"Who run?" cried Wolfe, instantly raising himself on his elbow, and looking up, as if life were returning with full vigor.
"The French," answered the officer; "they are giving way in all directions."
"Run, one of you," said the general, speaking with great firmness, "run to Colonel Burton; tell him to march Webb's regiment down to Charles River with all speed, so as to secure the bridge, and cut off the enemy's retreat."
His orders were obeyed, and after a short pause, he continued, "Now, God be praised, I shall die happy!" He fell back at these words, turned convulsively on his side and expired.
Montcalm had also fallen in the battle; the enemy was totally routed, and, five days after, Quebec capitulated to General Townshend.
The body of the gallant and high-minded Wolfe was conveyed home in a ship of war. When the hero's remains arrived at Portsmouth, minute-guns were fired, the flags half struck, and a body of troops, with reversed arms, received the coffin on the beach, and followed the hearse. Parliament voted Wolfe a monument in Westminster Abbey, and in that venerable pile would have been his last resting-place; but a mother claimed the ashes of her son, and laid them beside those of his father, in a vault of the parish church of Greenwich.[Back to Contents]
FREDERICK THE GREAT
By General John Mitchell
(1712-1786)
How shall we describe the "Incomparable," the extraordinary compound of so many brilliant and repulsive qualities? How is he to be depicted, who was great as a king, and little as a man,—always admired in his public, never beloved in his private, character;—a just, generous, and laborious prince,—a vain, avaricious, and cold-hearted individual; luxurious by temperament, temperate in practice; a selfish epicurean, and affecting the harshness of the cynic;—peacefully disposed, and cultivating the arts of peace, yet exercising the arts of war in their direst form;—a man of letters, ignorant of the beauties, and disdaining the language of his country;—magnificent and mean; the builder of palaces, theatres, libraries and museums, and dying, literally, without a whole shirt in which he could be buried;—and, lastly, the most brilliant and successful soldier of his time,—and almost destitute of the soldier's first quality, personal courage?