The gazetteers and writers, both of the French and English side, have given accounts sufficient of that bloody battle of Blarignies or Malplaquet, which was the last and the hardest earned of the victories of the great Duke of Marlborough.  In that tremendous combat near upon two hundred and fifty thousand men were engaged, more than thirty thousand of whom were slain or wounded (the Allies lost twice as many men as they killed of the French, whom they conquered):  and this dreadful slaughter very likely took place because a great general’s credit was shaken at home, and he thought to restore it by a victory.  If such were the motives which induced the Duke of Marlborough to venture that prodigious stake, and desperately sacrifice thirty thousand brave lives, so that he might figure once more in a Gazette, and hold his places and pensions a little longer, the event defeated the dreadful and selfish design, for the victory was purchased at a cost which no nation, greedy of glory as it may be, would willingly pay for any triumph.  The gallantry of the French was as remarkable as the furious bravery of their assailants.  We took a few score of their flags, and a few pieces of their artillery; but we left twenty thousand of the bravest soldiers of the world round about the intrenched lines, from which the enemy was driven.  He retreated in perfect good order; the panic-spell seemed to be broke, under which the French had labored ever since the disaster of Hochstedt; and, fighting now on the threshold of their country, they showed an heroic ardor of resistance, such as had never met us in the course of their aggressive war.  Had the battle been more successful, the conqueror might have got the price for which he waged it.  As it was, (and justly, I think,) the party adverse to the Duke in England were indignant at the lavish extravagance of slaughter, and demanded more eagerly than ever the recall of a chief whose cupidity and desperation might urge him further still.  After this bloody fight of Malplaquet, I can answer for it, that in the Dutch quarters and our own, and amongst the very regiments and commanders whose gallantry was most conspicuous upon this frightful day of carnage, the general cry was, that there was enough of the war.  The French were driven back into their own boundary, and all their conquests and booty of Flanders disgorged.  As for the Prince of Savoy, with whom our Commander-in-Chief, for reasons of his own, consorted more closely than ever, ’twas known that he was animated not merely by a political hatred, but by personal rage against the old French King:  the Imperial Generalissimo never forgot the slight put by Lewis upon the Abbe de Savoie; and in the humiliation or ruin of his most Christian Majesty, the Holy Roman Emperor found his account.  But what were these quarrels to us, the free citizens of England and Holland!  Despot as he was, the French monarch was yet the chief of European civilization, more venerable in his age and