Very pleasant it must have been to the Commander-in-Chief to report to his Government that in one of the first actions “five hundred Englishmen of the best Flemish training had flatly and shamefully run away.”  Yet this was the commencement of the struggle which ended with the dispersion and defeat of the great Armada, and destroyed the projects of the Spanish tyrant for introducing religious and political slavery into England!  It seems as if Mr. Motley’s Seventh Chapter were a prophecy, rather than a history.

* * * * *

An invasion and a conspiracy may always be expected to make head at first.  The men who plan such enterprises are not fools, but cunning, managing people.  They always have, or think they have, a prima facie case to start with.  They have been preparing just as the highwayman has been preparing for his aggressive movement.  They expect to find, and they commonly do find, their victims only half ready, if at all forewarned, and to take them at a disadvantage.  If conspirators and invaders do not strike heavy blows at once, their cause is desperate; if they do, it proves very little, because that is the least they expected to do.

It is very easy to run up a score behind the door of a tavern; credit is good, and chalk is cheap.  But these little marks have all got to be crossed out by-and-by, and the time will surely come for turning all empty pockets wrong side out.  The aggressors begin in a great passion, and are violent and dangerous at first; the nation or community assailed are surprised, dismayed, perhaps, like the good people in the coach, when they see Dick Turpin’s pistol thrust in at the window.

The Romans were certainly a genuine fighting people.  They kept the state on a perpetual military footing.  They were never without veterans, men and leaders bred in camp and experienced in warfare.  Yet what a piece of work their African invader cut out for them!  It seemed they had to learn everything over again.  Thousands upon thousands killed and driven into Lake Trasimenus,—­fifteen thousand prisoners taken; total rout again at Cannae,—­rings picked from slain gentlemen’s fingers by the peck or bushel,—­everything lost in battle, and a great revolt through the Southern provinces as a natural consequence.  What then?  Rome was not to be Africanized as yet.  The great leader who had threatened the capital, and scored these portentous victories, had at last to pay for them all in defeat and humiliation on his own soil.

Even the robber Spartacus beat the Roman armies at first, with their consuls at their head, and laid waste a large part of the peninsula.  These violent uprisings and incursions are always dangerous at their onset; they are just like new diseases, which the doctors tell us must be studied by themselves, and which are rarely treated with great success until near the period of their natural cessation.  After a time Fabius learns how to handle the hot Southern invaders, and Crassus the way of fighting the fierce gladiators with their classical bowie-knives.