those who knew him, with his pleasant smile, his Doric speech, and polished, dignified, and frank address, as the type of the old generation of Scottish gentlemen. To those who knew

him not, the pages of this book will convey a true picture of the man; and that country and society is fortunate whose thoughts, habits, and associations are moulded by minds so well balanced, sunny, and genial as that which pervades these volumes of pleasant recollections.

No. CCLXXXVI. will be published in October.

THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

OCTOBER, 1874.

No. CCLXXXVI.

ART. I.-Das Leben des Generals Von Scharnhorst. Von G. H. KLIPPEL. Leipsic: 1870.

PRUSSIA, as all the world admits, exhibits the strongest types of statesmanship and stategy that our age has produced; and statesman and strategist have combined their powers to raise her from a second-class kingdom to be the foremost military Power in Europe. But Bismarck's sagacity and Von Moltke's science might have been in vain had they not possessed, in the national organisation for war, the mightiest engine the world has ever seen framed. And Prussia does not forget the obligation she owes to the great man-a Prussian only by adoption, a German above all-who founded her military system, and who in doing so prepared those victories of the War of Independence in 1813-14, which he was not spared to share, yet which but for him would hardly have been won. Herr Klippel's great work has not the less been read because it appeared at a new crisis in the world's history, when his hero's country was seen to rise again as one man under arms against the hereditary foe for whose first overthrow the weapon was forged by Scharnhorst sixty years before.

Yet Scharnhorst himself, who came from Hanover to be the tutor of the Prussian nation, was but the pupil of an earlier teacher in a principality yet smaller than the Electorate which gave him birth. No fact is brought out more clearly than this in Herr Klippel's volumes; and before passing to his own career, it is but just to dwell on the memory of the instructor to whom the regenerator of the Prussian service owed so much. Those too, who imagine that military science is but the fancy of a day, and owes its study rather to men's immediate needs than to one of the deeper instincts of the race,

VOL. CXL. NO. CCLXXXVI.

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may study profitably the history of Count William of Lippe and the school which he founded. For there Scharnhorst in a time of settled peace imbibed the knowledge which was long after to fructify, in the days when Prussia, under his sage teaching, drew strength out of disaster, and honour out of humiliation.

Little loved by, and loving little the aristocracy of his island kingdom, George II. was ever ready to show favour to the sons of the small German princes with whom he felt a real kinship. His near neighbour in the Empire, and the faithful ally of Hanover, the Sovereign Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, had no difficulty in obtaining a commission in the British Guards for his second son, Count William, a boy of striking quickness and intelligence, who from his earliest childhood had eyinced his passion for a soldier's life. The young

ensign had received his first education in England, where his parents had spent much of their time as guests of George I., and is said to have spoken English as well as French fluently when he returned to London to carry the colours of his battalion. The sudden death of his elder brother whilst he was yet under age made him heir to the petty principality, and he resigned his commission at his father's call; but only to serve soon after in the field under the sovereign whose uniform he had put off. The claim of Maria Theresa to the throne of Austria threw all Europe into a blaze. As France supported her rival, the Elector of Bavaria, England naturally espoused the cause of the brave young Queen of Hungary; and George II. took the field on the Main at the head of a large force composed chiefly of English and Hanoverians, but having in it a Dutch contingent commanded by the Count of Lippe, whose son gained permission to see service by his father's side. The British monarch, though a brave man himself, was a poor strategist, and had scarce been in command a week when his army was in imminent danger of having its supplies altogether cut off by Noailles, who was operating against it with a superior force of French on the other side of the Main. Fortunately for the king, his movement of retreat from a very awkward position did not discourage his own troops, whilst it led to a sudden passage of the stream by the French, and a rash attempt to intercept his army altogether, which brought on the battle of Dettingen. Never was the value of the old advice to build a bridge of gold for the retiring enemy more strikingly illustrated than when Noailles, instead of allowing his adversary to commence his retreat, and then pushing his rear through the defiles to the north by which he must escape, resolved to intercept

him. The narrow front of the action which ensued on the north bank proved more favourable to the steadiness with which the British received the attack than to the impetuosity with which the French delivered it. The young Count learnt that day a practical lesson in the advantage of good discipline under fire, which dwelt with him during the rest of a long and varied military career. Here too he showed the same contempt for danger which caused Count Schulemburg, under whom he afterwards served in Italy, to send him off on detachment before a general action, lest he should get himself killed to no purpose; and which, later, made his name a proverb for daring in the first part of the Seven Years' War.

That great conflict had not long been engaged when Portugal was drawn into it, on the side of her already old ally, the King of Great Britain and of Frederick the Great with whom his sympathies were engaged. As has invariably been found in like cases, the Portuguese army, on coming out of peace, was quite unfit for the field; and the little kingdom was in danger of being crushed by Spanish arms guided by France. Help was sought from England, and sent in the person of Count de la Lippe, now holding a commission as Hanoverian general, who was soon on his way to Lisbon with a staff of trained officers. Here his duties were those which Beresford was sent two generations later to repeat; and so successfully was the task performed, that to his exertions it was universally acknowledged the safety of the kingdom was due. The grateful king would willingly have retained him at his post of commander-inchief when the war was over. But the Count had now succeeded to his father's sovereignty, and returned to Germany to devote himself to its duties with as much energy as though his few thousands of subjects had been as many millions. Although he saw war no more, he counted among the chief duties of a ruler the keeping his people thoroughly prepared for its event. The maxim he himself was never weary of teaching was, that since man has a natural inclination for war, this should be taken as the basis of national education, and properly directed. 'The study of military science,' so ran his favourite canon, 'is not the melancholy trade of discovering more skilful means 'of murder, but is the rendering a true service to humanity. For the more perfectly military science is studied, the more dangerous will it be found to commence a war, and the more 'rare consequently will war be; and when it does occur, the 'more removed from useless murder. The misuse of this higher " art would carry us down to the level from whence it raised us. No war but a defensive one is justifiable, as the wantonly

6

'offensive is utterly beneath the dignity of the just man. The 'preparation of means of defence will tend to limit war, inasmuch as they will constantly increase the obstacles that are put in the way of the invader.' Words these which have a sound truth in them, that is illustrated by the general course of history, none the less surely, that national animosities or dynastic ambitions from time to time prove so strong as to outweigh all caution and defy all restraint.

True to his maxims, Count William carried them out to the full in his own dominions, and in his general devotion to the wellbeing of his subjects never forgot the supposed necessity of their military training. His means for an army were indeed limited. To maintain the single battalion of foot, squadron of horse, and battery of guns which formed his establishment, and which it was his pride to make models for all Germany, might not have been too heavy a tax on the adults of the principality, and its money resources. But if their complement of men was always full, it would yet exclude, as in other German states was then excluded, a great part of the males able to bear arms. The old Teuton law had prescribed that there should be no exemption from the defence of the country; but this had long fallen into disuse, and the system of standing armies of long service which had grown up all over Germany in its place, was too suited to the absolutist notions of the age to be lightly shaken. It was reserved for this sovereign of an obscure and petty principality, in his zeal for earrying out his theory of complete defence, to revive the old notion that the army of a state should be the people of the state in arms. And in pressing earnestly after his object, he was the first to solve the problem which now engages the attention of great empires, of achieving this maximum of warlike power with the least possible expense. The method taken for this end was that by which alone it has been anywhere accomplished. He insisted on each adult fit for arms serving long enough in the ranks to acquire a thorough knowledge of the arm to which he was assigned, and this attained, dismissed him from the colours, but under the liability to rejoin in case of war. Gneisenau, the brains' of the victorious army of Blücher in after days, and the most trusted soldier of Prussia when fate robbed her of Scharnhorst, felt and acknowledged to the full the obligation Germany owed to the memory of the man who had bequeathed her the secret of her sudden rise from abject prostration.

"You have praised the Count of Lippe highly,' he wrote to Varnhagen von Ense, yet not as befits his merit. He was far greater than you re