all measure daring and intrepid, and enabled to cope with almost the best of those famous men of war who commanded the armies of the French King, Eugene had a weapon, the equal of which could not be found in France, since the cannon-shot of Sasbach laid low the noble Turenne, and could hurl Marlborough at the heads of the French host, and crush them as with a rock, under which all the gathered strength of their strongest captains must go down.

The English Duke took little part in that vast siege of Lille, which the Imperial Generalissimo pursued with all his force and vigor, further than to cover the besieging lines from the Duke of Burgundy’s army, between which and the Imperialists our Duke lay.  Once, when Prince Eugene was wounded, our Duke took his Highness’s place in the trenches; but the siege was with the Imperialists, not with us.  A division under Webb and Rantzau was detached into Artois and Picardy upon the most painful and odious service that Mr. Esmond ever saw in the course of his military life.  The wretched towns of the defenceless provinces, whose young men had been drafted away into the French armies, which year after year the insatiable war devoured, were left at our mercy; and our orders were to show them none.  We found places garrisoned by invalids, and children and women; poor as they were, and as the costs of this miserable war had made them, our commission was to rob these almost starving wretches—­to tear the food out of their granaries, and strip them of their rags.  ’Twas an expedition of rapine and murder we were sent on:  our soldiers did deeds such as an honest man must blush to remember.  We brought back money and provisions in quantity to the Duke’s camp; there had been no one to resist us, and yet who dares to tell with what murder and violence, with what brutal cruelty, outrage, insult, that ignoble booty had been ravished from the innocent and miserable victims of the war?

Meanwhile, gallantly as the operations before Lille had been conducted, the Allies had made but little progress, and ’twas said when we returned to the Duke of Marlborough’s camp, that the siege would never be brought to a satisfactory end, and that the Prince of Savoy would be forced to raise it.  My Lord Marlborough gave this as his opinion openly; those who mistrusted him, and Mr. Esmond owns himself to be of the number, hinted that the Duke had his reasons why Lille should not be taken, and that he was paid to that end by the French King.  If this was so, and I believe it, General Webb had now a remarkable opportunity of gratifying his hatred of the Commander-in-Chief, of balking that shameful avarice, which was one of the basest and most notorious qualities of the famous Duke, and of showing his own consummate skill as a commander.  And when I consider all the circumstances preceding the event which will now be related, that my Lord Duke was actually offered certain millions of crowns provided that the siege of Lille should be raised:  that the Imperial