spared at first would generally be spared to the end; those who perished would perish instantly.  It is possible that the 20 French retreat from Moscow may have made some nearer approach to this calamity in duration, though still a feeble and miniature approach; for the French sufferings did not commence in good earnest until about one month from the time of leaving Moscow; and though it is true 25 that afterward the vials of wrath were emptied upon the devoted army for six or seven weeks in succession, yet what is that to this Kalmuck tragedy, which lasted for more than as many months?  But the main feature of horror, by which the Tartar march was distinguished from 30 the French, lies in the accompaniment of women[5] and children.  There were both, it is true, with the French army, but so few as to bear no visible proportion to the total numbers concerned.  The French, in short, were merely an army—­a host of professional destroyers, whose regular trade was bloodshed, and whose regular element 5 was danger and suffering.  But the Tartars were a nation carrying along with them more than two hundred and fifty thousand women and children, utterly unequal, for the most part, to any contest with the calamities before them.  The Children of Israel were in the same circumstances 10 as to the accompaniment of their families; but they were released from the pursuit of their enemies in a very early stage of their flight; and their subsequent residence in the Desert was not a march, but a continued halt and under a continued interposition of Heaven for their 15 comfortable support.  Earthquakes, again, however comprehensive in their ravages, are shocks of a moment’s duration.  A much nearer approach made to the wide range and the long duration of the Kalmuck tragedy may have been in a pestilence such as that which visited 20 Athens in the Peloponnesian war, or London in the reign of Charles II.  There, also, the martyrs were counted by myriads, and the period of the desolation was counted by months.  But, after all, the total amount of destruction was on a smaller scale; and there was this feature of 25 alleviation to the conscious pressure of the calamity—­that the misery was withdrawn from public notice into private chambers and hospitals.  The siege of Jerusalem by Vespasian and his son, taken in its entire circumstances, comes nearest of all—­for breadth and depth of suffering, 30 for duration, for the exasperation of the suffering from without by internal feuds, and, finally, for that last most appalling expression of the furnace heat of the anguish in its power to extinguish the natural affections even of maternal love.  But, after all, each case had circumstances of romantic misery peculiar to itself—­circumstances 5 without precedent, and (wherever human nature is ennobled by Christianity), it may be confidently hoped, never to be repeated.