great battles

"The French are the lads for painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned centaurs?" Moby-Dick (1851)

"Amid my flights—they shall be our chit-chat, not "light reading"—I shall often be sober, serious, if not sublime. We will talk on all subjects, from the shape of a horse-shoe to that of the slipper of the last favorite—say the "divine Fanny," from great battles, or Napier's splendid pictures of such, down to the obscurest point of the squad drill—from buffalo bulls to elfin sprites." 
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 15 (June 1851): 372-373)

Napier must be military historian William Francis Patrick Napier,
and "splended pictures" the narrative descriptions of battles in Napier's
History of the War in the Peninsula 

UPDATE:
 "the divine Fanny" refers to Austrian ballet superstar Fanny Elssler (1810-1884).

The "Virtuoso's Collection" in Hawthorne's short story of that title (from Mosses from an Old Manse) holds

"Fanny Elssler's shoe, which bore testimony to the muscular character of her illustrious foot."