In short, he found that he had to contend with a mighty, and an uncontrollable, power--the great moral power of Public Opinion--compared with which, the Military Power, centred in a single Individual, however brilliant the latter in genius and in conception, however fertile in expedients, and however daring and successful in enterprise and in execution, can acquire no permanent stability, when not based upon, and emanating from, the broad and comprehensive moral energies of the Nation; and even a succession of dazzling triumphs, when gained through the instrumentality of an arbitrary drain upon the national resources, and in opposition to the real interests and welfare of the State, tends but to hasten the downfall of the Military Dictator: whose career may be aptly likened to a Grecian column erected upon a loose foundation, displaying around its lofty capital an exuberance of meretricious ornament, which, by its disproportionate weight, destroys the equilibrium of the ill-supported shaft, and involves the entire structure in one confused and irretrievable ruin. Its fall may startle the world with its shock; the fragments may strew the earth in a wreck as gigantic as were its proportions when it drew the gaze of admiring or trembling nations: but they are but the more striking proofs of the destruction that has overtaken it;--it is a ruin still. CHAPTER II. Belgium, the frequent battle-ground of Europe, whose every stream and every town is associated with the memory of bygone deeds of arms, was destined, in 1815, to witness another and a mighty struggle--a struggle in which were arrayed, on the one side, the two foremost of the confederated Armies advancing towards the French frontiers; and, on the other, the renowned _Grande Armée_ of Imperial France, resuscitated at the magic call of its original founder--the great NAPOLEON himself. During the months of April and May, troops of all arms continued to enter upon, and spread themselves over, the Belgian soil.