Had any nominal force been thrown into England at this moment, all had been at once recovered; for William, if indeed he could, would have to withdraw his army from Ireland "to save the larger stake," and that country, relieved of his foreign veterans, would soon rectify itself; or, if compelled to remain in Ireland, and continue the war for awhile, he would certainly lose the other two kingdoms, and the third would follow as a consequence. His affairs in Holland, too, were in an unpromising condition. The arms of France were everywhere predominant, and this was a matter of deeper importance to William, than even the loss of the English throne, which, 'tis said, he ambitioned only so far as it enabled him to cope with his proud and detested enemy, Louis XIV. Such a happy combination of events, dashed but by a single defeat, in which only about one thousand men were lost, would have imparted courage and hope to any heart, but that of this unfortunate king. But from the first to the last his course, if not leading to the ruin of a noble people, might be read as a great "Comedy of Errors." He seemed continually under the spell of some evil genius that lulled him to a sense of security, while leading him to destruction:--and from his refusal of the first generous offer of King Louis, through M. Bonrepas, while he was yet upon the throne of England, the series of mishaps and miscalculations through which he stumbled, seems indeed to mark out a manifest destiny. At Salisbury, when deserted by his nobles, he had but to choose generals from the ranks, and pledging his army the estates forfeited by this treason, he could have created a revolution within a revolution, and held his throne at will as the sovereign of the people. If, instead of going to Ireland, where four-fifths of the people were unalterably attached to him, he had gone to Scotland, we are told that the whole country would have risen under Dundee; and William would have had two countries to conquer instead of one. On his arrival in Ireland, he weakened the strength of that country by sending 3,000 trained soldiers to the assistance of Dundee; under the advice of Secretary Melford, a Scotchman, and against the advice of Tyrconnell, who had seen the fate of the soldiers sent under Hamilton to England. He next disconcerted the arrangements for the surrender of Derry, and afterwards, through a weak punctilio, refused the second offer, and protracted the rebellion of Ulster until the arrival of Schomberg. Again, deaf to the entreaties of his generals, he virtually saved the army of invasion from total destruction, on the plea that winter and desertion would do the work of war, on the foreigners. As time advanced, and the war assumed greater proportions, his blunders became more glaring and more fatal. In the spring of 1690, he sent Lord Mountcashel, the best general then in the country, and 6,000 men, "the flower of the Irish army," to France, in