his endeavors, and the town was carried by
assault on the 10th of May. Never, perhaps, did earth witness a more
cruel exhibition of the horrors of war. The soul sickens in the
contemplation of outrages so fiend-like. We prefer to give the narrative
of these deeds, which it is the duty of history to record, in the
language of another.

"All the horrors ever exercised against a captured place were repeated
and almost surpassed, on this dreadful event, which, notwithstanding all
the subsequent disorders and the lapse of time, is still fresh in the
recollection of its inhabitants and of Germany. Neither age, beauty nor
innocence, neither infancy nor decrepitude, found refuge or compassion
from the fury of the licentious soldiery. No retreat was sufficiently
secure to escape their rapacity and vengeance; no sanctuary sufficiently
sacred to repress their lust and cruelty. Infants were murdered before
the eyes of their parents, daughters and wives violated in the arms of
their fathers and husbands. Some of the imperial officers, recoiling
from this terrible scene, flew to Count Tilly and supplicated him to put
a stop to the carnage. 'Stay yet an hour,' was his barbarous reply; 'let
the soldier have some compensation for his dangers and fatigues.'

"The troops, left to themselves, after sating their passions, and almost
exhausting their cruelty in three hours of pillage and massacre, set
fire to the town, and the flames were in an instant spread by the wind
to every quarter of the place. Then opened a scene which surpassed all
the former horrors. Those who had hitherto escaped, or who were forced
by the flames from their hiding-places, experienced a more dreadful
fate. Numbers were driven into the Elbe, others massacred with every
species of savage barbarity--the wombs of pregnant women ripped up, and
infants thrown into the fire or impaled on pikes and suspended over the
flames. History has no terms, poetry no language, painting no colors to
depict all the horrors of the scene. In less than ten hours the most
rich, the most flourishing and the most populous town in Germany was
reduced to ashes. The cathedral, a single convent and a few miserable
huts, were all that were left of its numerous buildings, and scarcely
more than a thousand souls all that remained of more than thirty
thousand inhabitants.

"After an interval of two days, when the soldiers were fatigued, if not
sated, with devastation and slaughter, and when the f