announced the fate of Magdeburg.  Forty thousand people—­men, women, and children—­were inhumanly butchered, without necessity, quarter, compassion, or remorse.  So cold and hard is war!  This was the saddest massacre in the history of Germany, and one of the greatest crimes that a successful general ever committed.  History has no language, and painting no colors to depict the horrors of that dreadful scene; and the interval of more than two hundred years has not weakened the impression of its horrors.  The sack of Magdeburg stands out in the annals of war like the siege of Tyre and the fall of Jerusalem.

But it roused the Protestants as from a trance.  It united them, as the massacre of St. Bartholomew united the Huguenots.  They marched under the standard of Gustavus with the same enthusiasm that the Huguenots showed under Henry IV. at the battle of Ivry.  There was now no limit to the successes of the heroic Swede.  The decisive battle of Leipsic, the passage of the Lech, the defence of Nuremberg, and the great final victory at Lutzen raised the military fame of Gustavus to a height unknown since Hannibal led his armies over the Alps, or Caesar encountered the patrician hosts at the battle of Pharsalia.  No victories were ever more brilliant than his; and they not only gave him a deathless fame, but broke forever the Austrian fetters.  His reputation as a general was fairly earned.  He ranks with Conde, Henry IV., Frederic the Great, Marlborough, and Wellington; not, perhaps, with Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon,—­those phenomena of military genius, the exalted trio who shine amid the glories of the battlefield, as Homer, Dante, and Shakspeare loom up in fame above other immortal poets.

In two years from the landing of Gustavus Adolphus on the island of Ruden, near the southern extremity of the Baltic, he expelled a triumphant enemy from Pomerania, traversed the banks of the Oder, overran the Duchy of Mecklenburg, ascended the Elbe, delivered Saxony from the armies of Tilly, crossed the Thuringian forest, entered Frankfort in triumph, restored the Palatinate to its lawful sovereign, took possession of some of the strongest fortresses on the Rhine, overran Bavaria, occupied its capital, crossed the Danube, and then returned to Saxony, to offer up his life on the plains of Lutzen.  There, on that memorable battlefield, where the descending sun of victory in later times shed a delusive gleam on the eagles of Napoleon before his irremediable ruin, did Gustavus encounter the great antagonist of German liberties, whom the necessities of the Emperor had summoned from retirement.  Wallenstein once more commanded the imperial armies, but only on conditions which made him virtually independent of his master.  He was generalissimo, with almost unlimited authority, so long as the war should last; and the Emperor agreed to remove neither the general himself nor his officers, and gave him principalities and spoils indefinitely.  He was the most powerful subject in Europe, and the greatest general next to Gustavus.  I read of no French or English general who has been armed with such authority.  Cromwell and Napoleon took it; it was not conferred by legitimate and supreme power.  Had Wallenstein been successful to the end, he might have grasped the imperial sceptre.  Had Gustavus lived, he might have been the dictator of Germany.