that it could be done with half so much pleasure to the reader as to
ourself, we would present, a whole gallery of pictures from these rich
and fresh historic scenes. Never, certainly, since man first indulged
his instinctive appetite for war, did a queerer and less manageable host
sit down before a hostile city. The officers, drawn from the same.
class of citizens with the rank and file, had neither the power to
institute an awful discipline, nor enough of the trained soldier's
spirit to attempt it. Of headlong valor, when occasion offered, there
was no lack, nor of a readiness to encounter severe fatigue; but, with
few intermissions, the provincial army made the siege one long day of
frolic and disorder. Conscious that no military virtues of their own
deserved the prosperous result which followed, they insisted that Heaven
had fought as manifestly on their side as ever on that of Israel in the
battles of the Old Testament. We, however, if we consider the events of
after-years, and confine our view to a period short of the Revolution,
might doubt whether the victory was granted to our fathers as a blessing
or as a judgment. Most of the young men who had left their paternal
firesides, sound in constitution, and pure in morals, if they returned
at all, returned with ruined health, and with minds so broken up by the
interval of riot, that they never after could resume the habits of good
citizenship. A lust for military glory was also awakened in the
country; and France and England gratified it with enough of slaughter;
the former seeking to recover what she had lost, the latter to complete
the conquest which the colonists had begun. There was a brief season of
repose, and then a fiercer contest, raging almost from end to end of
North America. Some went forth, and met the red men of the wilderness;
and when years had rolled, and the settler came in peace where they had
come in war, there he found their unburied bones among the fallen boughs
and withered leaves of many autumns. Others were foremost in the
battles of the Canadas, till, in the day that saw the downfall of the