Of no battle have the details been so much
discussed, contested, and distorted. German
and even French authors have claimed the
victory for their respective nations. The
latest French specimen we have already
quoted. The arguments of M. Gozlan may
be judged of by his facts. He finds Genappe
between Soigne and Waterloo, which really
stands seven miles beyond Waterloo. He
makes the French occupy Mont St. Jean,
and the English stand posted near Waterloo;
so that the field where the Lion and the
monuments of Colonel Gordon and the
Prussians stand, could not be the place of
battle, after all, though all the world beside
thinks it was. He confuses La Haye Sainte
with La Belle Alliance, and so on, in hopeless
confusion, to the end of the chapter.

It is of little use contending as to whose was
the victory—it was a victory which wrung
from the firm heart of the Iron Duke, in his
despatch to Prince Schwarzenberg, these memorable
words:—"Our battle on the 18th was one
of giants; and our success was most complete,
as you perceive. God grant I may never see
another! for I am overwhelmed with grief
for the loss of my old friends and comrades."

We say Amen! May the world never
see such another vast and fearful field of
carnage. Waterloo was the terrible close of
a terrible reign of Moloch, which began with
the attempts of despotic powers to resist
the progress of liberty, and ended in this
signal destruction of the great genius of
conquest and subjugation which they had
raised into being. A new era has happily
begun. Six-and-thirty years of peace have
followed this last grand catastrophe; and
Great Britain, which played so brilliant yet
so unhappy a part in that wild drama, has
been the first to acknowledge her error by
sanctioning the French Revolution of 1848,
which swept away the last persons and
principles for which all this blood was shed. At
this moment, railways and steam-ships are
superseding cannon, and a large class of the
community are calling on statesmen and
governments to recognise Mrs. Browning's
simple but sublime truth, that

      . . "The world is past the mere brute blow,
       Given or taken. Children use the fist
       Until they are of age to use the brain."

Pondering on these facts—the sanguinary
gloom of the past, the bright and glowing
dawn of the future—we descended the Mount
of the Lion, and pursued our visit to various
quarters of the great, gory field, where heroic
hearts were crushed by thousands, or we
turned to where some one of the many sad
and touching stories told by survivors drew
our sympathies to the spot. Where we now
walked in the green corn, we thought of those
who all night long had lain there wounded,
amidst perished and perishing thousands;
where they heard the agonized groan, and
saw the prowling plunderer doing his base
and often murderous work. Especially did
the image of that young British officer come
before us, who perished by the plunderer's
bayonet rather than suffer his mother's
picture to be torn from him.

Beneath our feet slept seventy thousand
men—but above them waved the green corn,
and sang the lark, and shone the bright
exulting sun. The victims of the past sleep
deep in the repose of nearly forty years,
but—

      "I saw around me the wide fields revive
       With fruits and fertile promise, and the spring
       Come forth her work of gladness to contrive,
       With all her reckless birds upon the wing;"

and it seemed to me to symbolize a more
glorious future. I felt that it was good to
have trodden this famous field, whose aspect,
in bright contrast to its memories, assure us
that—in the words of Elizabeth Browning—

      .  .  .  .  .  .  .  "Drums and battle-cries
           Go out in music of the morning star—
       And soon we shall have thinkers in the place
           Of fighters; each found able as a man
       To strike electric influence through a race
           Unstayed by city wall, or barbican."

            LAMBS TO BE FED.

"FEED my lambs." It was Our Saviour's
last injunction. In all inquiries into the
condition of the "lower orders" of the people—
into the miseries which harass, or the crimes
which terrify the country—we are met by that
portentous phenomenon known as juvenile
depravity. To whoever has determined to
look below the surface of national affairs, this
is the first thing that presents itself. The
inquirer's journey is like that of Æneas into
the infernal regions of Virgil; no sooner had
the Trojan wanderer crossed the Black River,
and lulled the three–headed dog, than the
very first objects he encountered were the
souls of infants weeping in the threshold.*
The poet who fancied this, surely conceived it
to be the most horrible image that he could
commence his pictures of terror with.
Supposing we were to look for a little while at
our regions of this class—regions not
mythological, but very real, and very melancholy
indeed? It so happens at this time, that—
to keep up for an instant our Virgilian metaphor—
we, like Æneas, have a guide into the
gloomy realms. Æneas had his Sibyl; and to
us a female guide presents herself.

* Continue auditæ voces, vagitus et ingens,
          lnfantunique animæ flentes in limine primo.

An earnest, grave Christian lady, Miss
Mary Carpenter, has recently published a
book on "Reformatory Schools," wherein she
deals at large with the question of the children
of the perishing and dangerous classes,
and the juvenile offenders of the country; and
gives us, from all sorts of documents, and from