Why, there certainly does seem a great illumination in the valley there," said I.

"May I never," said the doctor, "if it isn't a station

"A station !-pray may I ask

"You need not ask a word on the subject; for, if I am a true prophet, you'll know what it means before morning."

A little more chatting together brought us to a narrow road, flanked on either side by high hedges of hawthorn, and, in a few minutes more, we stood before the priest's residence, a long, white-washed, thatched house, having great appearance of comfort and convenience. Arrived here, the doctor seemed at once to take on him the arrangement of the whole party; for, after raising the latch and entering the house, he returned to us in a few minutes, and said,

"Wait a while now; we'll not go in to Father Malachi 'till we've put Giles to bed."

We, accordingly, lifted him from off the car, and assisted him into the house, and following Finucane down a narrow passage, at last reached a most comfortable little chamber, with a neat bed; here we placed him, while

the doctor gave some directions to a bare-headed, red-legged hussey, without shoes or stockings, and himself proceeded to examine the wound, which was a more serious one than it at first appeared.

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After half an hour thus occupied, during which time roars of merri ment and hearty peals of laughing burst upon us, every time the door opened, from a distant part of the house, where his reverence was entertaining his friends, and which, as often as they were heard by the doctor seemed to produce in him sensations not unlike those that afflicted the wedding guest' " in the "Ancient Mariner," when he heard the "loud bassoon," and as certainly imparted an equally longing desire to be a partaker. in the mirth. We arranged everything. satisfactorily for Mr. Beamish's comfort, and with a large basin of vinegar and water, to keep his knee cool, and a strong tumbler of hot punch, to keep his heart warm-homeopathic medi-, cine is not half so new as Dr. Hahnneman would make us believe we left Mr. Beamish to his own meditations, and doubtless regrets that he did not get "the saw-handled one, he was used to," while we proceeded to make, our bows to Father Malachi Brennan.

But, as I have no intention to treat the good priest with ingratitude, I shall not present him to my readers at the tail of a chapter; here then I rest, and here, if the influenza does not take me by the nose, ad interim, I shall be found "confessing" this day month.

THE Fifth Volume of Major-General Napier's Peninsular War has been now, for some time, in the hands of his readers, and is, as the former were, both interesting and important. We doubt, indeed, if the interest of the events which he narrates is not greater at the present day, than even during the stirring period when they occurred; as they come upon us, after the lassitude of a long peace, with a force and a

freshness that could scarcely be said to belong to them, when the minds of men were dazzled and distracted by the tumult and the brilliancy of the various astounding military exploits, which marked the tide of war, as it rolled its fiery surges over a convulsed and agitated world. Certain it is that the transactions in the Peninsula were worthy of a more concentrated attention than could be given to them, while

Vol. V.

so many things of almost equal moment were claiming public attention; and our author has done well to avail himself of a season of quiet and reflection, for the purpose of laying before his readers those stores of knowledge, which his personal experience, as well as his acquaintance with many of the principal actors upon that theatre of British glory which he has chosen to illustrate, has enabled him to command.

Of his capabilities for the task which he has undertaken, it is not now necessary for us to speak. We have, in a former number, expressed our opinion of his strength and his weakness; and from that we see no reason to deviate. Our readers will bear us witness that we have not been sparing in praise of the industry and the sagacity of our author, nor have we stopped to notice some few blemishes which give a rakish and a school-boy character to his style, in our admiration of the perspicacity of his details, the vigour of his narrative, and the brilliancy of his descriptions. In truth, we believe we are bad critics, as we love to find an excuse for praise rather for censure; but maugre that amiable weakness, we are compelled to say, that General Napier's present Volume makes it a matter of conscience with us to put a restraint upon our inclinations, and to abate much of the cordiality with which we should rejoice to congratulate him upon the progress of his labours.

In the first place, we think that the vigour of his genius has been some what enervated by success. He slurs through the less important parts of his history in a careless and slovenly manner, and reserves his resources for those more striking events which determined the fortune of the war, and by a description of which he endeavours, and often succeeds in his endeavour, to fill the mind of the reader with astonishment, and terror, and admiration. But even here we sometimes miss the sustained and graphic vigour by which his former attempts in this line were distinguished. In painting the fluctuations of a battle, there is too little of the quietude of habitual command, and too much of the eagerness of tumultuous excitation. Indeed, we have felt surprise that a veteran, which we know General Napier to be, should exhibit the boyish enthusiasm in which he indulges, in describing what should be as familiar to his mind as daily occurrences to ordinary men; and the conviction has

been forced upon us, that, although he does not want the head to understand, or the eye to describe, yet he does want the capacity to direct or to originate great achievements.

Our next exception relates to his depreciating notice of the efforts of the heroic Spaniards for their own liberation. Assuredly we do not think that they could have accomplished their deliverance themselves; and we will not even affirm that Lord Wellington might not have accomplished it with out them. But it is impossible to read General Napier's volumes without admitting that our noble commander's most signal successes were owing chiefly to his superiority above the French in the article of intelligence a superiority almost entirely caused by the activity of the Partidas, in harassing the marches, impeding the communications, and intercepting the despatches of the enemy. No matter what may have been their deficiencies in the field, that was a service which they well performed; and when we consider how important time is in the affairs of war, the value of such service can scarcely be over-rated; especially as, in the present case, it was not only the means of giving a great advantage to the British troops, but of fostering jealousies, and sowing dissensions, amongst the unprincipled invaders.

Our next exception relates to his partial admiration of the French, and the un-British feeling which he exhibits in treating of such an event as the invasion of Spain. Let a reader take up his work at almost any page, and he will suppose that it is all fair wara struggle in which either party may have an equal right, and which is to be regarded more with reference to the skill or the valour, than the moral deserts of those who were engaged in it. He would never once suppose that the invaders deserved no other character than that of robbers and murderers. Yet such was the fact. If General Napier's house was at tacked by some kind friend, who had previously endeavoured, in vain, to seduce his wife; and if the treacherous and abandoned villain sought to accomplish his nefarious object by bloodshed and conflagration, it would only be an example, upon a small scale, of what was experienced during the Peninsular war, by the universal Spanish nation. And if a writer in " Bell's Life in London," in narrating the above supposed event, was almost wholly

silent respecting the moral enormity of the offence, while no terms were sufficiently extravagant to express his admiration of the courage and the skill which were evinced in its perpetration; if, moreover, he depreciated the efforts which the gallant General would, no doubt, have made to defend all that was dear to him from rapine and violation, and noted, with a cool, sarcastic, insolence, the deviations from the strict line of scientific defence, which were caused by the very tumult and storm of his soul; if our author will suffer his imagination to picture for him such a case as this, it will go near to afford him a just idea of what must be felt respecting his history by all honest and indignant readers. In truth, his work is less a history of the Spanish war, than an apology for the French invasion; and whatever may be the instruction or the amusement to be derived from it, the moral lesson, which should ever be uppermost in the historian's mind, has been most culpably disregarded.

Indeed, if the animus of this writer may be collected from the general spirit of his work, "the enemy" who were chiefly present to his thoughts during the composition of it, were not the French, but those whom he calls the oligarchy of England. Against the Tory ministry who governed England during that eventful war, he is venomous and unmeasured in his vituperation. And, unhappily for himself, the shallowness and the vulgarity of his political prejudice, completely defeats his own object.

That our resources might have been more abundantly furnished for carrying on the war in Spain, with every prospect of advantage; that the supplies which were afforded might have been more judiciously administered; and that fuller information respecting the real character of the contest in Spain, and a more unbounded confidence in the genius of the British commander, would have been desirable in our rulers, is most true; but it is also true, that it is one thing to judge of things looking back, and another to judge of them look ing forward. General Napier but lightly estimates the sort of check in which the government was held by the profligate Whig opposition, who lost no opportunity of causing difficulties in the prosecution of the war, and who were better to Buonaparte than an additional army. He forgets that ours was a free government, under which

the ministry, for every reverse, or, for every turn of the war that seemed a reverse, might be brought to a sort of parliamentary court-martial in the face of Europe. Or, if he holds these particulars in mind, he does not make sufficient allowance for the caution, and even for the timidity, which the servants of the crown might have justifiably felt, whether as regarded their position either at home or abroad, in every movement which they made in that eventful contest.

If General Napier will refer to the sentiments of those individuals of the Whig opposition, whose opinions upon general politics were most consentaneous with his own at present, he will find that they blamed the government of Mr. Percival much more for the largeness than for the smallness of the pecuniary aid by which he sustained the war in Spain; and he may from this form a more just idea of the difficulties in which the minister was placed, by the machinations of those with whom he would, himself, had he been in parliament at the time, have, in all probability, consorted. Nor do we see anything to surprise us in the hatred which Whigs and revolutionists exhibited towards Mr. Percival, when living, and the rancour which their legitimate successor now evinces towards his memory, when dead. Both were equally unprincipled. By both. Mr. Percival was regarded as the uncompromising guardian of the civil and religious institutions of the country, and in that there was no mistake. By both, Jacobinism in the abstract seemed to be idolized, and Bonaparte's military genius was held in the most unbounded admiration. And, this being so, we were not unprepared for the assault upon Mr. Percival for his profligate waste of the resources of England by the men of his own day, and by Major-General Napier, for his penury, in doling out these resources, when the interest of the country required a liberal expenditure, "grudg ingly, and of necessity." Nor, do we think that his predecessors in the work of calumny would deem that our author, although he has reversed their charges, has done bad service. A temporary obloquy may be excited now, by accusing that great and good man of an impolitic parsimony, as it was when he lived, by accusing him of an unprincipled profusion; and those who look not beyond the present, are incapable of seeing how much each

must serve as a commentary upon the other, and how both must thus be discredited in the judgment of the future historian.

Had our author confined his complaint to the real cause of offence; had he stripped of its mask the base and treacherous Jacobinism, which sought by depreciating the military power of England, and magnifying that of France, to lower the heart and the hopes of the country in the impending contest; had he shewn how this must, of necessity, have cooled the ardour and crippled the resources of any government depending upon popular support, while it afforded a corresponding encouragement to the common enemy; had he held up to merited reprobation the palliators of French atrocities, the men who scrupled not "to call evil, good, and good, evil;" and who hesitated not to rejoice in the invasion of Spain, as the bright era of its moral and political renovation, he would have done well. The wickedness of evil-doers might thus be rebuked, and the ignorance of foolish men put to shame. Had he taken to task that able organ of the revolutionary party, the Edinburgh Review, then in the plenitude of its reputation; had he detected the unsoundness of its views, and exposed the fallacy of its predictions, and employed the power of scornful sarcasm which he possesses, in branding its base and canting sophistry with merited indignation, we could well believe that Major-General Napier was really solicitous for the removal of those impediments which prevented the British government from bestowing all its energies upon the ardent and effectual prosecution of the war in Spain. But, seeing that he leaves untouched those sources of national difficulty, which hung, as it were, upon the flanks and rear of the government at home, even as the Guerillas and the Partidas upon the French in the Peninsula, no candid reader can help regarding his complaints as partaking more of the rancour of the partizan, than the honest reprehension of the dispassionate his

torian.

With General Napier's views respecting questions of domestic policy, we do not meddle; they are wholly beside our purpose, even if they were not below contempt. He appears to us to be an uneducated bigot of the vulgarest democracy, intoxicated with self-conceit, and thinking it a fine thing to strut upon his literary stilts, and

swag his saucy plume in the face of men who are immeasurably his superiors. But we tell him this, that, until democratic England has evinced the wisdom and the prowess, the righteous determination, and the noble perseverance, that distinguished aristocratic England under the ancient constitution, that has been overthrown, it were wiser to restrain his boasting. We trust in God the occasion may not soon arise, when efforts, like those of Wellington may be necessary for our preservation ;-but, if they did, we have little doubt that events would soon occur which would rebuke the folly of the military historian, and convince him, that if, in the transactions which he now records, there was a feebleness, a vacillation, and a want of promptitude in the conduct of our rulers, which rendered it difficult for Lord Wellington to carry on the war-all those evils would be only aggravated one hundred fold, by the caprice and the violence, the ignorance and the profligacy, which would be sure to characterise a more unmitigated democracy.

It will be seen from the above remarks, that we do not regard Major General Napier's history as perfect. But it cannot be denied that he has done good service in recording, as he has done, the great events in which he bore no inglorious part, and illustrating, as he has done, transactions which it required knowledge and experience such as he possessed to make plain to the comprehension of the general reader. He has thus furnished materials of which some future writer may take advantage, in giving a really enlightened account of the contest in Spain; and we look to Mr. Alison, if his history of the French revolution should extend so far, as one who will yet avail himself abundantly of our author's researches and of his skill, while he eschews the errors of the intemperate politician, and rebukes, with an unsparing severity, the shallow impertinences of the factious pamphleteer. We will, by those who know us, be believed, when we say, that we regret to be obliged to speak thus of one who belongs to a profession which we love, and who frequently evinces a spirit and an ability which we would delight to honor; but truth and justice required from us this exposure, and having made it, we proceed to the much more agreeable task of making known the merits of Major-General Napier's work to our readers.

His last volume brought down his history to the siege of Badajos, which he described with a force and a fidelity which we never remember to have seen exceeded. By that memorable exploit, the Duke of Wellington laid a basis for more extended operations in Spain, which it is the object of the General's present volume to describe; and it is but right to say, that he does not suffer his political prejudices to interfere much with his estimate of the transcendant merits of our great commander. Indeed, the services of this extraordinary man are such as surpass all praise; and it is impossible for us not to regard as providential the circumstances which placed him at the head of our army, when it is our conscientious persuasion that the complicated difficulties with which he had to contend could have been mastered by no other man in the British empire.

Buonaparte was now intent upon his Russian campaign. The intruder, Jo-seph, was in Madrid, and at variance with almost all the generals by whom the French troops in the various parts of Spain were commanded. They despised him for his want of generalship, and he, with a feeling worthy of a better cause, felt displeased with them for their arbitrary severities, and their tyranuous exactions.

Wellington was now no longer to be couped up within the territory of Portugal. By the successes of the last campaign, it was free to him to operate either upon the north or the south of Spain; and he chose the former, as well because success in that direction would bring him nearer to cutting off the communication of the enemy with France, as that the lateness of the harvests in Leon and Castile promised a more continued supply of provisions for his army.

Nearly three hundred thousand French troops were still in arms in the Peninsula. Seventy-six thousand, under Suchet, composed the armies of Catalonia and Arragon. Forty-nine thousand composed the army of the North, under Caffarelli, and were distributed on the grand line of communication from St. Sebastian to Burgos of these, two divisions were destined to reinforce Marmont. Nineteen thousand composed the army of the centre, "occupying a variety of posts in a circle round the capital, and having a division in La Mancha." Sixty-three thousand composed the army of the South, under Soult, occu

pying Andalusia and a part of Estremadura. "The army of Purtugal, under Marmont, consisted of seventy thousand men ;" these occupied Leon, part of Old Castile, and the Asturias ; their front was upon the Tormes ; and a division watched the movements in Gallicia.

Joseph saw that it was now optional with Wellington to direct his force against any of the divisions of the French army; and, accordingly, arrangements were made by which, wherever the attack was made, there should be a concentration of force by which it might be resisted. His chief anxiety, however, seemed to be about the security of Madrid, which, considering the position of affairs at that time, he vaÎned at more than its importance. Both Marmont and Soult respectively apprehended that they would be the object of the British commander and, accordingly, their advice respected, chiefly, the exigencies in which they imagined that they would, separately, be placed; and they either thwarted or disobeyed the commands of their king in a manner that was well calculated to provoke his indignation. Of the strife which prevailed between Joseph and Soult, the following may serve to convey some idea to the reader. The latter was directed by the king

"To keep Drouet, with one third of the army of the south, so far advanced in Estremadura, as to have direct communication with General Trielhard in the valley of the Tagus; and he especially ordered that Drouet should pass that river, if Hill passed it."

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The duke of Dalmatia would not suffer Drouet to stir, and Joseph, whose jealousy had been excited by the marshal's power in Andalusia, threatened to deprive him of his command. The inflexible duke replied that the king had already virtually done so by sending orders direct to Drouet, that he was ready to resign, but he would not commit a gross military error. Drouet could scarcely arrive in time to help Marmont, and would be too weak for the protection of Madrid, but his absence would ruin Andalusia, because the allies, whose force in Estremadura was very considerable, could in five marches reach Seville, and take it on the sixth; then communicating with the fleets at Cadiz they would change their line of operations without loss, and unite with thirty thousand other troops, British and Spanish, who were at Gibraltar, in the Isla, in the Niebla, on the side of Murcia,