The panic seized the men, and Talbot is swept away in the rout before a woman. In vain the Duke of Gloucester issued a proclamation to reassure his soldiers against the incantations of the girl; and the Duke of Bedford spoke of her as a disciple and limb of the fiend that used false enchantments and sorceries.

It was a panic as of Sisera's army-the Lord gave deliverance to Israel by the hand of a woman: Charles and his counselors were like the men of Reuben, for whose divisions there were great searchings of heart.

much belief in witchcraft, as to punish the unfortunate witch that fought on the losing side. In earlier times Joan of Arc would have been treated as an apparition from a higher world, or a century or two later, she would have been treated as a heroic but wrong-headed woman, a Charlotte Corday, or a Madame Krudener. But in the twilight of the fifteenth century her appearance was distorted, as objects are in that intermediate state between light and darkness. With alternate fits of cowardice and cruelty her enemies ran from her, and then took her and burned On both occasions it was her as a witch, while the Parliament of the sudden and supernatural courage of a Paris, more incredulous at first than the woman which kindled the flame in men's English, and afterward more completely hearts. As Joan held out a burning duped by her pretensions to prophecy, at torch, when in disguise she entered Roulast completed their infamy by consenting en, as a signal to the French outside, so to her death. Even Charles, who owed her mission was to lift up a signal to the every thing to her, did nothing toward fainting courage of her countrymen, and avenging her cause; but ten years after- to inspire them with some of her own ward contented himself with promising spirit. Women like these are to be rankthe restoration of her memory by the ed among the companions in the knightPope, and a reversal of the process. She hood of faith, whose achievements are was styled in that act, "a martyr to her unrolled to us in the eleventh of Hebrews: religion, her country, and her king." To" Women received their dead raised to this fair martyr the French owe the reconquest of France from the English. The words of promise which Shakspeare puts in her lips, were amply redeemed and made good:

Assigned am I to be the English scourge;
This night the siege assuredly I'll raise,
Expect Saint Martin's summer halcyon days,
Since I have entered into these wars.
Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught.
With Henry's death the English circle ends;
Dispersed all the glories it included.
Now am I like that proud insulting ship,
Which Cæsar and his fortune bears at once."
The event justified the boast. Orleans
was relieved, and boldly attacking the
English in their tents, she struck them
with such a panic that they were obliged
to raise the siege with precipitate haste.
As the faith of the French rose, so also
rose the fears of the English. God and
the saints had come down to take the side
of the oppressed against their oppressors.
It was in vain to resist the conviction and
to fight against it to the last, as stout-
hearted Talbot did.

"Pucelle or puzzel, dolphin or dogfish,
Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse's

heels,

And make a quagmire of your mingled

brains."

life again; and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance." Wherever there is faith on one side there will be panics on the other, for the assurance of divine help on one side is the assurance that the other side is fighting against God and the saints. No army long bears up against such a depressing conviction as this; it wastes its spirit away, as the dysentery caused by eating unripe grapes wasted away the bodies. of the Prussian invaders of France in 1792. They will either not come to the fight at all, or come up in such a faint-hearted way as if they knew what was before them, and felt that they deserved to be beaten.

We must return to Asia to write the history of panics. The Gorgon's head strikes no such terror on this side the Hellespont. In our Indian wars we have repeated in modern times the victories of Greece over Persia, of valor over numbers.

On the twenty-second June, 1757, the sun rose on General Clive, on the banks of the river Cossimbuzar. A toilsome march had to be made under an Indian sun in June, (for the sun fought against us then as a century after during the Indian Mutiny of 1857,) and late in the evening Clive and his little band took up its quar ters in a grove of mango trees near Plas

which wore the British uniform and were drilled by British officers-regiments which had won laurels, too, in campaigns from Pegu to Persia, turned round and ran before a few hundred Highlanders, as school-boys run at sight of a policeman. They had no confidence in each other, much less in their officers. It was a state of chronic panic, and to that we owe our mastery of India to this day. St. John Tucker well said, that it is not our might, nor our craft, much less our numbers, which holds India for us. Ours is an empire of opinion; an invincible persuasion possesses the Hindoo that one pale face is equal in the day of battle to ten of themselves. The Beloochees said of Sir Charles Napier, that the tramp of his war-horse was heard two miles off, and the men of Nicholson's regiment were found to adore him as a god, by name Nikul-Seyn.

sey, within a mile of the enemy. Surajah Dowlah, the Nabob of Bengal, had an army of fifty thousand infantry, armed with matchlocks, spears, rockets, and bows; eighteen thousand cavalry, well mounted and accoutred, and fifty pieces of cannon, for the most part twenty-four and thirty-two pounders, which were clumsily mounted on wooden carriages, and drawn by an elephant and forty or fifty horses. To oppose these Clive had no more than three thousand men of all arms, of whom not more than one thousand were Europeans, and the rest Madras Sepoys. The battle of Plassey is the history of one of Alexander's victories over Darius. Surajah Dowlah's artillery began the action, but did as little execution as the elephants and castles of Darius on the Macedonian phalanx, while the few fieldpieces of the English produced great effect. Clive continued on the defensive Asiatic armies have shown us the art of until about two P. M. when the Nabob, turning a victory into a defeat. Given a intimidated by the fall of a favorite chief, horde of men with very little knowledge ordered a retreat. This is the turning- of fighting, and no interest whatever in point in an Asiatic army. At best it is a the cause for which they are fighting, and mob of fighting men, which bears down we have at once the conditions requisite with its own weight against the enemy's to produce a panic. We may expect a lines, but when it has to repeat the Parth- panic in such a situation as this, just as ian maneuver, and retreat fighting, it we may expect to find a toad-stool in invariably falls into disorder, and the rout the stump of an old tree, or bulrushes becomes a run for dear life. So it was on in a marshy hollow. Asia is as indigthis day. It was a regular stampede of enous of panics as it is of the cholera. wild and affrighted buffaloes. Not more Hindoos fight under this pall thrown than five hundred fell by the enemy's over them by the king of terrors, as sword, but more than ten times that num- the Persians fought in the shade of ber were either wounded or missing. No their innumerable darts. The European muster-roll was ever called again of that general who marches out to fight Chiarmy of sixty thousand men; like a fag- nese and Hindoos, reckons upon a diverot of sticks it fell to pieces at a stroke sion in his favor caused by the god Pan, as of the conqueror's sword. Next day much as Bacchus reckoned on the assistSurajah Dowlah fled in disguise from ance of his ally in the celebrated expediMoorshedabad, and a creature of Clive's tion to India. It would almost cause a was set up on the Durbar in his stead, panic in the European lines if they found while the reality and even the symbols of it otherwise. Whenever Hindoos or Chisovereignty passed away to the English, nese stand to their guns we begin to suswith whom they have remained to this pect that there are French or Russian day. officers among them. For a long time The history of India is full of these we could not believe that_the_Sikh artilnarratives of battle, stoutly begun, butlery was not pointed by French gunners. ending in a panic, a rout, a deposition, and the annexation of the province to our still increasing empire. Sir Henry Laurence said of the Sikhs, that they were not educated up to the point when the soldier in the ranks can trust that his right-hand man is not planning to run away. Never was this more exemplified than during the Indian Mutiny in 1857. The regiments

It was asserted with equal confidence that the Russian uniform was to be seen in the Taku forts. Panic is our natural ally in our wars in the east; we think ourselves badly used if he does not overturn the baggage-wagons, cut the bullock's traces, and set an elephant or two mad with thirst and fear, and so turn things topsyturvy in the rear that there is no making

head against us in front. A panic is thus | colony, or pay the national debt by comas much a part of our materiel de guerre mon-sense. So as generalship is the art in the East as a balloon is of the French, of which Americans are generally ignoor a stink-pot of the Chinese. There rant, every second man you meet is a must be fightings without, but also fears general, and is ready to lead an army to within, or else a handful of Europeans battle under the strategy of commoncould never conquer or hold India to this sense. A great deal of uncommon non day. sense has been talked about the early wars of the French Revolution, as if Moreau, Dumouriez, and Jourdan gained their great victories by forgetting the art of war and throwing themselves on the enemy like a pack of wolves on a caravan of peaceful travelers. So far from this, their victories were the victories of masters in the art of war, against bunglers. Not to speak of Valmy, which after all was only a cannonade, and not an engage ment at close quarters, Dumouriez outgeneraled the Duke of Brunswick by his march on the Argonne Forest, which stopped the march of the allied army on Paris in 1792, and saved the Republic. Dumouriez put his finger on the map and exclaimed: "This is the Thermopyle of France." On the fourth of September, by a rapid movement in the face of the enemy, the bold and adroit Frenchman had occupied the main passes of the forest, and had taken up a position of great strength at Grandpre. The weather was wet, the country was flooded, but Dumou riez' great difficulty was to bring his raw and inexperienced troops to face the Prussians, whom Frederick the Great had led to victory. Even five days before Valmy they fled screaming before the Prussians. But by exhortation and menace he inspired the timid with some ardor, and his recruits were rallied to the cry of vive la patrie. But Dumouriez was too skillful a general to hazard an engagement at close quarters with raw against disciplined troops. He maneuvered his men, marched and countermarched them, and finally, by a succession of feints, tired out the enemy, and held his ground till the arrival of Kellermann with fifteen thousand men, encouraged him to engage the enemy, which he did at Valmy.

But the Asiatic panic is of one kind, the American of another; they differ as the tiger differs from the jaguar. The fear of undisciplined masses is always a terrible thing, whether in civilized or in semi-civilized societies; but as the causes of this panic differ, so it differs in its effects. In Asiatic armies a panic arises from indiscipline produced by want of confidence between man and man: in America, from indiscipline produced by undue confidence, together with want of military training. In Asia there is the defect, in America the excess of public spirit, and so opposite causes produce the same effect. The political spirit is nearly dead in an Asiatic community. The king has gathered up all the functions of government into his own person, and so, if he is an imbecile or a madman-to one of which extremes absolute power invariably leads men-the condition of things falls into a state resembling that of an enginedriver drunk or asleep by the stoke-hole, and the ship driving through the waters at the mercy of the winds and waves. In America an opposite kind of evil is at work, political life is there diffused through the mass, so that every one on board, from the captain to the cabin-boy, thinks himself fit to work the ship's engines; there is no division of labor, no such thing as professional statesmanship. The art of war and the art of government are thought to be born with all men as digging and delving. All men can dig, because they are the sons of Adam, the first gardener, and all women spin, because they are daughters of Eve, the first spinster. It is a point of honor with democracy, to prove all men equal on the tented field, for what comes easier than fighting? No man, says Archbishop Whately, thinks of deciding by common-sense in the craft or calling in which he is skilled. He only decides by common-sense in a professional matter of which he knows nothing. So physicians set a great store by common-sense in law, and the lawyers in physic. Engineers who would never build a bridge by common sense, will give a constitution to a

The cannonade of Valmy was the first action fought by the Republican levies against the disciplined armies of Prussia and Austria. The relief of Lille, in October of the same year, was followed by the battle of Jemmapes, in which, though the French lost more than the Austrians, they succeeded in routing them for the first time. Of the composition of the army

there are discordant accounts. Lamartine represents the cavalry as consisting of old soldiers, but says that the mass was composed of volunteers inexperienced in maneuver. Napoleon, on the other hand, at St. Helena, said that the Republic was not saved by the recruits and volunteers, but by the old troops of the Monarchy. We incline to agree with the soldier rather than the civilian. And if proof were wanting to confirm this opinion, it lies in this, that the French were generally successful by land, but invariably defeated by sea. Now, it is well known that while the land forces were commanded mainly by trained officers, men who, like the young Napoleon, had passed through the military schools of France under the monarchy, in the navy it was quite otherwise. The officers were almost all taken from the upper classes, who emigrated after the events of 1792, and so France had to fight her battles by sea with maritime conscripts commanded by captains of smacks and brigantines, who were good Jacobins and ardent Democrats, but who knew no more naval tactics than could be gained on a coasting voyage from Nantes to Bordeaux. Admiral de la Graviere, one of the few survivors of the French revolutionary war, candidly admits that France lost all chance of disputing for the command of the sea for want of skilled seamen. It has been calculated that even before the close of 1791 three fourths of the officers of the royal navy had either retired or been dismissed. Their place was supplied from the merchant service, with a very searching test as to politics, but with a very slight test as to service and skill.

He fled full soon

On the first of June,

But he bade the rest keep fighting."* Thus the lesson from the wars of the French Revolution, so far from disproving the superiority of discipline over valor, strongly confirms it. The French were victorious by land because they were better commanded, and as uniformly they were defeated at sea because they had no commanders at all. They acted as those shrewd people do who trust to professional rules on the subject of which they have some knowledge, but to common-sense, in a matter in which they have no knowledge at all, and who find out to their surprise, that common - sense will not weather a ship on a lee shore, or tie up an artery, or carry a man through an action of trespass and battery. If they had trusted their own sense less, and the sense of a professional man more, they would not have to rue their loss by sea when it was too late.

The Federalists in America are likely to find out by land what the French dis covered after eleven years of uniform defeat and disgrace by sea, that great com. manders are not extemporized, and that courage is no substitute for professional skill. From the first of June, 1794, to the twenty-fifth October, 1805, when the French flag was struck down never tc float again at sea during the wars of Napoleon, France was endeavoring to force a marine by all that skill, energy, and foresight could contrive. But it was all to no purpose. The school of arms which is to do service in war, must be prepared in peace. The Revolution had swept the During the action of the first of June, navy clean of all mind, and when mind 1794, the French Admiral Villaret Joy- came to be applied to the marine it was euse carried on board his flag-ship, the Mon- too late. The English had got the start, tagne, a Commissioner from the terrible the prestige of victory had already set in Convention-Jean Bon St. Andrè-who, on their side, and France would have had though wholly ignorant of seamanship, to gain a few Niles and Trafalgars before and indeed at one time a Calvinist divine, her fleets could ever expect to cope on had come on board and assumed the tone equal terms with those of England. So of a great commander. As Lord Howe low had her spirit fallen by sea, that to bore down on the Montagne, closely fol- escape a defeat was considered a victory, lowed by five ships of his own fleet, Jean to creep round the coast, giving the EngBon St. Andrè, thinking the Commission-lish fleet the slip in the night was a bold er's place was the place of safety, or perhaps mindful of his former clerical calling, retired to the cockpit. It is to this that the Anti-Jacobin song alludes

"Poor John was a gallant captain,
In battles much delighting;

maneuver, and to fight a running fight with a habor of refuge in sight, was a daring exploit, deserving at least a medal, or a paragraph in the Moniteur. Public

* Quoted from Lord Stanhope's Life of Pitt, vol. ii. p 241.

spirit is a good thing, it is the raw mate- | in numbers we do not fear that Prussia rial out of which soldiers and sailors are could make head against any army which made. But the raw material is one thing, France could launch against her across the manufactured article another, and the Rhine. But when it comes to real woe to the nation which in its strait and fighting, the difference between old solagony calls on its levies to face armies diers who have fought in real battles, and bronzed in battle. So the Prussian Land- those who have only fought in sham batsturm went down at Jena before the tles, is tremendous. Amid the hail of army of the Pyramids, Italy, and Auster- bullets, and the sights and sounds of real litz. It was not till eight years' humilia- fighting, even old soldiers sicken, and tion had called out in Prussia a spirit as young soldiers drop, and are benumbed heroic as that of the French Republicans with fear. If there are not veterans then in 1792, supported by a discipline as stern mixed up with the young soldiers, they and exact, that Prussia took revenge for may fall into a panic at any moment, Jena at Leipzig and Waterloo, and set which will sweep away generals, bagtled old scores which we hope may not gage and all, in one pell-mell of ruiu. soon be opened again on either side. At But if added to this, the officers are as inthis moment we should tremble for Prus- experienced as the men, nothing can save sia if she had to meet France single-hand- such an army from a ruin which is worse ed on the Rhine. In discipline and even than defeat.

From Chambers's Journal.

GIANT TREES.

Ir is a strange and impressive consideration, that many trees now standing began to flourish before the commencement of the oldest empires on record; witnessed the rise and decay of the Assyrian and Babylonian powers; beheld the Egyptian dynasties in their cradle; and saw pass by them, like meteors, the warlike monarchies of Macedon and Rome. Such are the great chestnut-trees on the slopes of Etna, and those enormous representatives of ancient forests observed by our older travelers in China, which being preserved by a harmless superstition from the ax, are doubtless still where they were two centuries ago, though recent visitors to the Flowery Land have either not penetrated into the provinces where they are found, or else have omitted to describe them. In some parts of the East, as in the larger islands, for example, of the Indian Archipelago, trees are more remarkable for their immense loftiness, and the distance from the ground free of boughs, than for mere girth. On the north-western prom

ontory of Borneo, as well as in parts of Australia, trees have been seen which though not more than eighteen or twenty feet in circumference, display a clear straight shaft of ninety feet below the spread of the branches, which at that elevation throw themselves forth on all sides, and constitute a close pyramid of unfailing verdure to the summit.

Africa, the abode of startling contrasts, where deserts of absolute barrenness run in vast belts parallel with the rankest vegetation in the world, presents us with nothing in the form of a tree more marvelous than the baobab, which rises from the plain like a regular mound of foliage, one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and from seventy-five to eighty feet high, thickly sprinkled in the hottest month of summer with white flowers, six inchea across. It would be difficult to imagine any thing more beautiful than this huge pile of green leaves, contrasting with the snowy blossoms, which, as they open their dewy chalices in the morning, diffuse far