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One looking at him would have felt instinctively that he was made to wear the gleaming uniform of a Prussian Lifeguard, rather than the sober garments of a civilian. As a matter of fact, he was dressed like an Englishman, and would probably have been taken for one, to his own intense disgust, in any European crowd.
But before they could well come to blows with the first ranks, the barbarians shrunk back, and were hotly pursued by Alexander, who drove those that fled before him into the middle of the battle, where Darius himself was in person, whom he saw from a distance over the foremost ranks, conspicuous in the midst of his lifeguard, a tall and fine-looking man, drawn in a lofty chariot, defended by an abundance of the best cavalry who stood close in order about it, ready to receive the enemy.
Next the house of Austria hired mercenaries, 1499; the princes of Italy did the same, as did others afterward. Even the popes themselves wanted a lifeguard of Swiss; the first, 1503, was Pope Julius II, who was often engaged in war. Switzerland suffered much from this course. Many a field remained untilled, many a plough stood still, because the husbandman had taken mercenary arms.
And therefore, after the death of Alexander, when Neoptolemus, who had been captain of his lifeguard, said that he had followed Alexander with shield and spear, but Eumenes only with pen and paper, the Macedonians laughed at him, as knowing very well that, besides other marks of favor, the king had done him the honor to make him a kind of kinsman to himself by marriage.
This Lifeguard Regiment of foot, for instance, in which the Crown-Prince now is, Friedrich Wilhelm got it in his Father's time, no doubt a regiment then of fair qualities; and he has kept drilling it, improving it, as poets polish stanzas, unweariedly ever since: and see now what it has grown to! A Potsdam Giant Regiment, such as the world never saw, before or since.
In one instant that mass of motionless statues becomes a flood of lava; down in one terrible sweep it comes, silence behind it and despair before; no one notices the beauty of that brilliant chivalrous array, all else is merged in the fury of the wild gallop; spurs are deep, reins free, blades grasped, heads bent; the excited horse feels the heel no more than he feels the hand; the uneven ground breaks their ranks, no matter, they feel that they can ride down the world: Rupert first clears the hedge, he is always first, then comes the captain of his lifeguard, then the whole troop "jumble after them," in a spectator's piquant phrase.
During the war he had been, by the terms of surrender, empowered to appoint and to change its magistracy at will. No change had occurred for many years, but as the government had of late fallen into the hands of the Barneveldians, and as Maurice considered the Truce to be a continuance of the war, he appeared suddenly, in the city at the head of a body of troops and surrounded by his lifeguard.
The cross-eyed man was a lifeguard at a beach and there were social entanglements involving a bearded father, his daughter in an inconsiderable bathing suit, a confirmed dipsomaniac, two social derelicts who had to live by their wits, and a dozen young girls also arrayed in inconsiderable bathing suits.
"I leave with him the descendant of the far famed James of Douglas," answered March. "It is his lordship's boast that he never puts foot in stirrup but a thousand horse mount with him as his daily lifeguard, and I believe the monks of Aberbrothock will swear to the fact.
Our venerable author pictures most vividly the Christian's weakness and the power of his enemies; 'Should you see a man that could not go from door to door but he must be clad in a coat of mail, a helmet of brass upon his head, and for his lifeguard a thousand men, would you not say, surely this man has store of enemies at hand? This is the case, enemies lie in wait for Israel in every hole, he can neither eat, drink, wake, sleep, work, sit still, talk, be silent worship his God in public or private, but he is in danger.
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