Wellesley. The remarkable details of the circumstances that first created this peculiar interest have been already told in a former article in this journal, which we must now venture to reproduce: The important fort of Ahmednuggur was taken by a most gallant escalade; in the thick of the assault General Wellesley saw a young officer who had reached the top of the "very lofty wall" thrust off by the enemy, and falling through the air from a great height. General Wellesley had little doubt that he must have been severely wounded, if not killed, by the fall; but hastened to inquire the name and fate of the gallant young fellow, and had the satisfaction of seeing him in a moment after, comparatively little injured, again mounting to the assault. Next morning the General sent for him-offered to attach him to his staff as brigade-major-and from that hour, through all his fields and fortunes, even down to the conquest of Paris-continued him in his personal family and friendship, and used sometimes to observe that the first time he had ever seen him was in the air: that young officer is now Sir Colin Campbell, Knight Commander of the Bath, a Major-General in the army, and Governor of Nova Scotia!'-Q. R. vol. li. p. 423. As We have now to add an important circumstance omitted in this statement. We do so on the authority of a gentleman than whom few enjoyed more of the Duke's society. his Grace repeatedly told the details in his hearing, young Colin not only mounted the ladder at the Indian fort a second time, but, getting within the place, forthwith contrived to arrange his own company into perfect order, so as to hold in check the still numerous garrison;-General Wellesley, on himself entering the town, recognized him by the bloody handkerchief round his head, and observed his steady conduct till all was over. Another similar instance is that of Colonel Gurwood, immortalized, we may venture to say, as the editor of the Dispatches, in a note to which his gallant exploit at Badajoz, and consequent introduction to the Duke's notice, is briefly and modestly stated. Many such instances could be repeated, and some too that, from being of a far humbler class, were not the less amiable-such as the poor old Irishwoman Judy, who, having been accidentally employed to make his bed early in the Peninsular campaigns, he would never permit to be displaced. She was for the rest of her life provided with a cottage adjoining the offices at Strathfieldsaye, and her fervent blessings on her benefactor, uttered with the genuine accent and feeling of her country, in return for his constant recognition of her, used to amuse, and better than amuse, the visitors at Strathfieldsaye. We may add that the two last times he left Walmer Castle were to visit an old friend who, he happened to hear, was in ill health, health, and within fifteen miles of him; and on one of these occasions, as he was returning through Dover, he stopped at the corner of a bye street to make some inquiry, which turned out to be after the health of one of the pilots, or some other subordinate person, whom he desired to be told to take care of himself, and not to return to his duties until he should be quite well. These were, we believe, his last appearances beyond his own threshold! The incidents themselves are trivial, but they tend to show that it was not in his private and social intercourse that this not more illustrious than kind-hearted man could be called the Iron Duke. We now return to M. Maurel. In our general testimony to his candour, we must not be supposed to subscribe to all his views. There are points-though we admit very few-on which we think he is not quite above national prejudices. We do not complain of them. On the contrary, they are the stamp of the writer's sincerity in the main and more important portions of his essay. If he were not a good Frenchman, we should not have so much respect for his opinion. There is but one of these points which we see any occasion to notice, and we wish to treat it with M. Maurel à l'aimable as matter of history. After doing justice to the success of the Duke's administration of affairs and to that of his diplomatic exertions in the negociations at Paris, he adds This success is quite enough to console him for the checks which he had afterwards to suffer in this line. In expiation of his triumphs on the field of battle, he had the pleasure of being beaten by M. de Châteaubriand and by M. de Montmorency and by M. de Villele in the field of diplomacy.'-p. 141. And this he attributes to the Duke's having been in a false position at the Congress (we suppose) of Verona-where, he says, England being on one hand the enemy of all revolutions, but, on the other hand, an enemy to putting them down by foreign intervention, he had in fact nothing left but to protest against everybody on all sides. We wonder that a person of M. Maurel's logic does not see that his statement, instead of extenuating, as he kindly intends, the Duke's diplomatic defeat, does much better, for it contradicts the fact itself, since, if his position was originally and essentially hostile to all the contending parties, he could hardly be said to have been beaten' by the diplomacy of one of them. No one better understands, and no one has more lucidly shown, than M. Maurel himself, that the Duke of Wellington's mind was not to be baffled by the tricks and intrigues of mere diplomacy, and we can assure him that, if a supplementary publication of 'Dispatches' should come to complete the history of the Duke's public 202 life, life, it will be made very clear that he was no more beaten in the cabinet by Châteaubriand, Montmorency, and Villèle, than in the field by Marmont, Massena, or Soult. That France did invade Spain, contrary to the advice given by the Duke of Wellington from his Government, and corroborated by his own private opinion, is true, but there was no room for any trial of diplomatic skill or struggle in the affair; he gave his advice, but only advice, and advice so disinterested and so rational, that it is said to have had a great effect on the mind of the ablest and wisest of the French ministers whom M. Maurel has named-M. de Villèle-though he was subsequently overborne by his rasher colleagues. Nay, it happens by a singular coincidence that, on the Duke of Wellington's return through Paris from this very mission in which M. Maurel thinks he was defeated by the French diplomatists, he had an audience of Louis XVIII. to repeat the advice he had given at Verona, and the King, says M. Lamartine, who had long before discerned that the Duke was a statesman as well as a soldier, was, like M. de Villèle, much affected by his opinion.'* Whatever of diplomatic struggle there was in the affair was in the French Ministry itself, and fatal were its results. M. de Montmorency was dismissed, and replaced by M. de Châteaubriand, who (we say it with personal regret) giddily and selfishly separated himself from M. de Villèle, thwarted him in all his measures, and finally, by a series of party intrigues, led to the overthrow of the wisest, the most moderate, and, till these unhappy dissensions, the strongest government that the Restoration had had. Thus those three diplomatists whom M. Maurel describes as 'beating the Duke of Wellington in statesmanship,' showed their boasted abilities only in defeating and ruining each other, dethroning their sovereign, and plunging their country in a series of revolutions of which who can foresee the end? We must now conclude. We have, we are aware, given an imperfect idea of the entraînant, though somewhat discursive style of the original, but we hope that we have added not inconsiderably to its value and authority by the elucidations and corroborations of the author's reasoning afforded by our extracts from the Duke's conversations, and we wish we saw any reason to expect that a work at once so amusing and instructive, so attractive and so convincing, was likely to exercise in France the salutary influence which it certainly would have if it could be read there; but we are informed that it is expressly prohibited in France, and we can ourselves say, in confirmation of the truth of this strange exercise of despotism, that we have Hist, de la Rest. vol. vii. p. 79. been been unable to procure a copy at any shop in Paris, and that persons high in the literary and political circles of that centreas they love to call it-of liberality and civilisation-of literature and of light-had not-when we last heard from Parisbeen able to obtain a sight of it. We can scarcely believe such monstrous tyranny, but, if it be true, our regret at the impediment thus arbitrarily interposed to personal justice and to historical truth is considerably alleviated by the consideration that such an impediment is already a testimony, odious, indeed, but decisive, to the truth and justice which it attempts to smother. It is also a wholesome and instructive lesson to see that the grand constitutional principles which France boasts of having conquered and consecrated in 1789-that the expansive liberties of the Republic, which they tell us have survived and excused its horrors-that the ineffaceable and immortal glories of the old Empire, and finally the stupendous agency of universal suffrage-or, in plainer terms, the omnipotent gendarmerie of the new one-are all together afraid to face a shilling pamphlet, in which there is not a fact, and hardly a word, that is not forty years old-of European notoriety-of the most unquestionable authenticity and veracity, and of which the sole offence can be that a Frenchman ventures to lay before his countrymen in their own tongue a review of historical facts which have been for almost half a century inscribed in the annals of all the other nations of the world. For our parts we confess that it is chiefly for the sake of France herself that we care that M. Maurel's estimate of the Duke of Wellington should make proselytes amongst his countrymen. She is now expiating in a strait-waistcoat her former extravagances, and her prospects are worse than dark; but we still hope and believe that there is in France, under that fearfrozen surface, a depth of good feeling and good sense which must eventually awaken a degree of moral and political courage sufficient to deliver her from the monstrous anomaly that she has during such a rapid succession of revolutions and usurpations exhibited, of being at once the wonder, the contempt, and the terror of the rest of the world, and-we really believe-of herself. M. Maurel's work is marked with that moral courage, and we heartily wish that we could extend its influence. Happy will it be for France and the world if she can be taught that the true glory of soldiers and statesmen, and the real safety and dignity of nations, is to be found in those eternal principles of justice and truth, of which the Duke of Wellington was while living, and has bequeathed to us in his works, the most perfect model. Those,' to borrow M. Maurel's eloquent expressions, VOL. XCII. NO. CLXXXIV. 2 P were 'were the qualities by which this man won step by step the admira- AS IT ALREADY IS-WILL GO DOWN WITH STILL INCREASING GRANDEUR Erratum to last Number, p. 248, for eighteen full-manned pilot boats,' read |