Essays Author:Hugh Miller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and He who can save by many or by few had willed that their efforts in every instance should be crowned with complete success. The siege was raised; the key ... more »of Palestine passed not into the hands of Napoleon; the besiegers fell back upon Egypt; disaster followed disaster; Nelson annihilated their fleet at the Nile ; their leader slunk away from them ; the army of Abercromby cooped up their forces amid the sand-hills of Alexandria; and their scheme of eastern conquest finally terminated in so inglorious an abandonment of the enterprise, that they owed their very safety mainly to the sufferance of the British. Napoleon afterwards opened his trenches before stronger fortresses, and they felL A single campaign threw open the cities of Prussia to him ; he gave law to the armed millions of Spain, Austria, and Holland; but on the solitary wastes of Judea there awaited another destiny; and the stars in their courses fought against him and prevailed, when his scheme of conquest led him there. His enterprise, and the apparently inadequate means through which it was defeated, remind one of the old Grecian story of the open space left by the countrymen of Ajax in the forefront of their armies, long after the hero's death, but in which they believed he still continued to take his stand. A famous warrior of the enemy, it is said, espying the opening in the heat of battle, rushed into it to make his way through, but he was instantly felled to the ground by some invisible antagonist, and then dashed back upon his friends. Judea, so long trodden under foot by every enemy, however mean or contemptible, seems in the present century to represent that open space. Forty years have passed since the discomfiture of Napoleon before the walls of Jean d'Acre. A new scene of things has arisen. The con...« less