the tide of disaster.  The French are unanimous in ascribing their defeat to Joubert’s delay at Paris, and it is certain that the enemy did take Alexandria and Mantua during that month’s delay, and thus were enabled to add the besieging forces to their main army, so that Joubert was about to retreat to the Apennines, and to assume a defensive position, when Suvaroff forced him to accept battle.  But something should be allowed for the genius of the Russian general, who was one of the great master-spirits of war, and who seldom fought without being completely victorious.  He had mostly been employed against the Turks, whose military reputation was then at the lowest, or the Poles, who were too divided and depressed to do themselves and their cause justice, and therefore his character as a soldier did not stand so high as that of more than one man who was his inferior; but when, in his seventieth year, he took command in Italy, there to encounter soldiers who had beaten the armies of almost all other European nations, and who were animated by a fanatical spirit as strong as that which fired his own bosom, he showed himself to be more than equal to his position.  He was not at all at fault, though brought face to face with an entirely new state of things, but acted with his accustomed vigor, marching from victory to victory, and reconquering Italy more rapidly than it had been conquered three years before by Bonaparte.  When Bonaparte was destroying the Austrian armies in Italy, Suvaroff watched his operations with deep interest, and said that he must go to the West to meet the new genius, or that Bonaparte would march to the East against Russia,—­a prediction, it has been said, that was fulfilled to the Frenchman’s ruin.  Whether, had he encountered Bonaparte, he would have beaten him, is a question for the ingenious to argue, but which never can be settled.  But one thing is certain, and that is, that Bonaparte never encountered an opponent of that determined and energetic character which belonged to Suvaroff until his latter days, and then his fall was rapid and his ruin utter.  That Suvaroff failed in Switzerland, to which country he had been transferred from Italy, does not at all impeach his character for generalship.  His failure was due partly to the faults of others, and partly to circumstances.  Switzerland was to him what Russia became to Napoleon in 1812.  Massena’s victory at Zuerich, in which half of Korsakoff’s army was destroyed, rendered Russian failure in the campaign inevitable.  All the genius in the world, on that field of action, could not have done anything that should have compensated for so terrible a calamity.  Zuerich saved France far more than did Marengo, and it is to be noted that it was fought and won by the oldest of all the able men who figure in history as Napoleon’s Marshals.  There were some of the Marshals who were older than Massena, but they were not men of superior talents.  Massena was forty-one when he defeated Korsakoff, and he was a veteran soldier when the Revolutionary wars began.