[8] "Napoleon hummed the well-known air, _Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre_, when he crossed the Niemen to commence the Russian campaign. The French nurses used to frighten their children with stories of _Marlbrook_!--as the Orientals, when their horses start, say they see the shadow of Richard Coeur-de-Lion crossing their path."--_Pref._, iv. v.
We have taken the trouble of being thus particular, out of justice to Mr Alison; for without this detail, neither the value nor the extent of his labours could have been appreciated by the reader; who, if he share our fate, will be carried evenly and rapidly along, from the beginning to the end of these two eloquent volumes, charmed with the result, but never adverting to the laborious and praiseworthy _process_. And we repeat that all this is thoroughly _tanti_--as a matter of even justice to the sedulously-slandered illustrious dead, in this respect sharing the fate of a prophet, who is not without honour, _save in his own country_, (for abroad, Marlborough's memory is radiant with imperishable glory,) and also because, as we have intimated, there is a portentous resemblance between Marlborough's time and our own. He was the great champion of Protestantism, in its tremendous encounter with Popery, of which Louis XIV. was the worthy and formidable exponent. "The siege of Lille," says Mr Alison, at the close of his first volume, "one of the most memorable and glorious of which there is any mention in history, like those of Troy and Carthage in ancient, and Malta and Jerusalem in modern times, was not merely the theatre of contest between rival powers, but of struggle between contending principles and rival faiths. The great contest between the Romish Church and the Reformation ultimately issued, as all such schisms in belief must issue, in a terrible war. Louis was the head of the ancient, Marlborough the champion of the new, faith. The circumstance of the Spanish Succession was but an accident, which brought into the field forces on either side, previously arranged under these opposite banners. It was the great division of men's minds which drew them forth, in such strength, into the field of war."[9] Now let any _thinking_ person of 1852 survey the existing attitudes of these fearful and implacable belligerents, as exhibited in their relations, both in this country and on the Continent, and in certain recently-developed political conditions, which they are rapidly moulding, and arranging with a view to action on a scale such as the world has perhaps never witnessed; and the "boldest may hold his breath for a time." He will at length, probably, ask, not without anxiety--Where are we to look for _our_ Marlborough by and by? and perhaps he may add, with an indignant sigh, We would not treat him as our fathers treated _theirs_!