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language may be here, such signs of alienation have already appeared in the publications of our transatlantic brethren, that without continued care, the writings of Johnson and Burke will, in a few centuries, be as unintelligible to the inhabitants of Columbia, as our own Alfred's translation of Boethius would now be to a circle of fair Blue-stockings in the metropolis of England.

The author before us is the best writer of English, in our estimation of that term, that America has produced since the era of her independence. He seems to have studied our languagewhere alone it can be studied in all its strength and perfectionin the writings of our old sterling authors; and in working these precious mines of literature, he has refined for himself the ore which there so richly abounds. His work, too, is exclusively English, and is not indebted for any of its charms to the common aid of classical allusion or quotation;-of which we do not recollect a single instance in either of his volumes. We take leave of him with the highest respect for his talents, and a warm feeling of regard for those amiable and benevolent qualities of heart and mind which beam through every page of his book.

ART. IV. Voyages dans La Grande Bretagne, entrepris relativement aux Services Publics de la Guerre, de la Marine, et des Ponts et Chaussées, en 1816-1819. Par Charles Dupin, Membre de l'Institut de France, &c. &c. Première Partie, Force Militaire. 2 vol. 4to. Paris, 1820.

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Lest triste,' says a celebrated French writer on tactics, 'd'imaginer que le premier art qu'aient inventé les hommes, ait été celui de se nuire but the mind is somewhat relieved by the reflection, that, in proportion to the improvement of that art, the miseries attendant upon a rude state of warfare have been mitigated. From the moment that war becomes a science, the soldier steps into the pale of intellectual existence; and, actuated and incited by the spirit of honour and patriotism, acquires an interest in our eyes beyond that of most other ranks in society. What has occurred in our own times presents no exception to this position. We have indeed seen a nation eminent in the military art, render themselves, by twenty years of blood and rapine, the scourge and terror of the continent; but we have also seen their pride levelled with the dust, by warriors who, with the same attention to the profession of arms, have turned their courage and their skill to the noblest of objects, the defence of their country, and the security and peace of the world. The splendid honours which the British troops gained for themselves in the gigantic contest must swell with honest exultation every heart not perverted by faction; and excite a lively cu

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riosity towards every thing connected with a profession, holding such influence over the destinies of mankind. It may not be wholly uninteresting, therefore, previously to our speaking of the work before us, to take a rapid view of the history of the art of war, and to trace its progress from antiquity to the times in which we live.

Although it is evident from Homer, that, at the period of the siege of Troy, the Asiatics were not at all inferior to the Greeks in military knowledge; and equally clear from the extent of the Persian empire afterwards, that considerable advances must have been made in the science among that people before their invasion of Greece, we are yet almost entirely without information on the state of the Persian armies; and it is impossible not to wish, with Mr. Mitford, that we possessed their own histories of events, for which Herodotus, a stranger to their country and manners, is our only authority. With our defective means of judging what the Persians were in the best days of their empire, we can only assert positively, that their monarchs were the first who maintained a regular and disciplined force.

The republics of Greece, after they had baffled the Persian power, became in the arts of war, no less than in those of peace, the general school of the world. The various causes which conspired to make Athens and Lacedemon the heads of the two conflicting interests of their common nation, as well as their different characters and geographical position, gave a particular bias to the military genius of each people. Athens, after the Piræus became a part of the city, was in effect a seaport; all her allies and dependents were maritime, and she could rely upon these connections alone for the sinews of war. Sparta, trusting wholly to her peculiar institutions for the acquirement of dominion, and being moreover chief of a continental confederacy, could have no dependence but on her armies. It naturally followed, therefore, that the Athenians became most eminent at sea, the Spartans by land; and though necessity obliged the former to maintain a military force, and the latter were ultimately driven by the events of the Peloponnesian war to direct their views to the establishment of a navy, there still remained to both states a prejudice in favour of what they respectively imagined to be their proper sphere of action. The Athenians were accordingly not very much esteemed as soldiers when compared with the Lacedemonians; and we find all the great authorities among the ancients constantly referring to the Spartan tactics as the standard of excellence in the Grecian school of warfare. The strict subordination which prevailed in the Lacedemonian armies, the attention to the clothing, equipment and comfort of their men, the precision of movement and evolution of their pha

lanx, and the measured cadence of their step, call for the acknowledgment, that, while their courage was invincible, they were not inferior to modern troops in those points of which we make our boast. The Spartan cavalry were, comparatively with their infantry, of smaller numbers than may appear to be advantageous; but they placed all confidence in an infantry indissolubly firm; and here we would remark, that the importance of infantry has been felt exactly in proportion to the scientific progress of war; while, in tumultuary Asiatic armies, and in the no less tumultuary contests of the middle ages, the cavalry formed the prominent arm.

The Grecian and Macedonian tactics may be viewed as very nearly of the same school: except that the Spartan phalanx was eight deep, and the Macedonian sixteen, there was no point of much apparent difference. Even in this instance each had its merits. A body of pikes eight deep must have possessed sufficient impetus for any purpose; and if sixteen ranks produced a weightier shock, the power of forming twice the extent of line with the same numbers appears a full balance to that advantage. Our opinion of the spirit of enterprize which could lead Alexander to attempt the conquest of Asia with 30,000 men, and of the patient valour evinced in the retreat of the Ten Thousand, must always remain the same; but if we remember what immense superiority the smaller numbers possessed in their excellent discipline, and that without such quality large assemblages of men are full as dangerous to themselves as to their enemies, we shall lose much of our wonder at the results.

While Alexander was conquering the eastern world, and while his generals were afterwards quarrelling over the spoil, another power was silently growing up to reap the fruits of their labours a people differing from the Grecians as much in their principles of warfare, as in a barbarian contempt for those arts which the latter so dearly prized that they were content rather to sacrifice liberty than to tear themselves from exclusive devotion to them.

The situation of Italy, when Rome began to extend her conquests beyond the narrow limits of the neighbouring states, afforded much more favourable opportunities for purposes of ambition than the most powerful states of Greece possessed in their most prosperous days. In Greece, where the arts of policy were better understood, the commencement of hostilities between two neighbouring cities was generally sufficient to embroil the whole nation; but, from the more barbarous condition of Italy, Rome found leisure to oppress every commonwealth singly, until the whole were brought under her yoke from the Alps to Calabria. Her armies gradually rose in experience and discipline; and were never injured by the necessity, which exists in combating against an equal

or more powerful force, of filling the ranks with all who offer.Having acquired strength and confidence from continued exertion, they were attacked by Pyrrhus at that fortunate moment of their vigour, when they could both resist him successfully, and derive instruction from the contest. Their more arduous struggles with Hannibal left them nothing to learn. When, after encountering these two famous captains, the Romans were to prove in Greece itself whether the laurel should remain with the legion or the phalanx, the question had been in effect already decided. Pyrrhus was no contemptible specimen of the Grecian or Macedonian school, and Carthage had frequently the military of those countries in her pay. The victory of Xantippus over Regulus, and the reform which the Spartan introduced into the Carthaginian troops before he led them against their enemy, must have been alone sufficient to make the Grecian discipline their rule and guide. When, therefore, both Pyrrhus and Hannibal found it requisite to discard the phalangic order, and to adopt that of the legion as the only method of successful resistance to the Roman army, a full confession was implied of the inferiority of Grecian tactics.

In comparing the Roman and Grecian order of battle, the first impression would be, that when, as was always the case in ancient warfare, the event must necessarily be decided by the actual contact of the combatants, the advantage would rest entirely with the latter; and that, with the ordinary courage inspired by discipline, it must be impossible for the open order and short sword of the Romans to withstand the charge of the deep closed ranks of the phalanx, where the pike, from sixteen to twenty feet long, was the weapon. The Greek occupied but a front of three feet; he was covered not only by his own pike, but by those of the four ranks behind him, which projected in advance of him in succession from twelve to four feet.* The Roman legionary required a front of six feet for the free use of his sword and buckler, and derived no benefit from his rear ranks; he was thus singly exposed to two men in front and to ten pikes of the phalanx. As long, therefore, as the latter body was covered in flank, and able to preserve its compact order, it was unquestionably irresistible; this, however, would happen but seldom,

* A length corresponding to nearly twenty English feet for the Grecian and Macedonian pike seems almost incredible, yet all the classical tacticians agree in the statement. Elian, in his Tactics, addressed to the Emperor Adrian, says, that in the old phalanx it had been twenty-one feet in length, but was much shortened when he wrote; Polybius, a better authority, states, that though the pike had been originally above twenty feet long, it was early reduced to about eighteen, and that the soldiers held it, at the charge, about five feet from the blunt end as a poise to its weight in front. This would make a projection before the front rank of about twelve feet. The whole length of the modern pike was not more than this.

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and wherever it could be attacked otherwise than in front, wherever the ground was abrupt or uneven, the phalanx was deficient; even after the first success in breaking the front line of the enemy, pursuit itself was generally fatal to it. The Roman array, on the contrary, was admirably adapted to almost every species of encounter, and particularly well calculated to oppose the phalanx. The ten cohorts or battalions of the legion were formed in two lines, each eight men deep, the first with intervals between the cohorts equal to the length of one of them; the second formed in the same way, but with every cohort opposite to the interval in the first line; and a third line, composed of the Triarii, in loose files, was destined for the support of the two first, as occasion required. As the lines moved to the encounter, the rear ranks of the first threw themselves out as skirmishers, annoyed the enemy with their missiles, and on their near approach found their place again in the cohorts, without disturbing the order of the ranks. With such dispositions the phalanx would have, first, to receive the javelins of the skirmishers in flank, then to charge the front line, and when, if successful, their order was broken more or less by the advance, to meet in that state the attack of the second line, supported by the Triarii, The Roman prowess was in its zenith, the Grecian courage had declined, before the systems were opposed to each other; but had the circumstances been reversed, had the phalanx and the legion met when Greece was at the best, Rome would still have proved the superiority of her tactics.

There are some inexplicable circumstances in the wars of antiquity, In modern warfare, notwithstanding our greater facility of raising food, from the superior state of all the arts of cultivation, the operations of an army of even moderate numbers are in the most fruitful countries constantly shackled and controuled by the difficulty of provisioning the troops; and large armies can never take the field without an immense train of magazines for their support: yet embarrassment in subsisting the most numerous force seems rarely to have been experienced by the ancients, much less to have imperiously influenced the movements of their armies, We observe, indeed, frequent mention in Cæsar of the subject of provisions, but we never read that the Romans or Grecians either outmarched or fell back upon their stores-constant occurrences in modern campaigns. Another curious and surprizing circumstance is, that notwithstanding the advances which the ancients had made in the military art, they seem to have had little idea of moving through a country before an enemy in parallel columns. The Roman order of march, as described by Livy, Cæsar, Polybius, and others, (and it was not confined to this people,) was usually in one column

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