a single blessing on the boy's head,--"that he may excel his father, and bring home _bloody spoils_, his enemy being slain, and _so make glad the heart of his mother_!" [15] Little better than Trojan Hector was the "great" Condé ranging over the field and exulting in the blood of the enemy, which defiled his sword-arm to the elbow.--Mahon, Essai sur la Vie du Grand Condé, p. 60. From early fields of modern literature, as from those of antiquity, might be gathered similar illustrations, showing the unconscious degradation of the soldier, in vain pursuit of _justice_, renouncing the human character, to assume that of brute. Bayard, the exemplar of chivalry, with a name always on the lips of its votaries, was described by the qualities of beasts, being, according to his admirers, _ram in attack, wild-boar in defence, and wolf in flight_. Henry the Fifth, as represented by our own Shakespeare, in the spirit-stirring appeal to his troops exclaims,-- "When the blast of war blows in our ears, _Then imitate the action of the tiger_." This is plain and frank, revealing the true character of war. I need not dwell on the moral debasement that must ensue. Passions, like so many bloodhounds, are unleashed and suffered to rage. Crimes filling our prisons stalk abroad in the soldier's garb, unwhipped of justice. Murder, robbery, rape, arson, are the sports of this fiendish Saturnalia, when "The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range _With conscience wide as hell_." By a bold, but truthful touch, Shakespeare thus pictures the foul disfigurement which war produces in man, whose native capacities he describes in those beautiful words: "How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!" And yet this nobility of reason, this infinitude of faculties, this marvel of form and motion, this nature so angelic, so godlike, are all, under the transforming power of War, lost in the action of the beast, or the license of the fleshed soldier with bloody hand and conscience wide as hell. II.