enemies. And such an one appeared in Napoleon. Pacifying La
Vendée, receiving back the emigrants, restoring the church,
remodelling the law, personally absolute, yet carefully
preserving and maintaining all the great points which the
nation had won at the Revolution, Napoleon united in himself,
not only the power, but the whole will of France; and that
power and will were guided by a genius for war such as Europe
had never seen since Cæsar. The effect was absolutely magical.
In November 1799, he was made First Consul; he found France
humbled by defeats, his Italian conquests lost, his allies
invaded, his own frontier threatened. He took the field in May
1800, and in June the whole fortune of the war was changed, and
Austria driven out of Lombardy by the victory of Marengo. Still
the flood of the tide rose higher and higher, and every
successive wave of its advance swept away a kingdom. Earthly
state has never reached a prouder pinnacle than when Napoleon,
in June 1812, gathered his army at Dresden--that mighty host,
unequalled in all time, of 450,000, not men merely, but
effective soldiers, and there received the homage of subject
kings. And now, what was the principal adversary of this
tremendous power? by whom was it checked, and resisted, and put
down? By none, and by nothing, but the direct and manifest
interposition of God. I know of no language so well fitted to
describe that victorious advance to Moscow, and the utter
humiliation of the retreat, as the language of the prophet with
respect to the advance and subsequent destruction of the host
of Sennacherib. 'When they arose early in the morning, behold
they were all dead corpses,' applies almost literally to that
memorable night of frost, in which twenty thousand horses
perished, and the strength of the French army was utterly