The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-18 00:00:00

LONDON, FRIDAY, DEC. 18, 1863.

MEADE'S retreat again across the Rapidan is cer-
filinly a bit of an anti-climax. The more credulous
believers in Federal boastfulness were on the tiptoe
of expectation thatLEE and his lieutenants were upon
the eve of being signally if not finally worsted-
-when lo ! and behold, like the King of FRANCE with
his forty thousand men, General MEADE,With thrice
that number, marches, if not up a hill, across the
Rapidan—only, with all the pride, pomp, and cir-
cumstance of glorious war, as creditably as he could
possibly perform the manoeuvre, to march back
again ! Perhaps the next time that the
Northerners are chaunting premature pecans
of triumph, no matter how loudly—we would now
suggest that—perhaps the next time the more in-
fatuated among the still. surviving hangers-on to
faint ghost of a belief in the possibility of Federal
truthfulness, will moderate their credence and delay,
f.°." a little while longer at least, the expression of
tools implicit confidence in the tidings bruited to
Europe from
New York—tidings often so auspi-
cious for
the North, and so disastrous for the
South! -yet
somehow invariably coming forth in
the end '
3"t Precisely vice versa ! Seen through
the lens of Northern observation, the news from
the actual seat of war has rather more than once
come to us jost
exactly inverted. The most bril-
liant success has turned out, almost always, to a dead
certainty, about the viret
ehedest failure well imagin-
able. The Commander-in-Chief,
tme back, figuratively
opeaking, who has gone forth
to conquer everything, has
come
his spurs shorn oz and his baton of
command ignominiously broken in
twain. And
while those successive Comtnande_
"Li in-chief of the
Northern army have contrived ju lamentably
rapid succession, to come like
-44,10,,v8, so
o
to depart—the Southern Commander-in-Chiefti
has continued uninterruptedly in
his von
su-
preme responsibility, with his reputation
prestige of Viet
steadily
advancing, and enlarging—the Ory,
ever his, for hitherto LEE, in the field, has never
upon one single occasion been defeated. -up
to the present period he has so played the terrible
game of war, though confronted from first to last by
immensely superior forces numerically, that, at his
own pleasure, he has advanced, or he has
retreated ! Often advancing at the pas de
charge never retreating, as his foes have done,
quite undeniably more than once, in panic flight.
The heaviest blow, indeed, that has yet befallen
the cause of the Confederates—who does not know
it ? Not the discomfiture very recently of General
RAGG, a General that LEE, unaccustomed
to the bare notion of Southern discomfiture,
hes, almost as a matter of course, at once
superseded. No—that heaviest blow of all
yet dealt at the cause of the Confederates, was,
not the batioxing
of General BRAGG'S ambition
It was
Southern that blow dealt inadvertently
em h
by a
and, that fatal blow which ,struck
th
down, seye-`a.,
months back, the noblest the
most chivalrous and
enterprising among' that
-roup of paladins
the
lieutenants of LEE.
Bat happily for the
th
LEE is there still
in the
cause of the South,
the chief command
in the full vigour of his great
Powers as a master of
the deadly art of war, as
perhaps altogether
the greatest soldier of the age • And there
him are men like ,
still around
--,ONGbTREET'
and JOHNSTON, and BEAUREGARD, and
others 1n
many ways worthy of being brothers in. arras
of
brave, dead and gone STONEWALL JaexisoNever_
one of them, as nu ller,itatingly as JAcliseN w:
throughout his brief but brilliant and memorablecareer, as he was, in simple truth, uP to the moment