a triumphant close, at the age of sixty-eight, and before he could hear the world’s applause.  The Germans, who were to owe so much to his labors, rejoiced at his removal, because he was supposed to belong to the peace party, who were opposed to further action, and who thought that their country was under no obligation to fight for the deliverance of other nations.  They feared, too, that, if the war should go on, his “Muscovite hoof” would be too strong for the Fatherland to bear it; and they saw in his death a Providential incident, which encouraged them to move against the French.  It is altogether probable, that, if he had lived but three months longer, events would have taken quite a different turn.  Baron von Mueffling tells us that Kutusoff “would not hear a word of crossing the Elbe; and all Scharnhorst’s endeavors to make him more favorably disposed toward Prussia were fruitless.  The whole peace party in the Russian army joined with the Field-Marshal, and the Emperor was placed in a difficult position.  On my arrival at Altenberg, I found Scharnhorst deeply dejected, for he could not shut his eyes to the consequences of this resistance.  Unexpectedly, the death of the obstinate old Marshal occurred on the twenty-eighth of April, and the Emperor was thus left free to pursue his own policy.”  The first general who had successfully encountered Napoleon, it would have been the strangest of history’s strange facts, if the Emperor had owed the continuance of his reign to Kutusoff’s influence, and that was the end to which the Russian’s policy was directed; for, though he wished to confine French power within proper limits, he had no wish to strengthen either England or any of the German nations, deeming them likely to become the enemies of Russia, while he might well suppose that the French had had enough of Russian warfare to satisfy them for the rest of the century.  Had his astute policy been adopted and acted on, there never would have been a Crimean War, and Sebastopol would not now be a ruin; and Russia would have been greater than she is likely to be in our time, or in the time of our children.

Bluecher, who completed the work which Kutusoff began, and in a manner which the Russian would hardly have approved, was an older man than the hero of Borodino.  When called to the command of the Prussian army, in March, 1813, he was in his seventy-first year; and he was in his seventy-third year when his energy enabled him, in the face of difficulties that no other commander could have overcome, to bring up more than fifty thousand men to the assistance of Wellington at Waterloo, losing more than an eighth of their number.  He had no military talent, as the term is generally used.  He could not tell whether a plan was good or bad.  He could not understand the maps.  He was not a disciplinarian, and he was ignorant of all the details of preparing an army, of clothing and feeding and arming it.  In all those things which it is supposed