go by a new way, having heard perhaps that some huntsmen of the Alps had already struck out several other tracks. It did not answer; and so he had to encamp for three days and three nights in the midst of the snow, that at the spot where the road was broken down, he might make with timber a new one broad enough for the beasts of burthen to pass. This is the place where indeed the distress of the army was overpowering, and it suffered such immense loss, especially in beasts. This difficulty being overcome, they came by and by to the valley of Aosta, where the Salassians dwelt, a cultivated and rather civilized country. The story of Hannibal’s having shown to his army, from the top of the mountain, the blooming land of Italy, is likewise an impossible one, and a rhetorical flourish: from the summit of St. Bernard, one sees nothing but mountains. Hannibal was now in the valley of Aosta. A great part of his elephants were dead, and his army now consisted of no more than twenty thousand foot (twelve thousand Africans, and eight thousand Spaniards), and six thousand horse, most of them Numidians. It is wonderful how strong the horses here showed themselves to have been; the Numidians must have treated them with great care. The whole management of the war on the side of the Romans, is a remarkable counterpart of that want of design, and that sluggishness, which in the wars of the revolution so often let the victory fall into the hands of the French. When the Romans heard that Hannibal was going to cross the Alps, they most certainly must have thought him a madman: this supposition alone can account for the slackness of their movements. Scipio, who had advanced as far as Avignon, ought, as he had a fleet, to have been in Lombardy, long before Hannibal reached the St. Bernard. He very likely thought, that there would still be always plenty of time whenever he came; and thus, when he arrived at the Po, Hannibal was already descending the Alps. The reports also of the losses of the Carthaginians, one may fancy to oneself from that logic of absurdity of which we have heard so many examples during the revolution. His condition was now indeed a very bad one for an ordinary general; yet Hannibal, without stopping, hastened on with his army in which typhus fever must necessarily have raged, and which must have looked like a horde of gipsies. Scipio had only two legions, a corresponding number of allies, and a few horse. The Romans were in many respects the slaves of established usage, from which they frequently did not know how to free themselves in an emergency. Thus from ancient times downward, such an army was looked upon as quite large enough, and therefore they did not send more. Part of the Gauls were already in open rebellion; the Boians, the summer before, had beaten a Roman legion, and kept the survivors shut up in Modena,--they dwelt from Parma and Placentia to the frontier of the Romagna,--and