case of history; but this is owing to the circumstance that that unfortunate queen is so closely associated with the origin of our modern parties that justice where her reputation is concerned is scarcely to be looked for. Little has been said for King John; and Mr. Woolryche's kind attempt to reconcile men to the name of Jeffreys has proved a total failure. Strafford has about as many admirers as enemies among those who know his history, but this is due more to the manner of his death than to any love of his life: of so much more importance is it that men should die well than live well, so far as the judgement of posterity is concerned with their actions.

Strafford's master, who so scandalously abandoned him to the headsman, owes the existence of the party that still upholds his conduct to the dignified manner in which he faced death, a death at which the whole world "assisted," or might have done so. Catiline, we believe, has found no formal defender, but the Catilinarian Conspiracy is now generally admitted to have been the Popish Plot of antiquity, with an ounce of truth to a pound of falsehood in the narratives of it that have come down to us from Rome's revolutionary age, in political pamphlets and party orations. Cicero's craze on the subject, and that tendency which all men have to overrate the value of their own actions, have made of the business in his lively pages a much more consequential affair than it really was. The fleas in the microscope, and there it will ever remain, to be mistaken for a monster. Truly, the Tullian gibbeted the gentleman of the Sergian gens. It must be confessed that Catiline was a proper rascal. How could he have been anything else, and be one of Sulla's men? And a proper rascal is an improper character of the very worst kind. Still, we should like to have had his marginal "notes" on Cicero's speeches, and on Sallust's job pamphlet. They would have been mighty interesting reading,as full of lies, probably, as the matter commented on, but not the less attractive on that account. What dull affairs libraries would be, if they contained nothing but books full of truth! The Greek tyrants have found defenders, and it has been satisfactorily made out that they were the cleverest men of their time, and that, if they did occasionally bear rather hard upon individuals, it was only because those individuals were so unreasonable as not to submit to be robbed or killed in a quiet and decorous manner. Mr. Grote's rehabilitation of the Greek sophists is a miracle of ingenuity and sense, and does as much honor to the man who wrote it as justice to the men of whom it is written.

Of the doubtful characters of history, royal families have furnished not a few, some of whom have stood in as bad positions as those which have been assigned to Robespierre and his immediate associates. Catharine de' Medici and Mary I. of England, the "Bloody Mary" of anti-Catholic localities, are supposed to be models of evil, to be in crinoline; but if you can believe Eugenio Albèri, Catharine was not the harlot, the tyrant, the poisoner, the bigot, and the son-killer that she passes for in the common estimation, and he has made out a capital defence for the dead woman whom he selected as his client. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew was not an "Italian crime," but a French coup d'état, and was as rough and coarse as some similar transactions seen by our grandfathers, say the September prison-business at Paris in 1792. As to Mary Tudor, she was an excellent woman, but a bigot; and if she did turn Mrs. Rogers and her eleven children out to the untender mercies of a cold world, by sending Mr. Rogers into a hot fire, it was only that souls might be saved from a hotter and a huger fire,a sort of argument the force of which we always have been unable to appreciate, no doubt because we are of the heretics, and never believed that persons belonging to our determination ought to be roasted. The incense of the stake, that was so sweet in ecclesiastical nostrils three hundred years ago, and also in vulgar nostrils wherever the vulgar happened to be of the orthodox persuasion, has become an insufferable stench to the more refined noses of the nineteenth century, which, nevertheless, are rather partial to the odor of the gallows. Miss Strickland and other clever historians may dwell upon the excellence of Mary Tudor's private character with as much force as they can make, or with much greater force they may show that Gardiner and other reactionary leaders were the real fire-raisers of her reign; but the common mind will ever, and with great justice, associate those loathsome murders with the name and memory of the sovereign in whose reign they were perpetrated.

The father of Mary I. stands much more in need of defence and apology than does his daughter. No monarch occupies so strange a position in history as Henry VIII. A sincere Catholic, so far as doctrine went, and winning from the Pope himself the title of Defender of the Faith because of his writing against the grand heresiarch of the age, he nevertheless became the chief instrument of the Reformation, the man and the sovereign without whose aid the reform movement of the sixteenth century would have failed as deplorably as the reform movements of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries had failed. A legitimate king, though the heir of a successful usurpation, and holding the royal prerogative as high as any man who ever grasped the sceptre, he was the tool of the mightiest of revolutionists, and poured out more royal and noble blood than ever flowed at the command of all the Jacobins and Democrats that have warred against thrones and dynasties and aristocracies. He is abhorred of Catholics, and Protestants do not love him; for he pulled down the old religious fabric of his kingdom, and furnished to the Reformers a permanent standing-place from which to move the world, while at the same time he slaughtered Protestants as ruthlessly as ever they were disposed of by any ruler of the Houses of Austria and Valois. Reeking with blood, and apparently insensible to anything like a humane feeling, he was yet popular with the masses of his subjects, and no small share of that popularity has descended to our time, in which he is admired by the unreflecting because of the boldness and dash of his actions and on account of the consequences of those actions, so that he is commonly known as "bluff King Hal," a title that speaks more as to the general estimate of his character than would a whole volume of professed personal panegyric, or of elaborate defence of his policy and his deeds. But this is not sufficient for those persons who would have reasons for their historical belief, and who seek to have a solid foundation for the faith they feel in the real greatness of the second Tudor king of England. Men of ability have occasionally sought to create an intelligible Henry VIII., and to cause us to respect one whose doings have so potently affected human affairs through ten generations, and the force of whose labors, whether those labors were blindly or rationally wrought, is apparently as unspent as it was on that day on which, having provided for the butchery of the noblest of his servants, he fell into his final sleep. At the head of these philosophic writers, and so far ahead of them as to leave them all out of sight, is Mr. James Anthony Froude, whose "History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth" has been brought down to the death of Mary I., in six volumes,another proof of the grand scale on which history is now written, in order that it may be read on the small scale; for it is not given to many men to have the time for study which even a moderate modern course of history requires in these active days. Mr. Froude is a very different writer from Dr. Nares, but the suggestions made to the heavy Doctor by Macaulay might be borne in mind by the lively historian. He should remember that "the life of man is now threescore years and ten," and not "demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence" as must necessarily be required for the perusal of a history which gives an octavo volume for every five years of the annals of a small, though influential monarchy.