ment passed the defile and formed in front of the outlet of Augetz, so as to prevent the French from turning it; the other regiments, aided by a single remaining brigade of artillery, interposed between the mass of helpless infantry and the French horsemen who strove to break in upon them; and though exposed during this trying service to the plunging fire of the French artillery, they bravely maintained their ground till the perilous retreat was completely effected. It was owing to the courage and energy of General Stutterheim that the remnants of the left wing were thus preserved; reduced to 10,000 men, to one-third of their original number, they joined the rest of the army in the position of Hodijetz, and with their passage of the defile ended what the French soldiers long termed "the battle of the three emperors." The cavalry under Prince John of Lichtenstein continued to occupy the position in front of Austerlitz. From three o'clock in the afternoon both armies remained tranquilly within half cannon-shot of each other, and separated only by a narrow valley. After nightfall the allies began their retreat towards Göring, unpursued by the enemy. The disaster of Austerlitz, the most fatal ever before experienced by a modern army, cost the allies 30,000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners; eighty pieces of artillery were left on the field, and forty stand of colours fell into the hands of the conquerors: the vanquished were not merely defeated, they were completely routed, and rendered for the moment totally unfit for further operations. "The sun of Austerlitz" had shone upon a scene of ruin which the annals of ages could not equal; but "events were on the gale" destined to reduce even this giant combat to an action of secondary importance. The loss of the French, if we believe their official bulletins, did not exceed 2500 men; but as the battle was severely contested along the whole line, from the heights of Pratzen to those of Dwarashna, they must evidently have suffered a great deal more, and it is known that, soon after the armistice, the hospitals of Brünn contained no less than 14,000 sick and wounded French soldiers. VOL. XXXIII. NO. CXCVIII, When we consider that the army had marched from the camp of Boulogne into the heart of Moravia, and been there engaged in military operations during the depth of winter, we can easily understand that the number of sick must have been considerable; but making every allowance for them, the state of the hospitals still shews how little reliance is to be placed on Napoleon's official reports. General Stutterheim tells us that the Austrian soldiers fought during this ill-fated day with a degree of gallantry which amply acquitted them from all charge of having occasioned the disaster of the campaign : the Russians, he says, also fought with great bravery at the commencement of the action, but slackened in their efforts and energy as the difficulties of the contest augmented: the French, he allows, displayed the most admirable soldiership from first to last. And it is, in fact, to this superior soldiership and to nothing else that the whole of this splendid victory must be ascribed; for it is due as little to any want of skill displayed by the allies, as to the great skill supposed to have been evinced by Napoleon. The attempt to turn the right of the French was in itself deserving of no great praise or blame. If executed with promptness and energy it might, when the French advanced to Pratzen, have led to the most brilliant results, because it would have taken in reverse the troops engaged with the right and centre of the allies; had the latter held their ground long enough to admit of the movement being duly executed. The French reserve would, no doubt, have interposed; but 12,000 or 15,000 men-twenty battalionscould not have arrested the mass of 30,000 opponents, well provided with cavalry and artillery, unless we ascribe to the French soldiers so great a superiority over their adversaries as to render totally needless all further proofs of our present proposition. The sudden advance of the centre and left of the French army has been described as a movement that evinced the highest military genius, and decided the fate of the day. But here, as on all occasions on which we find excess of praise so lavishly bestowed Χ Χ on the skill of the French emperor, the proofs in support of the declarations are totally wanting; for if we are to receive mere results as evidence of genius, we shall soon come to times when those results tell exactly the other way. The advance of the French rather endangered than secured the victory, for the line of the rivulet was extremely strong, and by crossing it they placed themselves on equal ground with their adversaries, and offered their right flank to the left wing of the allies then moving upon Solkonitz, had the latter been able to make a corresponding movement. As General Kutusoff told the quartermaster-general, the Russian troops were not quick at manoeuvring, and here they not only neglected to fall upon the flank of the advancing French, but seem to have offered little resistance when assailed themselves. Against other enemies, an attack on the right flank of a column moving by its left led to a very different result. At the battle of Toulouse, Marshal Beresford's division, moving in column, left in front, was attacked by the division of General Taupin, and the French, recollecting Austerlitz, perhaps, thought that the onset was of itself to prove decisive of the fate of the day; but the British wheeled simply to the right, received and defeated the assailants, pursued them up the hill, and gained the victory. Though the battle-ground on which these actions were fought was very different, the principle was exactly the same; and had the Russians been able to form up and meet the French front to front, the boasted advance of the latter would have been to their profit, whatever the ultimate result might have proved, for they would still have fought with more chances of success on level ground, than after forcing their way through the ravine and defile of Solkonitz. It may, perhaps, be said that Napoleon knew his adversaries and acted accordingly: any thing may be said; but what proof have we that he knew them here, when we shall find that he knew them not at a later period and after greater experience? The allied army had experienced so much difficulty in finding provisions on their advance, that it was resolved to relinquish the road to Olmütz, and retire by Göding into Hungary. They consequently left the position of Hodjegist after midnight, and reached Czeitch early in the morning; and on the following day the main body crossed the March at Göding, and arrived at Holitch in a very weak and reduced state, and with few men in the ranks. A mere look at the map, and a comparison of distances, will shew how little foundation there is for Napoleon's assertion, that their retreat was already cut off,-unless we suppose, indeed, that the French could march much faster by deep and miry cross-roads than the allies-already many hours in advance of them-could do by a direct highroad. Count Bagration having been withdrawn from Rausnitz in the evening after the battle, necessarily left the Olmütz road open to the French, who, sending some light cavalry to scour it, captured a great quantity of baggage, which had followed the allies in their advance. On the morning of the 3d of December, Prince John of Lichtenstein a brave soldier in the field, but from first to last the advocate of France in the Austrian councilalready arrived at Napoleon's headquarters, with a message from the Emperor of Austria, proposing an armistice, as well as an interview, preparatory to a negotiation for peace. The gratified victor gladly acceded to the overture. The armistice was to commence on the morning of the 4th, and the interview to take place immediately afterwards. The The two emperors met in the open air at a mill near the village of Niskowitch, and Napoleon, if we believe his assertion, told the Austrian, in conducting him to the fire, “I receive you in the only palace I have inhabited these two months." other, in reply, said, "You have turned your residence to such good account that you ought to be satisfied with it." If Napoleon made this speech, he forgot the palace of Schönbrün and the noblest palaces of which southern Germany can boast, which had been his habitations since he crossed the Rhine. The commander of an army need rarely bivouac, and his duty rather calls upon him to avoid needless personal hardship, as the mental hardships he has to undergo are amply sufficient for him. The speech was, no doubt, devised afterwards for effect, and repeated for the same purpose by his credulous biographers. At the interview, Napoleon makes the Emperor Francis say of the English, "They are a nation of merchants who would set the Continent on fire to secure for themselves the commerce of the world." Bignon himself has evidently some misgivings on the subject of these words, and asks why they should not have been uttered. The reason seems a plain one; the Emperor Francis was a gentleman in the best acceptation of the word, at no time likely to make a vulgar speech, and least of all to assert of his late allies what he knew to be a falsehood. The pretended speech bears, besides, the full impress of the Napoleon manufactory. The interview of the two emperors lasted a considerable time, and at its termination, Generals Savary and Stutterheim were sent to acquaint the Emperor of Russia with the arrangement, and were ordered, in the event of obtaining his accession to the armistice, to arrest all further movements of the troops, particularly of Davoust's corps, which was moving in the direction of Göding, where General Meerfeld's Austrian division was stationed. The two generals found the Czar at the castle of Hollitz in the night between the 4th and 5th, and obtained his ready assent to the armistice. The time and place of this interview shew the falsehood of Napoleon's statement, when he says that the Emperor Alexander asked General Savary whether he could retire in safety, and was told by the French general that he could do so, on pledging his word to retire immediately with his army into Russia. General Stutterheim, a man of high honour and veracity, does not say a single word of such a conversation having taken place; besides which, the emperor and his army had already crossed the March on the morning of the 4th, had all Hungary open to them, and were already far in advance of the French. From Hollitz the military emissaries went in search of Davoust, who was only at Josephsdorp, a march from Göding, where he could only arrive on the 5th, after fighting General Meerfeld, who occupied the strong pass of Lüdschutz. It is a painful task for a writer thus to dedicate page after page to the exposure of gross and glaring falsehoods, insulting to ordinary judg ments, and which the world, in deference to some new-fangled doctrines of liberality, deem themselves bound to receive with the most implicit faith and without the slightest examination. On the very day on which the armistice of Austerlitz was signed, the Archduke Ferdinand defeated the Bavarians under General Wrede at Iglau in Bohemia, and was already on the French line of communication on one side, while the Archduke Charles, having defeated and distanced Massena, was rapidly advancing on the other with an unbroken army of 85,000 men, eager to avenge the disasters which had befallen their country. At Göding and Kremsir were 15,000 men under Essen and Meerfeld, who had taken no share in the battle; but, by this hasty submission, all the advantages that might have been derived from time and the resources of a great empire, and the dangerous position in which Napoleon had placed himself, were wholly sacrificed; and the baseness of Prussian diplomacy soon completed the full measure of calamity, which the inability of Austrian and Russian commanders had brought upon Germany. 66 THIS planet of ours, which is a beggar of light from the sun and moon, is peopled with beggars of love from one another. Give, give, give!" is still the cry, from the wealthiest who cannot count their worth, to the "puling petitioner of Hallowmass," who is equally unable to do so, for he has no worth to count. "All the world's a poor-house, And all the men and women merely beggars," from the sovereign who "Craves fit disposition for himself, to the condemned culprit, who, in precisely the same words (having first taken his exception to capital punishment), may beg for the more convenient arrangements of transportation. Beggars are of three kinds: those who beg for themselves only, those who beg for themselves and others, and those who beg for others alone. Beggars for themselves only are either stationary, locomotive, or epistolary. The most obtrusive of stationary beggars are those supplicating impertinences on the wallsthose mural disfigurements of the bill-sticker, which "he who runs may read," and many of which he who regards may rue. Ere now walls have really spoken, as all may remember who were wont to traverse old Fleet Market some years back, when a voice used to accost them with, "Pray remember the poor debtors!" That voice is silenced now, though the debtor still lives in the memory of his grateful creditors, and is daily becoming a more interesting claimant on the sympathies of those who have lost nothing by him. The particular locality to which we have referred is also associated with another beggar of the stationary class. We alJude to the celebrated holder of that lucrative "crossing" which connects the extremities of Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, the sweeping argument of whose broom rendered the way clear to the apprehensions of the most delicate shoe-leather, and, by a peculiar process of alchemy, converted the soil, which was obnoxious to the foot-passenger, into gold-dust, most productive to himself. With his hat in one hand and his broom in the other, he aptly proclaimed his "suit and service," his submission to the "voluntary principle," and his determination to deserve its produce. At all events, he manifested his worthiness as a philanthropic labourer "in the way of common tread," and his right, after having brushed through the jostling day, to retire to the "Broom grove, whose shadow the dismissed sweeper loves," there to change his hat for a jug, his besom for a pipe, and certain of his coppers for brown ale and a savoury supper. The crossing-sweeper is the best of beggars, for he is of all the least a swindler. There can be no deception in the cleanliness of his crossing or the wear and tear of his broom. He only begs you to appreciate the value of dry feet, and is therein but an honourable rival of the apothecary, who may be called in to cure the cold which he prevents. There is something touching in seeing him often absorbed in the self-imposed duties of his calling— if, indeed, that can be called a calling which is more distinguished by a ready will than slavish obedience. He who does the work of a slave without a slave's compulsion is the worthiest (because the most practical) advocate of the slave's emancipation. We say, then, there is something touching in the devotional, untiring, and confiding perseverance with which he follows up his adopted labour, sweeping away right and left, and backwards and forwards, while "herds" of "fat and greasy citizens sweep on" in their selfish pursuits as heedless of his industry as he of their neglect. Dandyism, with its patent shining boot, and Beauty, with her thin-soled sandal shoe, bid him, unrewarded, get out of the way which he has, as it were, carpeted for their comfort. Hob-nailed Rusticity, independent of any care for picking its way, only stamps from its feet the dirt it has collected from other quarters; and the equipage of Fashion rattles over it, contemptuously flinging the offcast mud into the eyes of the sweeper, who is only left to recover his sight and sweep away again. Contrasted with him is the still more stationary beggar, who is as fixed by the road-side as a milestone. He is of two kinds—the loquacious and the silent. The loquacious, more especially if he be blind, ceases not from morn till night, from day to day, to cry down one's rising pity with most monotonous unpersuasiveness. There be of these who have often preserved to our pockets the penny which we have really wanted to get rid of; fellows who cannot see even with their mental vision, and who therefore cannot apprehend the repulsiveness of their complainings in the ears, at least, of the romantic pitiful, who are ever most touched by the "silent sorrows." The venting of loud and continuous plaints, like murky smoke issuing from a chimney, only shews the working of an artificial woe-manufactory, whose gloomy wares are produced by the habitual movements of mechanical utterance: whereas your silent beggar, like a chimney smokeless, indicates the desolate hearth and "the keen grate unconscious of a fire." The one only suffocates the nicer sense of compassion, while the other, flattering the imagination by the respect which allows its independent exercise, leaves us to throw in a pennyworth of the sympathy which may or may not have been rightly excited. The knowing beggar will, therefore, not be "taxed for speech." As "silence is the perfectest herald of joy," so is it of grief. Silence, as Shakspeare says, is " gracious." " My gracious Silence, hail!" "With silence (beggars) be thou politic." "Your silence and your patience speak to the people and they pity thee." But there is a variety of this class of beggar, which, though not loquacious, is not literally silent, since he shews his accomplished penmanship upon the pavement in chalks black, white, red, and blue, telling us in flourishes which make writing-masters despair how stones may be made to speak, "The ocean I've cross'd, My limb I have lost." Not unfrequently a portrait of his ship wins a copper from a passing brother tar, who would fain engage him as an amanuensis. Or he fascinates the fishmonger with the profile of a salmon, so true to nature that suggestion can add nothing further than a garnish of fennel. Authority is unusually lenient in respect to this fashion of stopping up the queen's highway. In no other example is the public respect for genius so indulgently shewn. perishability of the work is perhaps its safeguard during the passing hour. Its assured destruction even by the hand which has effected it, gives interest to its temporary existWe believe this to be a thriving branch of beggary. "The very stones prate of its whereabout." ence. The Another sample of the silent beggar is afforded in the case of him who displays a neatly-written record of his history in detail. But brevity is the soul of woe as of wit, and he does best who hangs to his chest a simple ticket of pasteboard whereon are inscribed the stirring words,— "I AM HUNGRY." And not only is he "hungry," but withal most patient under its unrelieved endurance; for, pass him again and again, and drop in a copper each time; go famished to your luncheon, and return in your walk to revive an appetite for dinner; there he and hunger still sit, throned on the self-same stone, or reclining against the same road-side bank, bidding the passengers do homage. "I am hungry," says his ticket; "all but starved," says his famished aspect; yet he rushes not with the given twopence to the bakehouse! He is no Otway; but, perhaps, he has heard of him. He dreads the chance of choking, and feeds upon thought till supper-time, when the appetite being sobered by reflection, and the digestive faculties braced by the open air, he sits down to a steaming dish of tripe and onions with a |