ow differently they will say what is in their hearts to the people they
address. To Bewick, war was more an absurdity than it was a horror: he
had not seen battle-fields, still less had he read of them, in ancient
days. He cared nothing about heroes,--Greek, Roman, or Norman. What he
knew, and saw clearly, was that Farmer Hodge's boy went out of the
village one holiday afternoon, a fine young fellow, rather drunk, with
a colored ribbon in his hat; and came back, ten years afterwards, with
one leg, one eye, an old red coat, and a tobacco-pipe in the pocket of
it. That is what he has got to say, mainly. So, for the pathetic side of
the business, he draws you two old soldiers meeting as bricklayers'
laborers; and for the absurd side of it, he draws a stone, sloping
sideways with age, in a bare field, on which you can just read, out of a
long inscription, the words "glorious victory;" but no one is there to
read them,--only a jackass, who uses the stone to scratch himself
against.

202. Now compare with this Botticelli's reproof of war. _He_ had seen
it, and often; and between noble persons;--knew the temper in which the
noblest knights went out to it;--knew the strength, the patience, the
glory, and the grief of it. He would fain see his Florence in peace; and
yet he knows that the wisest of her citizens are her bravest soldiers.
So he seeks for the ideal of a soldier, and for the greatest glory of
war, that in the presence of these he may speak reverently, what he must
speak. He does not go to Greece for his hero. He is not sure that even
her patriotic wars were always right. But, by his religious faith, he
cannot doubt the nobleness of the soldier who put the children of Israel
in possession of their promised land, and to whom the sign of the
consent of heaven was given by its pausing light in the valley of
Ajalon. Must then setting sun and risen moon stay, he thinks, only to
look upon slaughter? May no soldier of Christ bid them stay otherwise
than so? He draws Joshua, but quitting his hold of the sword: its hilt
rests on his bent knee; and he kneels before the sun, not commands it;
and this is his prayer:--

"Oh, King of kings, and Lord of lords, who alone rulest always in
eternity, and who correctest all our wanderings,--Giver of melody to the
choir of the angels, listen Thou a little to our bitter grief, and come
and rule us, oh Thou highest King, with Thy love which is so sweet!"

Is not that a little better, and