f Marlborough, it was said, the
Prince of Savoy sat down before Lille, the capital of French Flanders, and
commenced that siege, the most celebrated of our time, and almost as
famous as the siege of Troy itself, for the feats of valour performed in
the assault and the defence. The enmity of that Prince of Savoy against
the French king was a furious personal hate, quite unlike the calm
hostility of our great English general, who was no more moved by the game
of war than that of billiards, and pushed forward his squadrons, and drove
his red battalions hither and thither as calmly as he would combine a
stroke or make a cannon with the balls. The game over (and he played it so
as to be pretty sure to win it), not the least animosity against the other
party remained in the breast of this consummate tactician. Whereas between
the Prince of Savoy and the French it was _guerre a mort_. Beaten off in
one quarter, as he had been at Toulon in the last year, he was back again
on another frontier of France, assailing it with his indefatigable fury.
When the prince came to the army, the smouldering fires of war were
lighted up and burst out into a flame. Our phlegmatic Dutch allies were
made to advance at a quick march--our calm duke forced into action. The
prince was an army in himself against the French; the energy of his hatred
prodigious, indefatigable--infectious over hundreds of thousands of men.
The emperor's general was repaying, and with a vengeance, the slight the
French king had put upon the fiery little Abbe of Savoy. Brilliant and
famous as a leader himself, and beyond 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 vigour, 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