S8 SIR EDWIN LANDSEER, R.A. 



cannot feel too grateful, and which every one ought fervently to pray may ever be her 

 glad inheritance. " Yet," says a profound writer of the last century, " it is wonderful 

 with what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced, 

 Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its 

 evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game — a proclamation, 

 an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the successful field, 

 but they die upon the bed of honour, resign their lives amidst the joys of conquest, 

 and, filled with England's glory, smile in death ! 



"The life of a modern soldier is ill-represented by heroic fiction. War has means of 

 destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and 

 ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small 

 part ever felt the stroke of an enemy ; the rest languished in tents and ships amidst 

 damps and putrefaction ; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless ; gasping and groaning, 

 unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery ; and 

 were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without 

 remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where 

 courage is useless and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and 

 armies sluggishly melted away." * 



Johnson died in 1784; and if he drew such a, picture from what happened before, 

 and during, his own lifetime, how would he have written concerning the wars that 

 followed the outbreak of the great Revolution in France almost to the present day ? 

 But he knew nothing of Marengo, of Jena, and of Austerlitz ; he heard not of the 



" Half a million of heroes, the glory of Gaul," 



whose bones were left on the snow-covered plains of Russia : he rejoiced not with the 

 victors at Trafalgar and Waterloo, nor with those who drove back the eagle of France 

 which had desolated the vineyards of Spain and Portugal. The days and the nights of 

 more than half a century had thrown successive light and shadow over his grave in 

 Westminster Abbey ere the cannon thundered at the gates of Sebastopol, the armies of 

 England were avenging the atrocities of Indian fanaticism, the fratricidal contest was 

 deluging with blood the continent of Northern America, and the well-disciplined hosts 

 of Germany were scattering, like leaves before the autumn blast, the brave but over- 

 matched legions of France. All that Johnson lived to know was nothing compared 

 with the havoc and desolation which the world has since witnessed : — 



" Hark to that war, whose swift and deafening peals 

 In countless echoes through the mountains ring, 



Dr. Johnson's " Thoughts on Transactions concerning the Falkland Islands." 



