MacMahon had not only flung wide open the portals of Lorraine, but had made the reduction of ill-provided Strasburg a question of weeks or days. So heedlessly had the Ollivier Ministry, the Emperor and Empress rushed into war, at a time when even the fortifications of Metz were glaringly incomplete, when the storehouses of the frontier fortresses were ill-supplied, when arms and uniforms were not or could not be furnished to the Mobiles; when, in short, nothing could be put between the Germans and Paris except the troops hastily collected in Alsace and Lorraine—now a host in part shattered, in part disordered, and the whole without resolute and clear-sighted direction. Prince Louis Napoleon, sitting passively on his horse in the barrack-yard of Strasburg, in 1836, was defined by a caustic historian as a “literary man” whose characteristic was a “faltering boldness.” The phrases apply to the Emperor in Metz. It may be said that he could use the language employed by soldiers, that he had some military judgment, but that, when called on, he could not deal at all with the things which are the essence of the profession he loved to adopt. After a lapse of more than thirty years, he found himself, not alone in a barrack-yard facing an “indignant Colonel,” but at the head of a great, yet scattered and roughly handled Army, with formidable enemies pressing upon his front, and equally formidable enemies pouring through the rugged hill paths upon his vulnerable flank, and threatening the sole railway which led direct through Chalons to Paris. He was now a man, old for his years, and a painful disease made a seat on horseback almost intolerable. He could not, like his uncle in his prime, ride sixty miles a day, sleep an hour or two, and mount again if needful. He was an invalid and a dreamer, who had, against his fluctuating will, undertaken a task much too vast for his powers. The contemptuous words applied to him by Mr. Kinglake seem harsh, still, in very truth, they exactly describe Louis Napoleon as he was at Strasburg in 1836, and as he sat meditatively at Metz in 1870. Yet, be it understood, he never at any period of his career was wanting in coolness and physical courage, though what Napier has finely called “springing valour” had no place in his temperament. He was scared by the suddenness of the shock and the rapidity of events, and he was bewildered because he was incapable of grasping, co-ordinating, or understanding the thick-coming realities presented by war on a grand scale; and stood always too much in awe of the unknown. He could not “make up his mind,” and in the higher ranks of the French Army there was not one man who could force him to make it up and stand fast by his resolution. But, inferior as they were when measured by a high standard, it is probable that any one of the Corps Commanders, clothed with Imperial power, would have conducted the campaign far better than the Emperor. Another disadvantage which beset