In some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants.

In Christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister.

But their lot had fallen on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is far inferior in value to the strength of the mind.

It is probable that, among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers who were marshalled round Neerwinden under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England.
The French were victorious; but they had bought their victory dear.

More than ten thousand of the best troops of Lewis had fallen.