Note 62 — LIFE OF BUSBECQ.

One of the most remarkable applications of this theory is with regard to the military art. Busbecq wrote a treatise on the Art of Warfare against the Turks. In it he constantly quotes as his authorities the great captains of Greece and Rome; some may smile on reading his work, and imagine that the tactics of Cæsar and Alexander are out of place in the days of gunpowder and cannon balls, but the following passage will show how one of his countrymen successfully followed out the principle, which he may possibly have taken in the first instance from Busbecq’s work. ‘Lewis William of Nassau had felt that the old military art was dying out, and that there was nothing to take its place. He had revived in the swamps of Friesland the old manœuvres, the quickness of wheeling, the strengthening, without breaking the ranks or columns, by which the ancient Romans had performed so much excellent work in their day, and which seemed to have passed entirely into oblivion. Old colonels and ritt-masters, who had never heard of Leo the Thracian or the Macedonian phalanx, smiled and shrugged their shoulders ... but there came a day when they did not laugh, neither friends nor enemies.’—Motley, United Netherlands, iii. 4; see also United Netherlands, iv. 34.