best military schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of
the finest that ever existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the
prime of his manhood in a civil situation. He never looked on war
till he was more than forty years old. He had first to form
himself, and then to form his troops. Out of raw levies he
created an army, the bravest and the best disciplined, the most
orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war, that Europe had
seen. He called this body into existence. He led it to conquest.
He never fought a battle without gaining it. He never gained a
battle without annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his
victories were not the highest glory of his military system. The
respect which his troops paid to property, their attachment to
the laws and religion of their country, their submission to the
civil power, their temperance, their intelligence, their
industry, are without parallel. It was after the Restoration that
the spirit which their great leader had infused into them was
most signally displayed. At the command of the established
government, an established government which had no means of
enforcing obedience, fifty thousand soldiers whose backs no enemy
had ever seen, either in domestic or in continental war, laid
down their arms, and retired into the mass of the people,
thenceforward to be distinguished only by superior diligence,
sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits, of peace, from the
other members of the community which they had saved.

In the general spirit and character of his administration, we
think Cromwell far superior to Napoleon. "In the civil
government," says Mr. Hallam, "there can be no adequate parallel
between one who had sucked only the dregs of a besotted
fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of reason and philosophy