A LIFE OF KING LEOPOLD, Tins hook will be of

great value to the future historian, and will interest politicians even now, but for the general reader it lacks alike completeness and literary spirit. M. Thdodore Juste has ob- tained many documents from the Belgian Court, but the papers have been selected with a trifle too much care, and his own work is at once stilted in tone and meagre in substance. Unimportant details, such as the names of places where the King slept, are given in profusion, while valuable matter, such, for instance, as the King's opinion on the events of 1848, is carefully omitted. It was of course impossible that the special value of King Leopold to Europe, his position as the confidential adviser of Sovereigns, could be brought out till those with whom he corresponded had passed from the scene, but the needful reti- cence almost destroys the value of so fragmentary a biography.

It is as the calm observer who heard everything, discerned every- thing, and commented on everything from a singularly separate point of view that King Leopold is interesting to Europe outside Belgium ; and of these comments we get in this biography very few. There is scarcely a letter to a crowned head which is not purely formal, and hardly a comment on any event not directly interesting to Belgium. Even the letters inserted have, we suspect, been edited with the most anxious care lest anything should appear in them calculated to embarrass the present Government, and one reason at least for this care seems to us visible on the face of them. Leopold, we suspect, though we cannot clearly prove, never cordially liked the task which had fallen to him in the world, the secret government through constitutional forms of a minute and not very obedient State. His letters, such of them as are published, have an air almost of fretfulness, both with his throne and his people. He always complained that the constitution left him too little power, while throwing on him all real responsibility, and regarded the Belgians as people who did not thoroughly understand politics. He considered that the very life of his kingdom depended on successful external diplomacy, which no one could manage but himself ; he evidently thought the best guarantee for Belgium was the friendship of France, which he secured, as he considered, by a marriage with a Princess of Orleans, but which might at any time give way ; and he dreaded any war, no matter where, lest it should end in the partition of Belgium, which from first to last appears to have been with him an ever present fear. It was to avoid even a pos- sibility of danger that he passed a new extradition law, and assured Louis Napoleon that refugees should not be allowed to attack him from Belgium, that her institutions were" for home consumption." The size and condition of the Army were with him cardinal points, and he was curiously impatient of anything approaching defiance in the tone of his Chambers towards other countries. In 1833, he writes to Louis Philippe that the "Chamber has been at its usual fooleries," and in 1844 sends this letter to General Goblet, his most trusted Envoy ; (all italics, are his own) :—

" February 27, 1844. It Constitutional government, especially in a small country, takes a great deal of time, and causes sight to be lost of the questions which alone can secure to the country a political future. I have many a time believed that I saw you feeling more and more interest therein, and lain very anxious that it should be so, for it is time to be seriously occupied with those questions; otherwise Belgium will find herself at the tail of all other nations."

In 1845 he seems to have been perfectly tired out, and writes to his Minister of Foreign Affairs :—

" The manufacture of woollen fabrics having only a market in the interior cannot be compared with the other manufactures in point of importance and profit. Parliamentary considerations deserve tho greatest attention ; but to have Chambers, it is necessary first to have a country, and I ask bow and wherewith to fill the void which the cessation of the Convention would produce. The evil would be so much the greater in that the country has on all these questions a way of being perfectly CHILDISH, submitting to no sort of privation. The Government has on this head ample experience; and as for its liberty of action, or its hope of finding the country disposed to make any sacrifice whatever to reach an object, even with no remote probability, they would be the cruellest deceptions, for it would got nothing but the bitterest reproaches by way of recompense."

And in December of the same year :— " In Belgium, people are a little spoilt ; they consider they ought always to obtain the very best conditions ; I have from this point of view spoilt the country, by obtaining for it, fifteen years ago, things which by itself alone it had not the slightest chance of getting. This habit becomes quite injurious when the Chamber shows it, and, I must repeat, it is necessary to make those gentry understand that, when in a matter of transaction the footing is one of reciprocity, the fact must be recognized."

• Life of King Leopold. By Th6odore Ante. Translated by B. Black. London: Sampson Low.

In 1846 he speaks even more distinctly to M. Nothomb, his Minister at Berlin :—

" What is to seek for this country is a more robust national feeling, which exists among the people, but is feeble and fragmentary (und getheilt) among the higher classes. A. large proportion of what remains to us of the nobility is very patriotic. Sound judgment also is not our brilliant quality. Incessantly one has to ask how such consequences could possibly be deduced from given premisses. Hitherto royalty has been the rock on which the political existence of the country has ex- clusively rested ; after fifteen years many folks have not yet arrived at a notion of that. Perhaps royalty makes too little parade of its work ;

on the other hand, the work is so much the moro solid

It is wholly in accordance with this view that in 1848 Leopold told his people that if they wanted a Republic they could have one, but must express the want in a constitutional way, and that in the evening of life be regretted his refusal of the

Grecian throne. He should, he is reported to hare said, have been Emperor of Constantinople. He performed his duties as King admirably, but be was by nature a diplomatist, a cosmopolitan more interested in Europe than in Belgium, and he tired of the somewhat petty part he had to play, in a kingdom which seemed always to him less stable than to any one else. It is remarkable that the great Prussian Baron Stein considered the one vice of Leopold's character to be a kind of moral or rather political pusillanimity, and if we do not mistake M. Theodore Juste, he also is inclined to deem him somewhat over-cautious. Our readers will not forget Charlotte Bronta's powerful description of him as the most weary- looking man she had ever seen, and resigned weariness is the dominant expression in the very beautiful portrait prefixed to this volume. He was a Coburg, it must be remembered ; had an ex- tremely high notion of himself as statesman, as diplomatist, and,

curiously enough, as soldier ; and had once seen clear before him the prospect of guiding the destinies of Great Britain. All this contributed to the melancholy which of late years was his most

marked characteristic, a melancholy which had its root, we cannot but suspect, in ungratified ambition. If this view is correct, the barrenness of these letters is accounted for, as the revelation of such a feeling might have diminished Belgian regard for his family, but they are meagre in other respects, and their meagreness is the more remarkable because the King had seen and judged almost every statesman in Europe, and is believed to have owed much of the success he achieved to his acuteness in estimating individual character. Very little of this acuteness is visible in this work, which is, in fact, not a life of Leopold, but a collection of the few facts and documents which his family deem it as yet prudent to publish to the world.

We must add a letter which has been published before, but which many readers have forgotten, and which has just now a new interest :—

" QUEEN VICTORIA TO QUEEN MARY AMELIA.

"'Osborne, September 10, 1846.

"'MADAM,-1 have just received your Majesty's letter of the 8th inst., and I hasten to thank you for it. You will remember, perhaps, what passed at Eu between the King and me. You know the importance I have ever attached to the maintenance of our cordial understanding, and the zeal with which I have laboured for it. You have heard, without doubt, that we refused to further the marriage between the Queen of Spain and our cousin Leopold (which the two queens [Queens Christina and Isabella] had earnestly desired), with the sole aim of not holding aloof from a course which would be more agreeable to the King, although we could not consider that course the best. You can easily understand, then, that the sudden announcement of this double marriage could not but cause us surprise and very lively regret. I ask pardon, madam, for addressing you on politics at this juncture, but I like to be able to toll myself that I have ever been sincere with you. Begging you to present my respects to the King, I am, Madam, your Majesty's wholly devoted

sister and friend, "VICTORIA l.'"

ANOTHER BOOK ON WATERLOO."

WE can with difficulty resist a doubt, after reading a volume like this, whether military history may not be made too clear. The transactions described are in their very nature confused ; those concerned must be wrought up to the highest pitch of excitement in which illusion about what they do themselves, not to speak of the actions of others, is natural ; it is difficult for a critic after the event to separate clearly and yet keep running together the threads of his narrative—the actual progress of events, and that progress as it appeared, or ought to have appeared, to the princi- pal actors whose conduct is criticized. Yet in spite of all these difficulties Colonel Chesney manages to record the moves of the Waterloo campaign with all but the definiteness of the moves in a game of chess,—to which war is so inaptly compared ; but all the while he does not forget to keep before the imagination of his readers the shifting aspects of the conflict presented to the * Waterloo Leeturea: a Study of the Campulyn of 1415. By L:eutenant-Co!onel Char:es C. Chesney; 1LE. London : LOCIV114:115. 1er6S. great actors, and on which they based the various changes in their conduct. The work is so perfectly done, we get to know so much more than we had a right to expect, that we begin to dis- trust its truth, though the suspicion must be acknowledged without reason when we watch the careful sifting of evidence by which the conclusions are arrived at. Colonel Chesney, it is true, and as he acknowledges, has had many helps—such as the work of Mr. IIooper, in which all the evidence is discussed and summed up, and to which be says he would be inclined to adhere if reduced to one book in studying the campaign. A very brief campaign, too, like that of Waterloo or Sadowa, appears to lend itself to more minute study than a protracted series of operations. But these considera- tions detract very little from Colonel Chesney's merit in writing an original criticism confined mainly to the strategy of the cam- paign and the great controversies of fact and generalship which have arisen. His conclusions are not new, but they have been thoroughly wrought out. and verified by himself, and as he excels in lucidity of arrangement and expression, and is both earnest and 'eloquent, his critique is one which the student of the campaign could not overlook, and to which lie will be surely attracted.

It would be useless to follow Colonel Chesney point by point, or write an abridgment—even if we had space—of the story of the campaign. We propose merely to indicate what topics he has insisted upon, and exhibit in one or two cases the mode of treat- ment adopted. It should be well understood—especially in these days, when so much is said about the comparative rapidity of modern campaigning—that the campaign of Waterloo only lasted 89 hours. Between 3 a.m. on the morning of the 15th of June, and 8 p.m. on the evening of the 18th, when the combined Anglo- Prussian charge had completed the deathstroke of the French Army, are comprised all the vital incidents of the campaign,— nothing that happened afterwards affecting the result, though there are some points of interest for the critic, and everything. before that being only preparatory. And the events in this brief period are not many. On the 15th is the passage of the Belgian frontier by the French Army ; on the afternoon of the 16th the battle of Ligny with the Prussians to the right of the invader's line of advance by the high road to Brussels, and the engagement with the English at Quatre Bras on that road ; on the forenoon of the 17th, the retreat of the English to Waterloo, and of the Prussians on a parallel line to Wavre ; and on the afternoon of 18th, the final battle. If we add to these the erratic conduct of a French corps under D'Erlon, which vibrated between Ligny and Quatre Bras while the engagements were in pro- gress without sharing in either, and the wanderings of Grouchy's corps in " pursuit " of the Prussians in the after- noon of the 17th and the day of the 18th, we have enu- merated all the great incidents of which a historian must take account. The campaign thus blocks itself out into half-a-dozen chapters, into which the criticism may be easily -divided. The questions are—was Napoleon's design in crossing the frontier well conceived and carried out? were the English and the Prussian Gene- rals surprised, and did they act with promptitude in the crisis ? did Napoleon waste time on the morning of the 16th before Ligny and Quarto Bras, and again on the following morning ? who was responsible for D'Erlon and Grouchy's wanderings ? was time wasted on the morning of the great battle? what share had the Prussians in it ? and what errors were committed by the Generals in the actual conduct of the various battles or engagements ? Colonel Chesney supports what may now be treated as the ortho- dox answer to all these questions. Napoleon's design was well conceived, and placed the Allies in great danger ; but it was delayed some precious hours in execution, the first all-important step being hardly finished on the evening of the 15tb, instead of early in the forenoon, as the original intention was. On the other hand, the Allied Generals, though not surprised, knowing well enough that a concentration of the enemy was going forward, were some- what negligent in their preparations, distributing their troops too widely ; and Wellington, at least, was not fully roused on the 15th so soon as he ought to have been. The consequence was that Napoleon, in spite of his first delay, had the advantage of the posi- tion on the 16th; but be did lose valuable time that forenoon, fighting the battle of Ligny so late as to leave the Prussians an opportunity of safe retreat. D'Erlon's wandering, again, was due to the mistake of a staff officer carrying an order ; but a general like Napoleon should not have missed the opportunity of using the corps when it did appear on the battle-field. For Grouchy's wanderings Napoleon is purely responsible. As to the battle of Waterloo, the whole meaning of Wellington's stand was his con- fidence in the arrival of the Prussians; and the Prussians were virtually present so as to affect the progress of the battle almost

from the beginning, Napoleon very early detaching heavily so as to protect his own flank. Their delay in actually coming to blows was due not merely to the roads, but to a change in the disposition of the corps arranged with Wellington, so as to make their onset more decisive. Such is the aspect of Waterloo strategy which is becoming the accepted view. The final summing-up is that Wel- lington and Blucher were in great peril at first through blame- worthy neglect, b ut that their gen eral plan of combination was sound, and was steadily carried out when Napoleon's delays by the evening of the 16th had given them the ascendant. In other words, Napoleon's generalship was inferior—unequal to the occasion—though the task he had undertaken, to beat two armies, each about equal to his own in numbers, if somewhat inferior for the most part in the quality of the troops, was full of harird at the best. The single omission of the lectures is that of the tactics of the battles, which makes the whole view incomplete. The knowledge that there will be especial skill in the conduct of battles, either on his own side or the other, should be a main element in a general's calcula- tions; and the judgment is partial if not given on the whole case, even where the critic, like Colonel Chesney, is careful to show his appreciation of the facts left out.

The main object of the book is to correct, so far as Waterloo is concerned, those popular delusions as to military history which are very apt to grow up, and which Colonel Chesney shows to be very injurious. Nations in this way get wrong notions of what they can or cannot do, and act accordingly, to their own hurt. Here there are delusions both on the French and the English side to be corrected. French military writers propagate the fatal belief, whose evils all Europe feels, that France has always the capacity of producing troops and generals who, but for some contretemps of for- tune, or accident apart from generalship, would invariably suc- ceed; and Waterloo especially has been a theme for their romance, Thiess being the grand offender. The exposure of Thiers is, perhaps, the best part of the present work. On all the great questions discussed it is shown that his statements are either pure invention or the reverse of the truth—the reverse of what he must have known to be the truth. In the affair of Quatro Bras, for instance, it is pointed out that the account of several written orders of Napoleon to Ney is quite incorrect, though Thiers must have had them before him. He prints verbatim the last order of all, which happens to answer his purpose, and only describes the others. This is proof of wilful misstatement, and is far from being the solitary instance ; while the false insinuations and as- sumptions—the little touches by which the whole look of the picture is changed—are exposed with equal vigour. To demon- strate the untrustworthiness of Thiers was a work worth doing, and Colonel Chesney has done it to perfection. Of course the delusion which Thiers nurses of the infallibility of Napo- leon's generalship—so flattering to French vanity—is equally destroyed ; but we wish Colonel Chesney had had some- thing to say on what seems to us a still more subtle delusion, which may even be more injurious because supported by sober critics. This is—that Napoleon in the Waterloo campaign was not the general he had been, and that otherwise he would have won. A hypothesis of this sort is put forward by Charras and Quinet, and must be quite as good a salve to French vanity as Thiers's device of blaming Ney, and D'Erlon, and Grouchy for alleged disobedience of orders, or stupid neglect of opportunities which Napoleon was entitled to trust to their instinct to improve. Colonel Chesney, we fear, rather favours this hypothesis by dwelling on the errors of the Allies, though he avoids a discussion of what might have happened if Napoleon had not committed this and that mistake.

The principal English delusion which Colonel Chesney assails is the notion that the Prussians counted for very little in the actual fighting at Waterloo, a notion which we should have thought dead and buried by this time, though Colonel Chesney brings forward evidence that he is not slaying the slain. Wellington's stand at Waterloo was only justified by his expectation of the Prussians, and, according to the arrangement, they would have been on the field early in the afternoon, when Wellington, as the subsequent duration of the battle proved, would still have been holding out, though Napoleon had begun at the earliest possible moment. In actual fact, notwithstanding malarrangements at Wavre and the accidental fire which delayed Billow for two hours, —for which Wellington at least was not responsible,—the first Prussian corps was visible at St. Lambert on the French flank in the interval after the second of the five grand attacks of which the battle consisted. About this time the Prussian General was informed by Wellington that the French were attacking the centre and left of his army ; and this information guided him in attack-

ing the French according to a plan previously concerted, on which Wellington would now rely. The arrival of the Prussians so near him compelled Napoleon to reduce first by 10,000, increased afterwards to 16,000, men the force with which he had to beat Wellington. At the crisis of the fourth and most dangerous attack Napoleon was, perhaps, restrained by the pressure of Blucher on his flank from following up a tempo- rary advantage ; and soon after another Prussian corps appeared on Wellington's left, relieving some troops which actually took part in routing the last mad charge of the French Guards on the British centre. By this time the French defence of their flank was overpowered, and while Prussians were united with the English in the grand attack before which the French Army went down, the Prussian column which had appeared on the flank was pour- ing across the only line of retreat for the fugitives. The Prussian loss alone, 7,000 men, might show what real fighting they had. This account is something very different from the myth of the Prussians coming up at the last moment, and merely joining in the pursuit, and it may be hoped, will finally extinguish the school- book fables on the subject. Englishmen by their nature are perhaps not disposed to act on delusions flattering to their vanity ; there is a tendency the other way, as Colonel Chesney's complaint of the exaggeration of the Affgban disaster may prove ; but if the true story of Waterloo is not required to diminish over-confidence, it may furnish real lessons to a people whom marvels rather fail to impress. It is worth their while to know what Wellington did, though he did not beat a superior French army single-handed. To show the value of the truth another way—if the facts had been understood or remembered better, Sadowa would have been less surprisiug. There are many evidences of the value of the Prus- sian system in the story of this campaign. We may congratulate Colonel Chesney on the strength and completeness of his criticism on this branch of his subject.