up in a line eight miles long.  It may be doubted whether such an army had ever been brought together under the Roman eagles.  The show began early in the morning, and was not over when the long summer day closed.  Racine left the ground, astonished, deafened, dazzled, and tired to death.  In a private letter he ventured to give utterance to an amiable wish which he probably took good care not to whisper in the courtly circle:  “Would to heaven that all these poor fellows were in their cottages again with their wives and their little ones!"303

After this superb pageant Lewis announced his intention of attacking Namur.  In five days he was under the walls of that city, at the head of more than thirty thousand men.  Twenty thousand peasants, pressed in those parts of the Netherlands which the French occupied, were compelled to act as pioneers.  Luxemburg, with eighty thousand men, occupied a strong position on the road between Namur and Brussels, and was prepared to give battle to any force which might attempt to raise the siege.304 This partition of duties excited no surprise.  It had long been known that the great Monarch loved sieges, and that he did not love battles.  He professed to think that the real test of military skill was a siege.  The event of an encounter between two armies on an open plain was, in his opinion, often determined by chance; but only science could prevail against ravelins and bastions which science had constructed.  His detractors sneeringly pronounced it fortunate that the department of the military art which His Majesty considered as the noblest was one in which it was seldom necessary for him to expose to serious risk a life invaluable to his people.

Namur, situated at the confluence of the Sambre and the Meuse, was one of the great fortresses of Europe.  The town lay in the plain, and had no strength except what was derived from art.  But art and nature had combined to fortify that renowned citadel which, from the summit of a lofty rock, looks down on a boundless expanse of cornfields, woods and meadows, watered by two fine rivers.  The people of the city and of the surrounding region were proud of their impregnable castle.  Their boast was that never, in all the wars which had devastated the Netherlands, had skill or valour been able to penetrate those walls.  The neighbouring fastnesses, famed throughout the world for their strength, Antwerp and Ostend, Ypres, Lisle and Tournay, Mons and Valenciennes, Cambray and Charleroi, Limburg and Luxemburg, had opened their gates to conquerors; but never once had the flag been pulled down from the battlements of Namur.  That nothing might be wanting to the interest of the siege, the two great masters of the art of fortification were opposed to each other.  Vauban had during many years been regarded as the first of engineers; but a formidable rival had lately arisen, Menno, Baron of Cohorn, the ablest officer in the service of the States General.  The defences of Namur had been recently strengthened and repaired under Cohorn’s superintendence; and he was now within the walls.  Vauban was in the camp of Lewis.  It might therefore be expected that both the attack and the defence would be conducted with consummate ability.