He may have been superb on a battle-field; in a household he is simply intolerable.

He knows no love but barrack love,--the love which those clever myth-makers, the ancients, placed under the patronage of Eros, son of Mars and Venus.

Those delightful chroniclers of the old religions provided themselves with a dozen different Loves.

Study the fathers and the attributes of these Loves, and you will discover a complete social nomenclature,--and yet we fancy that we originate things! When the world turns upside down like an hour-glass, when the seas become continents, Frenchmen will find canons, steamboats, newspapers, and maps wrapped up in seaweed at the bottom of what is now our ocean.
[*] I do not, on principle, like foot-notes, and this is the first I have ever allowed myself.

Its historical interest must be my excuse; it will prove, moreover, that descriptions of battles should be something more than the dry particulars of technical writers, who for the last three thousand years have told us about left and right wings and centres being broken or driven in, but never a word about the soldier himself, his sufferings, and his heroism.