PROSE WORKS

By WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

THE PROSE WORKS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. FOR THE FIRST TIME COLLECTED, "WITH ADDITIONS FROM UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS".

Edited, with Preface, Notes and Illustrations, BY THE REV. ALEXANDER B. GROSART, ST. GEORGE'S, BLACKBURN, LANCASHIRE. IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

POLITICAL AND ETHICAL.

LONDON: EDWARD MOXON, SON, AND CO. 1 AMEN CORNER, PATERNOSTER ROW.

1876.

AMS Press, Inc. New York 10003 1967

Manufactured in the United States of America

TO THE QUEEN.

MADAM,

I have the honour to place in your Majesty's hands the hitherto uncollected and unpublished Prose Works of

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

--name sufficient in its simpleness to give lustre to any page.

Having been requested thus to collect and edit his Prose Writings by those who hold his MSS. and are his nearest representatives, one little discovery or recovery among these MSS. suggested your Majesty as the one among all others to whom the illustrious Author would have chosen to dedicate these Works, viz. a rough transcript of a Poem which he had inscribed on the fly-leaf of a gift-copy of the collective edition of his Poems sent to the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. This very tender, beautiful, and pathetic Poem will be found on the other side of this Dedication. It must 'for all time' take its place beside the living Laureate's imperishable verse-tribute to your Majesty.

I venture to thank your Majesty for the double permission so appreciatively given--of this Dedication itself and to print (for the first time) the Poem. The gracious permission so pleasantly and discriminatingly signified is only one of abundant proofs that your Majesty is aware that of the enduring names of the reign of Victoria, Wordsworth's is supreme as Poet and Thinker.

Gratefully and loyally, ALEXANDER B. GROSART.

Deign, Sovereign Mistress! to accept a lay, No Laureate offering of elaborate art; But salutation taking its glad way From deep recesses of a loyal heart.

Queen, Wife, and Mother! may All-judging Heaven Shower with a bounteous hand on Thee and Thine Felicity that only can be given On earth to goodness blest by grace divine.

Lady! devoutly honoured and beloved Through every realm confided to thy sway; Mayst Thou pursue thy course by God approved, And He will teach thy people to obey.

As Thou art wont, thy sovereignty adorn With woman's gentleness, yet firm and staid; So shall that earthly crown thy brows have worn Be changed for one whose glory cannot fade.

And now, by duty urged, I lay this Book Before thy Majesty, in humble trust That on its simplest pages Thou wilt look With a benign indulgence more than just.

Nor wilt Thou blame an aged Poet's prayer, That issuing hence may steal into thy mind Some solace under weight of royal care, Or grief--the inheritance of humankind.

For know we not that from celestial spheres, When Time was young, an inspiration came (Oh, were it mine!) to hallow saddest tears, And help life onward in its noblest aim?

W.W.

9th January 1846.

PREFACE.

In response to a request put in the most gratifying way possible of the nearest representatives of WORDSWORTH, the Editor has prepared this collection of his "Prose Works". That this should be done "for the first time" herein seems somewhat remarkable, especially in the knowledge of the permanent value which the illustrious Author attached to his Prose, and that he repeatedly expressed his wish and expectation that it would be thus brought together and published, "e.g." in the 'Memoirs,' speaking of his own prose writings, he said that but for COLERIDGE'S irregularity of purpose he should probably have left much more in that kind behind him. When COLERIDGE was proposing to publish his 'Friend,' he (WORDSWORTH) had offered contributions. COLERIDGE had expressed himself pleased with the offer, but said, "I must arrange my principles for the work, and when that is done I shall be glad of your aid." But this "arrangement of principles" never took place. WORDSWORTH added: ""I think my nephew, Dr. Wordsworth, will, after my death, collect and publish all I have written in prose"...." "On another occasion, I believe, he intimated a desire that his "works in Prose should be edited by his son-in-law, Mr. Quillinan"."[1] Similarly he wrote to Professor REED in 1840: 'I am much pleased by what you say in your letter of the 18th May last, upon the Tract of the "Convention of Cintra," and "I think myself with some interest upon its being reprinted hereafter along with my other writings" [in prose]. But the respect which, in common with all the rest of the rational part of the world, I bear for the DUKE OF WELLINGTON will prevent my reprinting the pamphlet during his lifetime. It has not been in my power to read the volumes of his Despatches, which I hear so highly spoken of; but I am convinced that nothing they contain could alter my opinion of the injurious tendency of that or any other Convention, conducted upon such principles. "It was, I repeat, gratifying to me that you should have spoken of that work as you do, and particularly that you should have considered it in relation to my Poems, somewhat in the same manner as you had done in respect to my little volume on the Lakes".'[2]

[1] 'Memoirs,' vol. ii. p. 466.

[2] Ibid. vol. i. p. 420.

It is probable that the "amount" of the Prose of WORDSWORTH will come as a surprise--surely a pleasant one--on even his admirers and students. His own use of 'Tract' to describe a goodly octavo volume, and his calling his 'Guide' a 'little volume' while it is a somewhat considerable one, together with the hiding away of some of his most matterful and weightiest productions in local and fugitive publications, and in Prefaces and Appendices to Poems, go far to explain the prevailing unacquaintance with even the "extent", not to speak of the importance, of his Prose, and the light contentment with which it has been permitted so long to remain (comparatively) out of sight. That the inter-relation of the Poems to the Prose, and of the Prose to the Poems--of which above he himself wrote--makes the collection and publication of the Prose a duty to all who regard WILLIAM WORDSWORTH as one of the supreme intellects of the century--as certainly the glory of the Georgian and Victorian age as ever SHAKESPEARE and RALEIGH were of the Elizabethan and Jacobean--will not be questioned to-day.

The present Editor can only express his satisfaction at being called to execute a task which, from a variety of circumstances, has been too long delayed; but only delayed, inasmuch as the members of the Poet's family have always held it as a sacred obligation laid upon them, with the additional sanction that WORDSWORTH'S old and valued friend, HENRY CRABB ROBINSON, Esq., had expressed a wish in his last Will (1868) that the Prose Works of his friend should one day be collected; and which wish alone, from one so discriminating and generous--were there no other grounds for doing so--the family of WORDSWORTH could not but regard as imperative. He rejoices that the delay--otherwise to be regretted--has enabled the Editor to furnish a much fuller and more complete collection than earlier had perhaps been possible. He would now briefly notice the successive portions of these Volumes:

VOL. I.

I. POLITICAL.

(a) "Apology for the French Revolution", 1793.

This is from the Author's own MS., and is published "for the first time". Every reader of 'The Recluse' and 'The Excursion' and the 'Lines on the French Revolution, as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement'--to specify only these--is aware that, in common with SOUTHEY and the greater COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH was in sympathy with the uprising of France against its tyrants. But it is only now that we are admitted to a full discovery of his youthful convictions and emotion by the publication of this Manuscript, carefully preserved by him, but never given to the world. The title on the fly-leaf--'Apology,' &c., being ours--in the Author's own handwriting, is as follows:

A LETTER TO THE BISHOP OF LANDAFF ON THE EXTRAORDINARY AVOWAL OF HIS POLITICAL PRINCIPLES, CONTAINED IN THE APPENDIX TO HIS LATE SERMON: BY A REPUBLICAN.

It is nowhere dated, but inasmuch as Bishop WATSON'S Sermon, with the Appendix, appeared early in 1793, to that year certainly belongs the composition of the 'Letter.' The title-page of the Sermon and Appendix may be here given;

A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE THE STEWARDS OF THE WESTMINSTER DISPENSARY, AT THEIR ANNIVERSARY MEETING, CHARLOTTE STREET CHAPEL, APRIL 1785.

WITH AN APPENDIX, BY R. WATSON, D.D. LORD BISHOP OF LANDAFF.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR T. CADELL IN THE STRAND; AND T. EVANS IN PATERNOSTER ROW.

1793 [8vo].

In the same year a 'second edition' was published, and also separately the Appendix, thus:

STRICTURES ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION, AS WRITTEN IN 1793 IN AN APPENDIX TO A SERMON PREACHED BEFORE THE STEWARDS OF THE WESTMINSTER DISPENSARY, AT THEIR ANNIVERSARY MEETING, CHARLOTTE STREET CHAPEL, APRIL 1785,

BY R. WATSON, D.D. LORD BISHOP OF LANDAFF.

"Reprinted at Loughborough, (With his Lordship's permission) by Adams, Jun. and Recommended by the Loughborough Association For the Support of the Constitution to The Serious Attention of the Public".

Price Twopence, being one third of the original price,

1793 [small 8vo],

The Sermon is a somewhat commonplace dissertation on 'The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor,' from Proverbs xxii. 2: 'The rich and poor meet together, the Lord is the Maker of them all.' It could not but be most irritating to one such as young WORDSWORTH--then in his twenty-third year--who passionately felt as well with as for the poor of his native country, and that from an intimacy of knowledge and intercourse and sympathy in striking contrast with the serene optimism of the preacher,--all the more flagrant in that Bishop Watson himself sprang from the very humblest ranks. But it is on the Appendix this Letter expends its force, and, except from BURKE on the opposite side, nothing more forceful, or more effectively argumentative, or informed with a nobler patriotism, is to be found in the English language. If it have not the kindling eloquence which is Demosthenic, and that axiomatic statement of principles which is Baconian, of the 'Convention,' every sentence and epithet pulsates--as its very life-blood--with a manly scorn of the false, the base, the sordid, the merely titularly eminent. It may not be assumed that even to old age WILLIAM WORDSWORTH would have disavowed a syllable of this 'Apology.' Technically he might not have held to the name 'Republican,' but to the last his heart was with the oppressed, the suffering, the poor, the silent. Mr. H. CRABB ROBINSON tells us in his Diary (vol. ii. p. 290, 3d edition): 'I recollect once hearing Mr. WORDSWORTH say, half in joke, half in earnest, "I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me;"' and his friend adds: 'To be sure he has. His earlier poems are full of that intense love of the people, as such, which becomes Chartism when the attempt is formally made to make their interests the especial object of legislation, as of deeper importance than the positive rights hitherto accorded to the privileged orders.' Elsewhere the same Diarist speaks of 'the brains of the noblest youths in England' being 'turned' (i. 31, 32), including WORDSWORTH. There was no such 'turning' of brain with him. He was deliberate, judicial, while at a red heat of indignation. To measure the quality of difference, intellectually and morally, between WORDSWORTH and another noticeable man who entered into controversy with Bishop WATSON, it is only necessary to compare the present Letter with GILBERT WAKEFIELD'S 'Reply to some Parts of the Bishop of Landaff's Address to the People of Great Britain' (1798).

The manuscript is wholly in the handwriting of its author, and is done with uncharacteristic painstaking; for later, writing was painful and irksome to him, and even his letters are in great part illegible. One folio is lacking, but probably it contained only an additional sentence or two, as the examination of the Appendix is complete. Following on our ending are these words: 'Besides the names which I.'

That the Reader may see how thorough is the Answer of WORDSWORTH to Bishop WATSON, the 'Appendix' is reprinted "in extenso". Being comparatively brief, it was thought expedient not to put the student on a vain search for the long-forgotten Sermon. On the biographic value of this Letter, and the inevitableness of its inclusion among his prose Works, it cannot be needful to say a word. It is noticed--and little more--in the 'Memoirs' (c. ix. vol. i. pp. 78-80). In his Letters (vol. iii.) will be found incidental allusions and vindications of the principles maintained in the 'Apology.'

"(b) Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, to each other and the common Enemy, at this Crisis; and specifically as affected by the Convention of Cintra: the whole brought to the test of those Principles, by which alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered". 1809.

As stated in its 'Advertisement,' two portions of this treatise (rather than 'Tract'), 'extending to p. 25' of the completed volume, were originally printed in the months of December and January (1808-9), in the 'Courier' newspaper. In this shape it attracted the notice of no less a reader than Sir WALTER SCOTT, who thus writes of it: 'I have read WORDSWORTH'S lucubrations[3] in the 'Courier,' "and much agree with him". Alas! we want everything but courage and virtue in this desperate contest. Skill, knowledge of mankind, ineffable unhesitating villany, combination of movement and combination of means, are with our adversary. We can only fight like mastiffs--boldly, blindly, and faithfully. I am almost driven to the pass of the Covenanters, when they told the Almighty in their prayers He should no longer be their God; and I really believe a few Gazettes more will make me turn Turk or infidel.'[4]

[3] Lucubrations = meditative studies. It has since deteriorated in meaning.

[4] Lockhart's 'Life of Scott,' vol. iii. pp. 260-1 (edition, 1856).

What WORDSWORTH'S own feelings and impulses were in the composition of the 'Convention of Cintra' are revealed with unwonted as fine passion in his 'Letters and Conversations' (vol. iii. pp. 256-261, &c.), whither the Reader will do well to turn, inasmuch as he returns and re-returns therein to his standing-ground in this very remarkable and imperishable book. The long Letters to (afterwards) Sir CHARLES W. PASLEY and another--"never before printed"--which follow the 'Convention of Cintra' itself, are of special interest. The Appendix of Notes, 'a portion of the work which WORDSWORTH regarded as executed in a masterly manner, was drawn up by De Quincey, who revised the proofs of the whole' ('Memoirs,' i. 384). Of the 'Convention of Cintra' the (now) Bishop of Lincoln (WORDSWORTH) writes eloquently as follows: 'Much of WORDSWORTH'S life was spent in comparative retirement, and a great part of his poetry concerns natural and quiet objects. But it would be a great error to imagine that he was not an attentive observer of public events. He was an ardent lover of his country and of mankind. He watched the progress of civil affairs in England with a vigilant eye, and he brought the actions of public men to the test of the great and lasting principles of equity and truth. He extended his range of view to events in foreign parts, especially on the continent of Europe. Few persons, though actually engaged in the great struggle of that period, felt more deeply than WORDSWORTH did in his peaceful retreat for the calamities of European nations, suffering at that time from the imbecility of their governments, and from the withering oppression of a prosperous despotism. His heart burned within him when he looked forth upon the contest, and impassioned words proceeded from him, both in poetry and prose. The contemplative calmness of his position, and the depth and intensity of his feelings, combined together to give a dignity and clearness, a vigour and splendour, and, consequently, a lasting value, to his writings on measures of domestic and foreign policy, qualities that rarely belong to contemporaneous political effusions produced by those engaged in the heat and din of the battle. This remark is specially applicable to his tract on the Convention of Cintra.... Whatever difference of opinion may prevail concerning the relevance of the great principles enunciated in it to the questions at issue, but one judgment can exist with respect to the importance of those principles, and the vigorous and fervid eloquence with which they are enforced. If WORDSWORTH had never written a single verse, this Essay alone would be sufficient to place him in the highest rank of English poets.... Enough has been quoted to show that the Essay on the Convention of Cintra was not an ephemeral production, destined to vanish with the occasion which gave it birth. If this were the case, the labour bestowed upon it was almost abortive. The author composed the work in the discharge of what he regarded a sacred duty, and for the permanent benefit of society, rather than with a view to any immediate results.'[5] The Bishop adds further these details: 'He foresaw and predicted that his words would be to the public ear what midnight storms are to men who sleep:

[5] 'Memoirs,' as before, vol. i. pp. 383, 399.

"I dropp'd my pen, and listen'd to the wind, That sang of trees uptorn and vessels tost-- A midnight harmony, and wholly lost To the general sense of men, by chains confined Of business, care, or pleasure, or resign'd To timely sleep. Thought I, the impassion'd strain, Which without aid of numbers I sustain, Like acceptation from the world will find. Yet some with apprehensive ear shall drink A dirge devoutly breath'd o'er sorrows past; And to the attendant promise will give heed-- The prophecy--like that of this wild blast, Which, while it makes the heart with, sadness shrink, Tells also of bright calms that shall succeed."[6]

It is true that some few readers it had on its first appearance; and it is recorded by an ear-witness that Canning said of this pamphlet that he considered it the most eloquent production since the days of Burke;[7] but, by some untoward delays in printing, it was not published till the interest in the question under discussion had almost subsided. Certain it is, that an edition, consisting only of five hundred copies, was not sold off; that many copies were disposed of by the publishers as waste paper, and went to the trunkmakers; and now there is scarcely any volume published in this country which is so difficult to be met with as the tract on the Convention of Cintra; and if it were now reprinted, it would come before the public with almost the unimpaired freshness of a new work.'[8] In agreement with the closing statement, at the sale of the library of Sir James Macintosh a copy fetched (it has been reported) ten guineas. Curiously enough not a single copy was preserved by the Author himself. The companion sonnet to the above, 'composed while the author was engaged in writing a tract occasioned by the Convention of Cintra, 1808,' must also find a place here:

'Not 'mid the world's vain objects that enslave The free-born soul--that world whose vaunted skill In selfish interest perverts the will, Whose factions lead astray the wise and brave-- Not there; but in dark wood and rocky cave, And hollow vale which foaming torrents fill With omnipresent murmur as they rave Down their steep beds, that never shall be still, Here, mighty Nature, in this school sublime I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain; For her consult the auguries of time, And through the human heart explore my way, And look and listen--gathering where I may Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.'[9]

"(c) Letter to Major-General Sir Charles W. Pasley, K.C.B., on his 'Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire,' with another--now first printed--transmitting it".

[6] 'Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty,' viii.

[7] Southey's 'Life and Correspondence,' vol. iii. p. 180; 'Gentleman's Magazine' for June 1850, p. 617.

[8] 'Memoirs,' as before, vol. i, pp. 404-5.

[9] 'Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty,' vii.

The former is derived from the 'Memoirs' (vol. i. pp. 405-20). In forwarding it to the (now) Bishop of Lincoln, Sir CHARLES thus wrote of it: 'The letter on my "Military Policy" is particularly interesting.... Though WORDSWORTH agreed that we ought to step forward with all our military force as principals in the war, he objected to any increase of our own power and resources by continental conquest, in which I now think he was quite right. I am not, however, by any means shaken in the opinion then advanced, that peace with Napoleon would lead to the loss of our naval superiority and of our national independence, ... and I fully believe that the Duke of Wellington's campaigns in the Spanish Peninsula saved the nation, though no less credit is due to the Ministry of that day for not despairing of eventual success, but supporting him under all difficulties in spite of temporary reverses, and in opposition to a powerful party and to influential writers.' The letter transmitting the other has only recently been discovered on a reëxamination of the Wordsworth MSS. Both letters have a Shakespearian-patriotic ring concerning 'This England.' It is inspiring to read in retrospect of the facts such high-couraged writing as in these letters.

"(d) Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland", 1818.

The 'Mr. BROUGHAM' of these 'Two Addresses' was, as all the world knows, the (afterwards) renowned and many-gifted HENRY, Lord BROUGHAM and VAUX. In his Autobiography he refers very good-humouredly to his three defeats in contesting the representation of Westmoreland; but there is no allusion whatever to WORDSWORTH. With reference to his final effort he thus informs us: 'Parliament was dissolved in 1826, when for the third time I stood for Westmoreland; and, after a hard-fought contest, was again defeated. I have no wish to enter into the local politics of that county, but I cannot resist quoting an extract from a letter of my esteemed friend Bishop BATHURST to Mr. HOWARD of Corby, by whose kindness I am enabled to give it: "Mr. BROUGHAM has struggled nobly for civil and religious liberty; and is fully entitled to the celebrated eulogy bestowed by Lucan upon Cato--

'Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.'

How others may feel I know not, but for my own part I would much rather be in his situation than in that of the two victorious opponents; notwithstanding the cold discouraging maxim of Epictetus, which is calculated to check every virtuous effort--[Greek: Anikêtos einai dunasai, ean ouk eis mêdena agôna katabainês, ou ouk estin epinikêsai] [=You may be invincible if you never go down into the arena when you are not secure of victory: Enchiridion, cxxv.]. He will not, I hope, suffer from his exertions, extraordinary in every way. I respect exceedingly his fine abilities, and the purpose to which he applies them" (Norwich, July 10, 1826). As Cato owed Lucan's panegyric to the firmness he had shown in adhering to the losing cause, and to his steadfastness to the principles he had adopted, so I considered the Bishop's application of the lines to me as highly complimentary' ('Life and Times,' vol. ii. pp. 437-8). It seemed only due to the subject of WORDSWORTH'S invective and opposition to give "his" view of the struggle and another's worthy of all respect. Unless the writer has been misinformed, WORDSWORTH and BROUGHAM came to know and worthily estimate each other when the exacerbations and clamours of provincial politics had long passed away, and when, except the 'old gray head' of WELLINGTON, none received more reverence from the nation than that of HENRY BROUGHAM. In the just-issued 'Memoirs of the Reigns of George IV. and William IV.' by GREVILLE, BROUGHAM and WORDSWORTH are brought together very pleasingly. (See these works, vol. iii. p. 504.)

The Author's personal relations to the Lowthers semi-unconsciously coloured his opinions, and intensified his partisanship and glorified the commonplace. But with all abatements these 'Two Addresses' supply much material for a right and high estimate of WORDSWORTH as man and thinker. As invariably, he descends to the roots of things, and almost ennobles even his prejudices and alarms and ultra-caution. There is the same terse, compacted, pungent style in these 'Two Addresses' with his general prose. Bibliographically the 'Two Addresses' are even rarer and higher-priced than the 'Convention of Cintra.'

"(e) Of the Catholic Relief Bill", 1829.

To the great names of EDMUND SPENSER and Sir JOHN DAVIES, as Englishmen who dealt with the problem of the government of Ireland, and found it, as more recent statesmen have done, to be in infinite ways 'England's difficulty,' has now to be added one not less great--WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. If at this later day--for even 1829 seems remote now--much of the present letter to the Bishop of London (BLOMFIELD) is mainly of historical noticeableness, as revealing how 'Catholic Emancipation' looked to one of the foremost minds of his age, there are, nevertheless, expressions of personal opinion--"e.g." against the Athanasian Creed in its 'cursing' clauses, and expositions of the Papacy regarded politically and ecclesiastically in its domination of Ireland, that have a message for to-day strangely congruous with that of the magnificent philippic 'Of the Vatican Decrees,' which is thundering across Europe as these words are written. As a piece of vigorous, masculine, and o'times eloquent English, this letter may take its place--not an inch lower--beside a 'View of the State of Ireland,' and the 'Discoverie of the True Cavses why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under obedience of the Crowne of England, untill the beginning of his Maiestie's happie raigne;' while the conflict with Ultramontanism in Germany and elsewhere and Mr. Gladstone's tractate give new significance to its forecastings and portents.

The manuscript, unlike most of his, is largely in WORDSWORTH'S own handwriting--the earlier portion in (it is believed) partly Miss WORDSWORTH'S and partly Mrs. WORDSWORTH'S. In the 'Memoirs' this letter is quoted largely (vol. ii. pp. 136-140). It is now given completely from the manuscript itself, not without significant advantage. It does not appear whether this letter were actually sent to the Bishop of London. There is no mention of it in Bishop Blomfield's 'Life;' and hence probably it never was sent to him. In his letters there are many references to the present topics (cf. vol. iii. pp. 258-9, 263-4, &c.).

II. ETHICAL.

I. "Of Legislation for the Poor, the Working Classes, and the Clergy: Appendix to Poems", 1835.

This formed one of WORDSWORTH'S most deliberate and powerful Appendices to his Poems (1835), and has ever since been regarded as of enduring worth. It has all the Author's characteristics of deep thinking, imaginative illustration, intense conviction and realness. Again, accept or dissent, this State Paper (so to say) is specially Wordsworthian.

It seems only due to WORDSWORTH to bear in recollection that, herein and elsewhere, he led the way in indicating CO-OPERATION as "the" remedy for the defects and conflicts in the relations between our capitalists and their operatives, or capital and labour (see the second section of the Postscript, and remember its date--1835).

II. "Advice to the Young".

("a") Letter to the Editor of 'The Friend,' signed Mathetes.

("b") Answer to the Letter of Mathetes, 1809.

'Mathetes' proved to be Professor JOHN WILSON, 'eminent in the various departments of poetry, philosophy, and criticism' ('Memoirs,' i. 423), and here probably was the commencement of the long friendship between him and WORDSWORTH. As a student of WILSON'S, the Editor remembers vividly how the 'old man eloquent' used to kindle into enthusiasm the entire class as he worked into his extraordinary lectures quotations from the 'Excursion' and 'Sonnets' and 'Poems of the Imagination.' Among the letters (vol. iii. p. 263) is an interesting one refering to 'Advice to the Young;' and another to Professor WILSON (vol. ii. pp. 208-14).

III. OF EDUCATION.

("a") On the Education of the Young: Letter to a Friend, 1806.

("b") Of the People, their Ways and Needs: Letter to Archdeacon Wrangham, 1808.

("c") Education: Two Letters to the Rev. H.J. Rose, 1828.

("d") Education of Duty: Letter to Rev. Dr. Wordsworth, 1830.

("e") Speech on laying the Foundation-stone of the New School in the Village of Bowness, Windermere, 1836.

In these Letters and the Speech are contained WORDSWORTH'S earliest and latest and most ultimate opinions and sentiments on education. Agree or differ, the student of WORDSWORTH has in these discussions--for in part they have the elaborateness and thoroughness of such--what were of the substance of his beliefs. Their biographic importance--intellectually and spiritually--can scarcely be exaggerated, "(a), (b), (c), (d)" are from the 'Memoirs;' ("e") is from the local newspaper (Kendal), being for the first time fully reprinted.

VOL. II.

AESTHETICAL AND LITERARY.

I. "Of Literary Biography and Monuments".

("a") A Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, 1816.

("b") Letter to a Friend on Monuments to Literary Men, 1819.

("c") Letter to John Peace, Esq., of Bristol, 1844.

These naturally group themselves together. Of the first ("a"), perhaps it is hardly worth while, and perhaps it is worth while, recalling that WILLIAM HAZLITT, in his Lectures upon the English Poets, attacked WORDSWORTH on this Letter with characteristic insolence and uncritical shallowness and haste. Under date Feb. 24th, 1818, Mr. H. CRABB ROBINSON thus refers to the thing: 'Heard part of a lecture by HAZLITT at the Surrey Institution. He was so contemptuous towards WORDSWORTH, speaking of his Letter about Burns, that I lost my temper. He imputed to WORDSWORTH the desire of representing himself as a superior man' (vol. i. p. 311, 3d ed.). The lecture is included in HAZLITT'S published Lectures in all its ignorance and wrong-headedness; but it were a pity to lose one's temper over such trash. His eyes were spectacles, not 'seeing eyes,' and jaundice-yellow, ("b") and ("c") are sequels to ("a"), and as such accompany it.

II. UPON EPITAPHS.

("a") From 'The Friend.' ("b" and "c") From the Author's MSS., for the first time.

Of ("a") CHARLES LAMB wrote: 'Your Essay on Epitaphs is the only sensible thing which has been written on that subject, and it goes to the bottom' (Talfourd's 'Final Memorials,' vol. i. p. 180). The two additional Papers--only briefly quoted from in the 'Memoirs' (c. xxx. vol. i.)--were also intended for 'The Friend,' had COLERIDGE succeeded in his announced arrangement of principles. These additional papers are in every respect equal to the first, with Wordsworthian touches and turns in his cunningest faculty. They are faithfully given from the MSS.

III. ESSAYS, LETTERS, AND NOTES ELUCIDATORY AND CONFIRMATORY OF THE POEMS, 1798-1835.

("a") Of the Principles of Poetry and the 'Lyrical Ballads' (1798-1802.)

("b") Of Poetic Diction.

("c") Poetry as a Study (1815).

("d") Of Poetry as Observation and Description, and Dedication of 1815.

("e") Of 'The Excursion:' Preface.

("f") Letters to Sir George and Lady Beaumont and others on the Poems and related Subjects.

("g") Letter to Charles Fox with the 'Lyrical Ballads,' and his Answer, &c.

("h") Letter on the Principles of Poetry and his own Poems to (afterwards) Professor John Wilson.

("a") to ("e") form appendices to the early and later editions of the Poems, and created an epoch in literary criticism. COLERIDGE put forth his utmost strength on a critical examination of them, oblivious that he had himself impelled, not to say compelled, his friend to write these Prefaces, as WORDSWORTH signifies. It is not meant by this that COLERIDGE was thereby shut out from criticising the definitions and statements to which he objected.

IV. DESCRIPTIVE.

("a") A Guide through the District of the Lakes, 1835.

("b") Kendal and Windermere Railway: two Letters, &c.

These very much explain themselves; but of the former it may be of bibliographical interest to state that it formed originally the letterpress and Introduction to 'Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire,' by the Rev. JOSEPH WILKINSON, Rector of East Wrotham, Norfolk, 1810 (folio). It was reprinted in the volume of Sonnets on the River Duddon. The fifth edition (1835) has been selected as the Author's own final text. In Notes and Illustrations in the place, a strangely overlooked early account of the Lake District is pointed out and quoted from. The 'Two Letters' need no vindication at this late day. Ruskin is reiterating their arguments and sentiment eloquently as these pages pass through the press. Apart from deeper reasons, let the fault-finder realise to himself the differentia of general approval of railways, and a railway forced through the 'old churchyard' that holds his mother's grave or the garden of his young prime. It was a merely sordid matter on the part of the promoters. Their professions of care for the poor and interest in the humbler classes getting to the Lakes had a Judas element in them, nothing higher or purer.

VOL. III.

CRITICAL AND ETHICAL.

I. "Notes and Illustrations of the Poems, incorporating":

("a") The Notes originally added to the first and successive editions.

("b") The whole of the I.F. MSS.

This division of the Prose has cost the Editor more labour and thought than any other, from the scattered and hitherto unclassified semi-publication of these Notes. Those called 'original' are from the first and successive editions of the Poems, being found in some and absent in other collections. An endeavour has been made to include everything, even the briefest; for judging by himself, the Editor believes that to the reverent and thoughtful student of WORDSWORTH the slightest thing is of interest; "e.g." one turns to the most commonplace book of topography or contemporary verse in any way noticed by him, just because it is WORDSWORTH who has noticed it, while an old ballad, a legend, a bit of rural usage, takes a light of glory from the page in which it is found. Hence as so much diamond-dust or filings of gold the published Notes are here brought together. Added, and far exceeding in quantity and quality alike, it is the privilege of the Editor to print "completely and in integrity" the I.F. MSS., as written down to the dictation of WORDSWORTH by Miss FENWICK. These have been hitherto given with tantalising and almost provoking fragmentariness in the 'Memoirs' and in the centenary edition of the Poems--again withdrawn in the recent Rossetti edition. In these Notes--many of which in both senses are elaborate and full--are some of the deepest and daintiest-worded things from WORDSWORTH. The I.F. MSS. are delightfully chatty and informal, and ages hence will be treasured and studied in relation to the Poems by the (then) myriad millions of the English-speaking races.

Miss FENWICK, to whom the world is indebted for these MSS., is immortalised in two Sonnets by WORDSWORTH, which surely long ere this ought to have been included in the Poetical Works; and they may fitly reappear here (from the 'Memoirs'):

'"On a Portrait of I.F., painted by Margaret Gillies".

We gaze--nor grieve to think that we must die, But that the precious love this friend hath sown Within our hearts, the love whose flower hath blown Bright as if heaven were ever in its eye, Will pass so soon from human memory; And not by strangers to our blood alone, But by our best descendants be unknown, Unthought of--this may surely claim a sigh. Yet, blessed Art, we yield not to dejection; Thou against Time so feelingly dost strive: Where'er, preserved in this most true reflection, An image of her soul is kept alive, Some lingering fragrance of the pure affection, Whose flower with us will vanish, must survive.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

"Rydal Mount, New Year's Day, 1840".'

'"To I.F."

The star which comes at close of day to shine More heavenly bright than when it leads the morn Is Friendship's emblem, whether the forlorn She visiteth, or shedding light benign Through shades that solemnise Life's calm decline, Doth make the happy happier. This have we Learnt, Isabel, from thy society, Which now we too unwillingly resign Though for brief absence. But farewell! the page Glimmers before my sight through thankful tears, Such as start forth, not seldom, to approve Our truth, when we, old yet unchill'd by age, Call thee, though known but for a few fleet years, The heart-affianced sister of our love!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

"Rydal Mount, Feb. 1840".'

In addition to these Sonnets the beautiful memory of Miss FENWICK has been reillumined in the 'Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge' (2 vols. 1873); "e.g." 'I take great delight in Miss Fenwick, and in her conversation. Well should I like to have her constantly in the drawing-room, to come down to and from my little study up-stairs--her mind is such a noble compound of heart and intelligence, of spiritual feeling and moral strength, and the most perfect feminineness. She is intellectual, but--what is a great excellence--never talks for effect, never "keeps possession of the floor", as clever women are so apt to do. She converses for the interchange of thought and feeling, no matter "how", so she gets at your mind, and lets you into hers. A more generous and a tenderer heart I never knew. I differ from her on many points of religious faith, but on the whole prefer her views to those of most others who differ from her' (ii. 5). Again: 'Miss FENWICK is to me an angel upon earth. Her being near me now has seemed a special providence. God bless her, and spare her to us and her many friends. She is a noble creature, all tenderness and strength. When I first became acquainted with her, I saw at once that her heart was of the very finest, richest quality, and her wisdom and insight are, as ever must be in such a case, exactly correspondent' (ibid. p. 397). Such words from one so penetrative, so indeceivable, so great in the fullest sense as was the daughter of "the" COLERIDGE, makes every one long to have the same service done for Miss FENWICK as has been done for SARA COLERIDGE and Miss HARE, and within these weeks for Mrs. FLETCHER. Her Diaries and Correspondence would be inestimable to lovers of WORDSWORTH; for few or none got so near to him or entered so magnetically into his thinking. The headings and numberings of the successive Notes--lesser and larger--will guide to the respective Poems and places. The numberings accord with ROSSETTI'S handy one-volume edition of the Poems, but as a rule will offer no difficulty in any. The I.F. MSS. are marked with an asterisk [*]: They are "for the first time" furnished in their entirety, and accurately.

II. "Letters and Extracts of Letters".

These are arranged as nearly as possible chronologically from the 'Memoirs,' &c. &c., with the benefit, as before, of collation in many cases of the original MSS., especially in the Sir W.R. HAMILTON letters, and a number are "for the first time printed". The Editor does not at all like 'Extracts,' and must be permitted to regret that what in his judgment was an antiquated and mistaken idea of biography led the excellent as learned Bishop of Lincoln to abridge and mutilate so very many--the places not always marked. On this and the principle and "motif" which approve and vindicate the publication of the Letters of every really potential intellect such as WORDSWORTH'S, the accomplished daughter of SARA COLERIDGE has remarked: 'A book composed of epistolary extracts can never be a wholly satisfactory one, because its contents are not only relative and fragmentary, but unauthorised and unrevised. To arrest the passing utterances of the hour, and reveal to the world that which was spoken either in the innermost circle of home affection, or in the outer (but still guarded) circle of social or friendly intercourse, seems almost like a betrayal of confidence, and is a step which cannot be taken by survivors without some feelings of hesitation and reluctance. That reluctance is only to be overcome by the sense that, however natural, it is partly founded on delusion--a delusion which leads us to personify "the world," to our imagination, as an obtuse and somewhat hostile individual, who is certain to take things by the wrong handle, and cannot be trusted to make the needful allowance, and supply the inevitable omissions. Whereas it is a more reasonable and a more comfortable belief, that the only part of the world which is in the least likely to concern itself with such volumes as these is composed of a number of enlightened and sympathetic persons' (as before, Preface, vii. viii.). The closing consideration ought to overweigh all scruples and reserve.[10]

[10] The charming 'Journal' in full of Miss WORDSWORTH has only within the past year been published. The welcome it has met with--having bounded into a third edition already--is at once proof of the soundness of judgment that at long-last issued it, if it be also accusatory that many have gone who yearned to read it. The Editor ventures to invite special attention to WORDSWORTH'S own express wish that the foreign 'Journals' of Miss WORDSWORTH and Mrs. WORDSWORTH should be published. Surely "his" words ought to be imperative (vol. iii. p. 77)?

There "is" the select circle of lovers of WORDSWORTH--yearly widening--and there are the far-off multitudes of the future to whom WILLIAM WORDSWORTH will be the grand name of the 18th-19th century, and all that SHAKESPEARE and MILTON are now; and consequently the letters of one so chary in letter-writing ought to be put beyond the risks of loss, and given to Literature in entirety and trueness. WORDSWORTH had a morbid dislike of writing letters, his weak eyes throughout rendering all penmanship painful; but the present Editor, while conceding that his letters lack the charm of style of COWPER'S, and the vividness and passion of BYRON'S, finds in them, even the hastiest, matter of rarest biographic and interpretative value. He was not a great sentencemaker; in a way prided himself that his letters were so (intentionally) poor as sure to be counted unworthy of publication; and altogether had the prejudices of an earlier day against the giving of letters to the world; but none the less are his letters informed with his intellect and meditative thoughtfulness and exquisiteness of feeling. It is earnestly to be hoped that one of the Family who is admirably qualified for the task of love will address himself to write adequately and confidingly the Life of his immortal relative; and toward this every one possessed of anything in the handwriting or from the mind of WORDSWORTH may be appealed to for co-operation. The 'Memoirs' of the (now) Bishop of Lincoln, within its own limits, was a great gift; but it is avowedly not a 'Life,' and "the world wants a Life". Collation of the originals of these letters has restored sentences and words and things of the most characteristic kind. Very gross mistakes have also been corrected.[11]

[11] It may be well to point out here specially a mistake in heading two of the WORDSWORTH letters to Sir W.R. HAMILTON: 'Royal Dublin Society,' instead of 'Royal Irish Academy' (see vol. iii. pp. 350 and 352); also that at p. 394 'of the' has slipped in from the first 'of the,' and so now reads 'Of the Heresiarch of the Church of Rome,' for 'The Heresiarch Church,' as in the body of the letter.

III. "Conversations and Personal Reminiscences of Wordsworth".

From 'Satyrane's Letters;' Klopstock.

Personal Reminiscences of the Hon. Mr. Justice Coleridge.

Recollections of a Tour in Italy with Wordsworth. By H.C. Robinson.

Reminiscences of Lady Richardson and Mrs. Davy.

Conversations recorded by the Bishop of Lincoln.

Reminiscences by the Rev. R.P. Graves, M.A., Dublin; on the Death of Coleridge; and further (hitherto unpublished) Reminiscences.

An American's Reminiscences.

Recollections of Aubrey de Vere, Esq., now first published.[12]

From 'Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron,' by E.J. Trelawny, Esq.

From Letters of Professor Tayler (1872).

Anecdote of Crabbe and Wordsworth.

Wordsworth's Later Opinion of Lord Brougham.

[12] Will the Reader indulgently correct a most unfortunate oversight of the printers in vol. iii. p. 497, l. 15, where 'no angel smiled' (mis)reads 'no angle smiled'?

These are included in the Prose inevitably, inasmuch as they preserve opinions and sentiments, criticisms and sayings, actually spoken by WORDSWORTH, of exactly the type of which Lord COLERIDGE, among other things, wrote the Editor: 'I hope we shall have a transcript from you of the thoughts and opinions of that very great and noble person, of whom (as far as I know them) it is most true that "the very dust of his writings is gold." Any grave and deliberate opinion of his is entitled to weight; and if we have his opinions at all, we should have them whole and entire.'

The Editor has studied to give WORDSWORTH'S own conversations and sayings--not others' concerning him. Hence such eloquent pseudo-enthusiasm as is found in De Quincey's 'Recollections of the Lakes' (Works, vol. ii.) is excluded. He dares to call it pseudo-enthusiasm; for this book of the little, alert, self-conscious creature, with the marvellous brain and more marvellous tongue--a monkey with a man's soul somehow transmigrated into it--opens and shuts without preserving a solitary saying of the man he professes to honour. That is a measure of "his" admiration as of his insight or no insight. There are besides personal impertinencies, declarative of essential vulgarity.[13] Smaller men have printed their 'Recollections,' or rather retailed their gossip; but they themselves occupy the foreground, much as your chimney-sweep introduces himself prominently in front of his signboard presentment of some many-chimneyed 'noble house.' Even Emerson's 'English Traits' (a most un-English book) belongs to the same underbred category. The new 'Recollections' by AUBREY DE VERE, Esq., it is a privilege to publish--full of reverence and love, and so daintily and musically worded, as they are.

[13] Possibly indignation roused by the 'Recollections' has provoked too vehement condemnation. Let it therefore be noted that it is the 'Recollections' that are censured. Elsewhere DE QUINCEY certainly shows a glimmering recognition of WORDSWORTH'S great qualities, and that before they had been fully admitted; but everywhere there is an impertinence of familiarity and a patronising self-consciousness that is irritating to any one who reverences great genius and high rectitude. It may be conceded that DE QUINCEY, so far as he was capable, did reverence WORDSWORTH; but his exaggerations of awe and delays bear on the face of them unveracity.

Such is an account of the contents of these volumes; and it may be permitted the Editor to record his hearty thanks to the Sons of the Poet--WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Esq., Carlisle, and the just dead Rev. JOHN WORDSWORTH, M.A., Brigham--and his nephew Professor WORDSWORTH of Bombay, for their so flattering committal of this trust to him; and especially to the last, for his sympathetic and gladdening counsel throughout--augury of larger service ultimately, it is to be hoped. To the co-executor with WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, Esq.--STRICKLAND COOKSON, Esq.--like acknowledgment is due. He cannot sufficiently thank AUBREY DE VERE, Esq., for his brilliant contribution to the 'Personal Reminiscences.' The Rev. ROBERT PERCEVAL GRAVES, M.A., of Dublin (formerly of Windermere), has greatly added to the interest of these volumes by forwarding his further reminiscences of WORDSWORTH and the Hamilton Letters. Fifteen of these letters of WORDSWORTH, not yet published, will be given in a Life of the great mathematician of Ireland, Sir W.R. HAMILTON, towards whom WORDSWORTH felt the warmest friendship, and of whose many-sided genius he had the most absolute admiration. Mr. GRAVES, walking in the footsteps of FULKE GREVILLE, Lord BROOKE, who sought that on his tomb should be graven 'Friend of Sir Philip Sidney' (albeit he would modestly disclaim the lofty comparison), regards it as his title to memory that he was called 'my highly esteemed friend' by WORDSWORTH (vol. iii. p. 27). For the GRAVESES the Poet had much regard, and it was mutual. A Sonnet addressed to WORDSWORTH by the (now) Bishop of Limerick was so highly valued by him that it is a pleasure to be able to read it, as thus:

'"To Wordsworth".

The Sages of old time have pass'd away, A throng of mighty names. But little power Have ancient names to rule the present hour: No Plato to the learners of our day In grove of Academe reveals the way, The law, the soul of Nature. Yet a light Of living wisdom, beaming calm and bright, Forbids our youth 'mid error's maze to stray. To thee, with gratitude and reverent love, O Poet and Philosopher! we turn; For in thy truth-inspirèd song we learn Passion and pride to quell--erect to move, From doubts and fears deliver'd--and conceiving Pure hopes of heaven, live happy in believing.

"August" 1833.' C.G.

Lady RICHARDSON has similarly added to the value of her former 'Recollections' for this work. Very special gratitude is due to the Miss QUILLINANS of Loughrigg, Rydal, for the use of the MS. of Miss FENWICK'S Notes--one half in their father's handwriting, and the other half (or thereabout) in that of Mrs. QUILLINAN ('DORA'), who at the end has written:

'To dearest Miss Fenwick are we obliged for these Notes, every word of which was taken down by her kind pen from my father's dictation. The former portion was transcribed at Rydal by Mr. Quillinan, the latter by me, and finished at the Vicarage, Brigham, this twenty-fifth day of August 1843.--D.Q.'

The MS., he it repeated, is now printed "in extenso", nor will the least acceptable be 'DORA'S' own slight pencillings intercalated. The Miss COOKSONS of Grasmere were good enough to present the Editor with a copy of the 'Two Letters to the Freeholders of Westmoreland', when he had almost despaired of recovering the pamphlet. Thanks are due to several literary friends for aid in the Notes and Illustrations. There must be named Professor DOWDEN and Rev. E.P. GRAVES, M.A.,[14] Dublin; F.W. COSENS, Esq., and G.A. SIMCOX, Esq., London; W. ALDIS WRIGHT, Esq., M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge.

[14] Mr. Graves has published the following on the Wordsworths: ("a") 'Recollections of Wordsworth and the Lake Country'; a lecture, and a capital one. ("b") 'A Good Name and the Day of Death: two Blessings'; a sermon preached in Ambleside Church, January 30, 1859, on occasion of the death of Mrs. Wordsworth--tender and consolatory. ("c") 'The Ascension of our Lord, and its Lessons for Mourners'; a sermon (1858) finely commemorative of Arnold, the Wordsworths, Mrs. Fletcher, and others.

One point only remains to be noticed. Every one who knows our highest poetical literature knows the 'Lost Leader' of ROBERT BROWNING, Esq. Many have been the speculations and surmises and assertions and contradictions as to who the 'Lost Leader' was. The verdict of one of the immortals on his fellow-immortal concerns us all. Hence it is with no common thankfulness the Editor of WORDSWORTH'S Prose embraces this opportunity of settling the controversy beyond appeal, by giving a letter which Mr. BROWNING has done him the honour to write for publication. It is as follows:

'19 Warwick-crescent, W. Feb. 24, '75.

DEAR MR. GROSART,

I have been asked the question you now address me with, and as duly answered it, I can't remember how many times: there is no sort of objection to one more assurance, or rather confession, on my part, that I "did" in my hasty youth presume to use the great and venerated personality of WORDSWORTH as a sort of painter's model; one from which this or the other particular feature may be selected and turned to account: had I intended more, above all, such a boldness as portraying the entire man, I should not have talked about "handfuls of silver and bits of ribbon". These never influenced the change of politics in the great poet; whose defection, nevertheless, accompanied as it was by a regular face about of his special party, was to my juvenile apprehension, and even mature consideration, an event to deplore. But just as in the tapestry on my wall I can recognise figures which have "struck out" a fancy, on occasion, that though truly enough thus derived, yet would be preposterous as a copy, so, though I dare not deny the original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the "very effigies" of such a moral and intellectual superiority.

Faithfully yours,

ROBERT BROWNING.'

The Editor cannot close this Preface without expressing his sense of the greatness of the trust confided to him, and the personal benefit it has been to himself to have been brought so near to WILLIAM WORDSWORTH as he has been in working on this collection of his Prose. He felt almost awed as he handled the great and good man's MSS., and found himself behind the screen (as it were), seeing what he had seen, touching what he had touched, knowing what he had known, feeling what he had felt. Reverence, even veneration is an empty word to utter the emotion excited in such communion; these certainly, but something tenderer and more human were in head and heart. It was a grand, high-thoughted, pure-lived, unique course that was run in those sequestered vales. The closer one gets to the man, the greater he proves, the truer, the simpler; and it is a benediction to the race, amid so many fragmentary and jagged and imperfect lives, to have one so rounded and completed, so august and so genuine:

'Summon Detraction to object the worst That may be told, and utter all it can; It cannot find a blemish to be enforced Against him, other than he was a man, And built of flesh and blood, and did live here, Within the region of infirmity; Where all perfections never did appear To meet in any one so really, But that his frailty ever did bewray Unto the world that he was set in clay.'

(Funeral Panegyric on the Earl of Devonshire, by Samuel Daniel.)

ALEXANDER B. GROSART.

"Park View, Blackburn, Lancashire".

NOTE.--It is perhaps right to mention, for Editor and present Printers' sake, that WORDSWORTH'S own capitals, italics, punctuation, and other somewhat antique characteristics, have been faithfully reproduced. At the dates, capitals, italics, and punctuation were more abundant than at present. "G".

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

*** A star [*] designates publication herein "for the first time". G. =PAGE= The Dedication to the Queen v *Poem addressed to her Majesty with a Gift-copy of the Poems. vi The Preface vii-xxxviii

POLITICAL.

*I. Apology for the French Revolution, 1793 1-23 Appendix to Bishop Watson's Sermon 24-30 II. The Convention of Cintra, 1809 31-174 Appendix by De Quincey 175-194 III. Vindication of Opinions in the Treatise on the 'Convention of Cintra:' ("a") Letter to Major-General Sir Charles W. Pasley, K.C.B., on his 'Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire,' 1811 195-200 *("b") Letter enclosing the Preceding to a Friend unnamed 206-209 iv. Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland, 1818 211-257 *v. Of the Catholic Relief Bill, 1829 259-270

ETHICAL.

I. Of Legislation for the Poor, the Working Classes, and the Clergy: Appendix to Poems, 1835 271-294 II. Advice to the Young: ("a") Letter to the Editor of 'The Friend,' signed 'Mathetes' 295-308 ("b") Answer to the Letter of 'Mathetes,' 1809 309-326 III. Of Education: ("a") On the Education of the Young: Letter to a Friend, 1806 327-333 ("b") Of the People, their Ways and Needs: Letter to Archdeacon Wrangham, 1808 334-339 ("c") Education: two Letters to the Rev. H. J. Rose, 1828 340-348 ("d") Education of Duty: Letter to Rev. Dr. Wordsworth, 1830 349 *("e") Speech on laying the Foundation-stone of the New School in the Village of Bowness, Windermere, 1830 350-356

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS 357-360

I. POLITICAL.

I. APOLOGY FOR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 1793.

NOTE.

For an account of the manuscript of this 'Apology,' and details on other points, see Preface in the present volume. G.

APOLOGY FOR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1793.

MY LORD,

Reputation may not improperly be termed the moral life of man. Alluding to our natural existence, Addison, in a sublime allegory well known to your Lordship, has represented us as crossing an immense bridge, from whose surface from a variety of causes we disappear one after another, and are seen no more. Every one who enters upon public life has such a bridge to pass. Some slip through at the very commencement of their career from thoughtlessness, others pursue their course a little longer, till, misled by the phantoms of avarice and ambition, they fall victims to their delusion. Your Lordship was either seen, or supposed to be seen, continuing your way for a long time unseduced and undismayed; but those who now look for you will look in vain, and it is feared you have at last fallen, through one of the numerous trap-doors, into the tide of contempt, to be swept down to the ocean of oblivion.

It is not my intention to be illiberal; these latter expressions have been forced from me by indignation. Your Lordship has given a proof that even religious controversy may be conducted without asperity; I hope I shall profit by your example. At the same time, with a spirit which you may not approve--for it is a republican spirit--I shall not preclude myself from any truths, however severe, which I may think beneficial to the cause which I have undertaken to defend. You will not, then, be surprised when I inform you that it is only the name of its author which has induced me to notice an Appendix to a Sermon which you have lately given to the world, with a hope that it may have some effect in calming a perturbation which, you say, has been "excited" in the minds of the lower orders of the community. While, with a servility which has prejudiced many people against religion itself, the ministers of the Church of England have appeared as writers upon public measures only to be the advocates of slavery civil and religious, your Lordship stood almost alone as the defender of truth and political charity. The names of levelling prelate, bishop of the Dissenters, which were intended as a dishonour to your character, were looked upon by your friends--perhaps by yourself--as an acknowledgment of your possessing an enlarged and philosophical mind; and like the generals in a neighbouring country, if it had been equally becoming your profession, you might have adopted, as an honourable title, a denomination intended as a stigma.

On opening your Appendix, your admirers will naturally expect to find an impartial statement of the grievances which harass this Nation, and a sagacious inquiry into the proper modes of redress. They will be disappointed. Sensible how large a portion of mankind receive opinions upon authority, I am apprehensive lest the doctrines which they will there find should derive a weight from your name to which they are by no means intrinsically entitled. I will therefore examine what you have advanced, from a hope of being able to do away any impression left on the minds of such as may be liable to confound with argument a strong prepossession for your Lordship's talents, experience, and virtues.

Before I take notice of what you appear to have laid down as principles, it may not be improper to advert to some incidental opinions found at the commencement of your political confession of faith.

At a period big with the fate of the human race I am sorry that you attach so much importance to the personal sufferings of the late royal martyr, and that an anxiety for the issue of the present convulsions should not have prevented you from joining in the idle cry of modish lamentation which has resounded from the Court to the cottage. You wish it to be supposed you are one of those who are unpersuaded of the guilt of Louis XVI. If you had attended to the history of the French Revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping to bewail his death, you would rather have regretted that the blind fondness of his people had placed a human being in that monstrous situation which rendered him unaccountable before a human tribunal. A bishop, a man of philosophy and humanity[15] as distinguished as your Lordship, declared at the opening of the National Convention--and twenty-five millions of men were convinced of the truth of the assertion--that there was not a citizen on the tenth of August who, if he could have dragged before the eyes of Louis the corpse of one of his murdered brothers, might not have exclaimed to him: 'Tyran, voilà ton ouvrage.' Think of this, and you will not want consolation under any depression your spirits may feel at the contrast exhibited by Louis on the most splendid throne of the universe, and Louis alone in the tower of the Temple or on the scaffold. But there is a class of men who received the news of the late execution with much more heartfelt sorrow than that which you, among such a multitude, so officiously express. The passion of pity is one of which, above all others, a Christian teacher should be cautious of cherishing the abuse when, under the influence of reason, it is regulated by the disproportion of the pain suffered to the guilt incurred. It is from the passion thus directed that the men of whom I have just spoken are afflicted by the catastrophe of the fallen monarch. They are sorry that the prejudice and weakness of mankind have made it necessary to force an individual into an unnatural situation, which requires more than human talents and human virtues, and at the same time precludes him from attaining even a moderate knowledge of common life, and from feeling a particular share in the interests of mankind. But, above all, these men lament that any combination of circumstances should have rendered it necessary or advisable to veil for a moment the statues of the laws, and that by such emergency the cause of twenty-five millions of people, I may say of the whole human race, should have been so materially injured. Any other sorrow for the death of Louis is irrational and weak.

[15] M. Gregoire.

In France royalty is no more. The person of the last anointed is no more also; and I flatter myself I am not alone, even in this "kingdom", when I wish that it may please the Almighty neither by the hands of His priests nor His nobles (I allude to a striking passage of Racine) to raise his posterity to the rank of his ancestors, and reillume the torch of extinguished David.[16]

[16] See "Athalie", [act i.] scene 2:

'Il faut que sur le trône un roi soit élevé, Qui "se souvienne un jour" qu'au rang de ses ancêtres.

You say: 'I fly with terror and abhorrence even from the altar of Liberty, when I see it stained with the blood of the aged, of the innocent, of the defenceless sex, of the ministers of religion, and of the faithful adherents of a fallen monarch.' What! have you so little knowledge of the nature of man as to be ignorant that a time of revolution is not the season of true Liberty? Alas, the obstinacy and perversion of man is such that she is too often obliged to borrow the very arms of Despotism to overthrow him, and, in order to reign in peace, must establish herself by violence. She deplores such stern necessity, but the safety of the people, her supreme law, is her consolation. This apparent contradiction between the principles of liberty and the march of revolutions; this spirit of jealousy, of severity, of disquietude, of vexation, indispensable from a state of war between the oppressors and oppressed, must of necessity confuse the ideas of morality, and contract the benign exertion of the best affections of the human heart. Political virtues are developed at the expense of moral ones; and the sweet emotions of compassion, evidently dangerous when traitors are to be punished, are too often altogether smothered. But is this a sufficient reason to reprobate a convulsion from which is to spring a fairer order of things? It is the province of education to rectify the erroneous notions which a habit of oppression, and even of resistance, may have created, and to soften this ferocity of character, proceeding from a necessary suspension of the mild and social virtues; it belongs to her to create a race of men who, truly free, will look upon their fathers as only enfranchised.[17]

[17]

Dieu l'a fait remonter par la main de ses prêtres: L'a tiré par leurs mains de l'oubli du tombeau, Et de David éteint rallumé le flambeau.'

The conclusion of the same speech applies so strongly to the present period that I cannot forbear transcribing it:

'Daigne, daigne, mon Dieu, sur Mathan, et sur elle Répandre "cet esprit d'imprudence et d'erreur, De la chute des rois funeste avant-coureur"!'

I proceed to the sorrow you express for the fate of the French priesthood. The measure by which that body was immediately stripped of part of its possessions, and a more equal distribution enjoined of the rest, does not meet with your Lordship's approbation. You do not question the right of the Nation over ecclesiastical wealth; you have voluntarily abandoned a ground which you were conscious was altogether untenable. Having allowed this right, can you question the propriety of exerting it at that particular period? The urgencies of the State were such as required the immediate application of a remedy. Even the clergy were conscious of such necessity; and aware, from the immunities they had long enjoyed, that the people would insist upon their bearing some share of the burden, offered of themselves a considerable portion of their superfluities. The Assembly was true to justice, and refused to compromise the interests of the Nation by accepting as a satisfaction the insidious offerings of compulsive charity. They enforced their right. They took from the clergy a large share of their wealth, and applied it to the alleviation of the national misery. Experience shows daily the wise employment of the ample provision which yet remains to them. While you reflect on the vast diminution which some men's fortunes must have undergone, your sorrow for these individuals will be diminished by recollecting the unworthy motives which induced the bulk of them to undertake the office, and the scandalous arts which enabled so many to attain the rank and enormous wealth which it has seemed necessary to annex to the charge of a Christian pastor. You will rather look upon it as a signal act of justice that they should thus unexpectedly be stripped of the rewards of their vices and their crimes. If you should lament the sad reverse by which the hero of the necklace[18] has been divested of about 1,300,000 livres of annual revenue, you may find some consolation that a part of this prodigious mass of riches is gone to preserve from famine some thousands of curés, who were pining in villages unobserved by Courts.

[18] Prince de Rohan.

I now proceed to principles. Your Lordship very properly asserts that 'the liberty of man in a state of society consists in his being subject to no law but the law enacted by the general will of the society to which he belongs.' You approved of the object which the French had in view when, in the infancy of the Revolution, they were attempting to destroy arbitrary power, and to erect a temple to Liberty on its remains. It is with surprise, then, that I find you afterwards presuming to dictate to the world a servile adoption of the British constitution. It is with indignation I perceive you 'reprobate' a people for having imagined happiness and liberty more likely to flourish in the open field of a Republic than under the shade of Monarchy. You are therefore guilty of a most glaring contradiction. Twenty-five millions of Frenchmen have felt that they could have no security for their liberties under any modification of monarchical power. They have in consequence unanimously chosen a Republic. You cannot but observe that they have only exercised that right in which, by your own confession, liberty essentially resides.

As to your arguments, by which you pretend to justify your anathemas of a Republic--if arguments they may be called--they are so concise, that I cannot but transcribe them. 'I dislike a Republic for this reason, because of all forms of government, scarcely excepting the most despotic, I think a Republic the most oppressive to the bulk of the people; they are deceived in it with a show of liberty, but they live in it under the most odious of all tyrannies--the tyranny of their equals.'

This passage is a singular proof of that fatality by which the advocates of error furnish weapons for their own destruction: while it is merely "assertion" in respect to a justification of your aversion to Republicanism, a strong "argument" may be drawn from it in its favour. Mr. Burke, in a philosophic lamentation over the extinction of chivalry, told us that in those times vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. Infatuated moralist! Your Lordship excites compassion as labouring under the same delusion. Slavery is a bitter and a poisonous draught. We have but one consolation under it, that a Nation may dash the cup to the ground when she pleases. Do not imagine that by taking from its bitterness you weaken its deadly quality; no, by rendering it more palatable you contribute to its power of destruction. We submit without repining to the chastisements of Providence, aware that we are creatures, that opposition is vain and remonstrance impossible. But when redress is in our own power and resistance is rational, we suffer with the same humility from beings like ourselves, because we are taught from infancy that we were born in a state of inferiority to our oppressors, that they were sent into the world to scourge, and we to be scourged. Accordingly we see the bulk of mankind, actuated by these fatal prejudices, even more ready to lay themselves under the feet of "the great" than the great are to trample upon them. Now taking for granted, that in Republics men live under the tyranny of what you call their equals, the circumstance of this being the most odious of all tyrannies is what a Republican would boast of; as soon as tyranny becomes odious, the principal step is made towards its destruction. Reflecting on the degraded state of the mass of mankind, a philosopher will lament that oppression is not odious to them, that the iron, while it eats the soul, is not felt to enter into it. 'Tout homme né dans l'esclavage nâit pour l'esclavage, rien n'est plus certain; les esclaves perdent tout dans leurs fers, jusqu'au désir d'en sortir; ils aiment leur servitude, comme les compagnons d'Ulysse aimaient leur abrutissement.'

I return to the quotation in which you reprobate Republicanism. Relying upon the temper of the times, you have surely thought little argument necessary to content what few will be hardy enough to support; the strongest of auxiliaries, imprisonment and the pillory, has left your arm little to perform. But the happiness of mankind is so closely connected with this subject, that I cannot suffer such considerations to deter me from throwing out a few hints, which may lead to a conclusion that a Republic legitimately constructed contains less of an oppressive principle than any other form of government.

Your Lordship will scarcely question that much of human misery, that the great evils which desolate States, proceed from the governors having an interest distinct from that of the governed. It should seem a natural deduction, that whatever has a tendency to identify the two must also in the same degree promote the general welfare. As the magnitude of almost all States prevents the possibility of their enjoying a pure democracy, philosophers--from a wish, as far as is in their power, to make the governors and the governed one--will turn their thoughts to the system of universal representation, and will annex an equal importance to the suffrage of every individual. Jealous of giving up no more of the authority of the people than is necessary, they will be solicitous of finding out some method by which the office of their delegates may be confined as much as is practicable to the proposing and deliberating upon laws rather than to enacting them; reserving to the people the power of finally inscribing them in the national code. Unless this is attended to, as soon as a people has chosen representatives it no longer has a political existence, except as it is understood to retain the privilege of annihilating the trust when it shall think proper, and of resuming its original power. Sensible that at the moment of election an interest distinct from that of the general body is created, an enlightened legislator will endeavour by every possible method to diminish the operation of such interest. The first and most natural mode that presents itself is that of shortening the regular duration of this trust, in order that the man who has betrayed it may soon be superseded by a more worthy successor. But this is not enough; aware of the possibility of imposition, and of the natural tendency of power to corrupt the heart of man, a sensible Republican will think it essential that the office of legislator be not intrusted to the same man for a succession of years. He will also be induced to this wise restraint by the grand principle of identification; he will be more sure of the virtue of the legislator by knowing that, in the capacity of private citizen, to-morrow he must either smart under the oppression or bless the justice of the law which he has enacted to-day.

Perhaps in the very outset of this inquiry the principle on which I proceed will be questioned, and I shall be told that the people are not the proper judges of their own welfare. But because under every government of modern times, till the foundation of the American Republic, the bulk of mankind have appeared incapable of discerning their true interests, no conclusion can be drawn against my principle. At this moment have we not daily the strongest proofs of the success with which, in what you call the best of all monarchical governments, the popular mind may be debauched? Left to the quiet exercise of their own judgment, do you think that the people would have thought it necessary to set fire to the house of the philosophic Priestley, and to hunt down his life like that of a traitor or a parricide? that, deprived almost of the necessaries of existence by the burden of their taxes, they would cry out, as with one voice, for a war from which not a single ray of consolation can visit them to compensate for the additional keenness with which they are about to smart under the scourge of labour, of cold, and of hunger?

Appearing, as I do, the advocate of Republicanism, let me not be misunderstood. I am well aware, from the abuse of the executive power in States, that there is not a single European nation but what affords a melancholy proof that if, at this moment, the original authority of the people should be restored, all that could be expected from such restoration would in the beginning be but a change of tyranny. Considering the nature of a Republic in reference to the present condition of Europe, your Lordship stops here; but a philosopher will extend his views much farther: having dried up the source from which flows the corruption of the public opinion, he will be sensible that the stream will go on gradually refining itself. I must add also, that the coercive power is of necessity so strong in all the old governments, that a people could not at first make an abuse of that liberty which a legitimate Republic supposes. The animal just released from its stall will exhaust the overflow of its spirits in a round of wanton vagaries; but it will soon return to itself, and enjoy its freedom in moderate and regular delight.

But, to resume the subject of universal representation, I ought to have mentioned before, that in the choice of its representatives a people will not immorally hold out wealth as a criterion of integrity, nor lay down as a fundamental rule, that to be qualified for the trying duties of legislation a citizen should be possessed of a certain fixed property. Virtues, talents, and acquirements are all that it will look for.

Having destroyed every external object of delusion, let us now see what makes the supposition necessary that the people will mislead themselves. Your Lordship respects 'peasants and mechanics when they intrude not themselves into concerns for which their education has not fitted them.'

Setting aside the idea of a peasant or mechanic being a legislator, what vast education is requisite to enable him to judge amongst his neighbours which is most qualified by his industry and integrity to be intrusted with the care of the interests of himself and of his fellow-citizens? But leaving this ground, as governments formed on such a plan proceed in a plain and open manner, their administration would require much less of what is usually called talents and experience, that is, of disciplined treachery and hoary Machiavelism; and at the same time, as it would no longer be their interest to keep the mass of the nation in ignorance, a moderate portion of useful knowledge would be universally disseminated. If your Lordship has travelled in the democratic cantons of Switzerland, you must have seen the herdsman with the staff in one hand and the book in the other. In the constituent Assembly of France was found a peasant whose sagacity was as distinguished as his integrity, whose blunt honesty over-awed and baffled the refinements of hypocritical patriots. The people of Paris followed him with acclamations, and the name of Père Gerard will long be mentioned with admiration and respect through the eighty-three departments.

From these hints, if pursued further, might be demonstrated the expediency of the whole people 'intruding themselves' on the office of legislation, and the wisdom of putting into force what they may claim as a right. But government is divided into two parts--the legislative and executive. The executive power you would lodge in the hands of an individual. Before we inquire into the propriety of this measure, it will be necessary to state the proper objects of the executive power in governments where the principle of universal representation is admitted. With regard to that portion of this power which is exerted in the application of the laws, it may be observed that much of it would be superseded. As laws, being but the expression of the general will, would be enacted only from an almost universal conviction of their utility, any resistance to such laws, any desire of eluding them, must proceed from a few refractory individuals. As far, then, as relates to the internal administration of the country, a Republic has a manifest advantage over a Monarchy, inasmuch as less force is requisite to compel obedience to its laws.

From the judicial tribunals of our own country, though we labour under a variety of partial and oppressive laws, we have an evident proof of the nullity of regal interference, as the king's name is confessedly a mere fiction, and justice is known to be most equitably administered when the judges are least dependent on the crown.

I have spoken of laws partial and oppressive; our penal code is so crowded with disproportioned penalties and indiscriminate severity that a conscientious man would sacrifice, in many instances, his respect for the laws to the common feelings of humanity; and there must be a strange vice in that legislation from which can proceed laws in whose execution a man cannot be instrumental without forfeiting his self-esteem and incurring the contempt of his fellow-citizens.

But to return from this digression: with regard to the other branches of the executive government, which relate rather to original measures than to administering the law, it may be observed that the power exercised in conducting them is distinguished by almost imperceptible shades from the legislative, and that all such as admit of open discussion and of the delay attendant on public deliberations are properly the province of the representative assembly. If this observation be duly attended to, it will appear that this part of the executive power will be extremely circumscribed, will be stripped almost entirely of a deliberative capacity, and will be reduced to a mere hand or instrument. As a Republican government would leave this power to a select body destitute of the means of corruption, and whom the people, continually contributing, could at all times bring to account or dismiss, will it not necessarily ensue that a body so selected and supported would perform their simple functions with greater efficacy and fidelity than the complicated concerns of royalty can be expected to meet with in the councils of princes; of men who from their wealth and interest have forced themselves into trust; and of statesmen, whose constant object is to exalt themselves by laying pitfalls for their colleagues and for their country.

I shall pursue this subject no further; but adopting your Lordship's method of argument, instead of continuing to demonstrate the superiority of a Republican executive government, I will repeat some of the objections which have been often made to monarchy, and have not been answered.

My first objection to regal government is its instability, proceeding from a variety of causes. Where monarchy is found in its greatest intensity, as in Morocco and Turkey, this observation is illustrated in a very pointed manner, and indeed is more or less striking as governments are more or less despotic. The reason is obvious: as the monarch is the chooser of his ministers, and as his own passions and caprice are in general the sole guides of his conduct, these ministers, instead of pursuing directly the one grand object of national welfare, will make it their chief study to vary their measures according to his humours. But a minister "may" be refractory: his successor will naturally run headlong into plans totally the reverse of the former system; for if he treads in the same path, he is well aware that a similar fate will attend him. This observation will apply to each succession of kings, who, from vanity and a desire of distinction, will in general studiously avoid any step which may lead to a suspicion that they are so spiritless as to imitate their predecessor. That a similar instability is not incident to Republics is evident from their very constitution.

As from the nature of monarchy, particularly of hereditary monarchy, there must always be a vast disproportion between the duties to be performed and the powers that are to perform them; and as the measures of government, far from gaining additional vigour, are, on the contrary, enfeebled by being intrusted to one hand, what arguments can be used for allowing to the will of a single being a weight which, as history shows, will subvert that of the whole body politic? And this brings me to my grand objection to monarchy, which is drawn from (THE ETERNAL NATURE OF MAN.) The office of king is a trial to which human virtue is not equal. Pure and universal representation, by which alone liberty can be secured, cannot, I think, exist together with monarchy. It seems madness to expect a manifestation of the "general" will, at the same time that we allow to a "particular" will that weight which it must obtain in all governments that can with any propriety be called monarchical. They must war with each other till one of them is extinguished. It was so in France and....

I shall not pursue this topic further, but, as you are a teacher of purity of morals, I cannot but remind you of that atmosphere of corruption without which it should seem that courts cannot exist.

You seem anxious to explain what ought to be understood by the equality of men in a state of civil society; but your Lordship's success has not answered your trouble. If you had looked in the articles of the Rights of Man, you would have found your efforts superseded: 'Equality, without which liberty cannot exist, is to be met with in perfection in that State in which no distinctions are admitted but such as have evidently for their object the general good;' 'The end of government cannot be attained without authorising some members of the society to command, and of course without imposing on the rest the necessity of obedience.'

Here, then, is an inevitable inequality, which may be denominated that of power. In order to render this as small as possible, a legislator will be careful not to give greater force to such authority than is essential to its due execution. Government is at best but a necessary evil. Compelled to place themselves in a state of subordination, men will obviously endeavour to prevent the abuse of that superiority to which they submit; accordingly they will cautiously avoid whatever may lead those in whom it is acknowledged to suppose they hold it as a right. Nothing will more effectually contribute to this than that the person in whom authority has been lodged should occasionally descend to the level of private citizen; he will learn from it a wholesome lesson, and the people will be less liable to confound the person with the power. On this principle hereditary authority will be proscribed; and on another also--that in such a system as that of hereditary authority, no security can be had for talents adequate to the discharge of the office, and consequently the people can only feel the mortification of being humbled without having protected themselves.

Another distinction will arise amongst mankind, which, though it may be easily modified by government, exists independent of it; I mean the distinction of wealth, which always will attend superior talents and industry. It cannot be denied that the security of individual property is one of the strongest and most natural motives to induce men to bow their necks to the yoke of civil government. In order to attain this end of security to property, a legislator will proceed with impartiality. He should not suppose that, when he has insured to their proprietors the possession of lands and movables against the depredation of the necessitous, nothing remains to be done. The history of all ages has demonstrated that wealth not only can secure itself, but includes even an oppressive principle. Aware of this, and that the extremes of poverty and riches have a necessary tendency to corrupt the human heart, he will banish from his code all laws such as the unnatural monster of primogeniture, such as encourage associations against labour in the form of corporate bodies, and indeed all that monopolising system of legislation, whose baleful influence is shown in the depopulation of the country and in the necessity which reduces the sad relicks to owe their very existence to the ostentatious bounty of their oppressors. If it is true in common life, it is still more true in governments, that we should be just before we are generous; but our legislators seem to have forgotten or despised this homely maxim. They have unjustly left unprotected that most important part of property, not less real because it has no material existence, that which ought to enable the labourer to provide food for himself and his family. I appeal to innumerable statutes, whose constant and professed object it is to lower the price of labour, to compel the workman to be "content" with arbitrary wages, evidently too small from the necessity of legal enforcement of the acceptance of them. Even from the astonishing amount of the sums raised for the support of one description of the poor may be concluded the extent and greatness of that oppression, whose effects have rendered it possible for the few to afford so much, and have shown us that such a multitude of our brothers exist in even helpless indigence. Your Lordship tells us that the science of civil government has received all the perfection of which it is capable. For my part, I am more enthusiastic. The sorrow I feel from the contemplation of this melancholy picture is not unconsoled by a comfortable hope that the class of wretches called mendicants will not much longer shock the feelings of humanity; that the miseries entailed upon the marriage of those who are not rich will no longer tempt the bulk of mankind to fly to that promiscuous intercourse to which they are impelled by the instincts of nature, and the dreadful satisfaction of escaping the prospect of infants, sad fruit of such intercourse, whom they are unable to support. If these flattering prospects be ever realised, it must be owing to some wise and salutary regulations counteracting that inequality among mankind which proceeds from the present "fixed" disproportion of their possessions.

I am not an advocate for the agrarian law nor for sumptuary regulations, but I contend that the people amongst whom the law of primogeniture exists, and among whom corporate bodies are encouraged, and immense salaries annexed to useless and indeed hereditary offices, is oppressed by an inequality in the distribution of wealth which does not necessarily attend men in a state of civil society.

Thus far we have considered inequalities inseparable from civil society. But other arbitrary distinctions exist among mankind, either from choice or usurpation. I allude to titles, to stars, ribbons, and garters, and other badges of fictitious superiority. Your Lordship will not question the grand principle on which this inquiry set out; I look upon it, then, as my duty to try the propriety of these distinctions by that criterion, and think it will be no difficult task to prove that these separations among mankind are absurd, impolitic, and immoral. Considering hereditary nobility as a reward for services rendered to the State--and it is to my charity that you owe the permission of taking up the question on this ground--what services can a man render to the State adequate to such a compensation that the making of laws, upon which the happiness of millions is to depend, shall be lodged in him and his posterity, however depraved may be their principles, however contemptible their understandings?

But here I may be accused of sophistry; I ought to subtract every idea of power from such distinction, though from the weakness of mankind it is impossible to disconnect them. What services, then, can a man render to society to compensate for the outrage done to the dignity of our nature when we bind ourselves to address him and his posterity with humiliating circumlocutions, calling him most noble, most honourable, most high, most august, serene, excellent, eminent, and so forth; when it is more than probable that such unnatural flattery will but generate vices which ought to consign him to neglect and solitude, or make him the perpetual object of the finger of scorn? And does not experience justify the observation, that where titles--a thing very rare--have been conferred as the rewards of merit, those to whom they have descended, far from being thereby animated to imitate their ancestor, have presumed upon that lustre which they supposed thrown round them, and, prodigally relying on such resources, lavished what alone was their own, their personal reputation?

It would be happy if this delusion were confined to themselves; but, alas, the world is weak enough to grant the indulgence which they assume. Vice, which is forgiven in one character, will soon cease to meet with sternness of rebuke when found in others. Even at first she will entreat pardon with confidence, assured that ere long she will be charitably supposed to stand in no need of it.

But let me ask you seriously, from the mode in which those distinctions are originally conferred, is it not almost necessary that, far from being the rewards of services rendered to the State, they should usually be the recompense of an industrious sacrifice of the general welfare to the particular aggrandisement of that power by which they are bestowed? Let us even alter their source, and consider them as proceeding from the Nation itself, and deprived of that hereditary quality; even here I should proscribe them, and for the most evident reason--that a man's past services are no sufficient security for his future character; he who to-day merits the civic wreath may to-morrow deserve the Tarpeian rock. Besides, where respect is not perverted, where the world is not taught to reverence men without regarding their conduct, the esteem of mankind will have a very different value, and, when a proper independence is secured, will be regarded as a sufficient recompense for services however important, and will be a much surer guarantee of the continuance of such virtues as may deserve it.

I have another strong objection to nobility, which is that it has a necessary tendency to dishonour labour, a prejudice which extends far beyond its own circle; that it binds down whole ranks of men to idleness, while it gives the enjoyment of a reward which exceeds the hopes of the most active exertions of human industry. The languid tedium of this noble repose must be dissipated, and gaming, with the tricking manoeuvres of the horse-race, afford occupation to hours which it would be happy for mankind had they been totally unemployed.

Reflecting on the corruption of the public manners, does your Lordship shudder at the prostitution which miserably deluges our streets? You may find the cause in our aristocratical prejudices. Are you disgusted with the hypocrisy and sycophancy of our intercourse in private life? You may find the cause in the necessity of dissimulation which we have established by regulations which oblige us to address as our superiors, indeed as our masters, men whom we cannot but internally despise. Do you lament that such large portions of mankind should stoop to occupations unworthy the dignity of their nature? You may find in the pride and luxury thought necessary to nobility how such servile arts are encouraged. Besides, where the most honourable of the Land do not blush to accept such offices as groom of the bedchamber, master of the hounds, lords in waiting, captain of the honourable band of gentlemen-pensioners, is it astonishing that the bulk of the people should not ask of an occupation, what is it? but what may be gained by it?

If the long equestrian train of equipage should make your Lordship sigh for the poor who are pining in hunger, you will find that little is thought of snatching the bread from their mouths to eke out the '"necessary" splendour' of nobility.

I have not time to pursue this subject further, but am so strongly impressed with the baleful influence of aristocracy and nobility upon human happiness and virtue, that if, as I am persuaded, monarchy cannot exist without such supporters, I think that reason sufficient for the preference I have given to the Republican system.

It is with reluctance that I quit the subjects I have just touched upon; but the nature of this Address does not permit me to continue the discussion. I proceed to what more immediately relates to this Kingdom at the present crisis.

You ask with triumphant confidence, to what other law are the people of England subject than the general will of the society to which they belong? Is your Lordship to be told that acquiescence is not choice, and that obedience is not freedom? If there is a single man in Great Britain who has no suffrage in the election of a representative, the will of the society of which he is a member is not generally expressed; he is a Helot in that society. You answer the question, so confidently put, in this singular manner: 'The King, we are all justly persuaded, has not the inclination--and we all know that, if he had the inclination, he has not the power--to substitute his will in the place of law. The House of Lords has no such power. The House of Commons has no such power.' This passage, so artfully and unconstitutionally framed to agree with the delusions of the moment, cannot deceive a thinking reader. The expression of your full persuasion of the upright intentions of the King can only be the language of flattery. You are not to be told that it is constitutionally a maxim not to attribute to the person of the King the measures and misconduct of government. Had you chosen to speak, as you ought to have done, openly and explicitly, you must have expressed your just persuasion and implicit confidence in the integrity, moderation, and wisdom of his Majesty's ministers. Have you forgot the avowed ministerial maxim of Sir Robert Walpole? Are you ignorant of the overwhelming corruption of the present day?

You seem unconscious of the absurdity of separating what is inseparable even in imagination. Would it have been any consolation to the miserable Romans under the second triumvirate to have been asked insultingly, Is it Octavius, is it Anthony, or is it Lepidus that has caused this bitterness of affliction? and when the answer could not be returned with certainty, to have been reproached that their sufferings were imaginary? The fact is that the King "and" Lords "and" Commons, by what is termed the omnipotence of Parliament, have constitutionally the right of enacting whatever laws they please, in defiance of the petitions or remonstrances of the nation. They have the power of doubling our enormous debt of 240 millions, and "may" pursue measures which could never be supposed the emanation of the general will without concluding the people stripped of reason, of sentiment, and even of that first instinct which prompts them to preserve their own existence.

I congratulate your Lordship upon your enthusiastic fondness for the judicial proceedings of this country. I am happy to find you have passed through life without having your fleece torn from your back in the thorny labyrinth of litigation. But you have not lived always in colleges, and must have passed by some victims, whom it cannot be supposed, without a reflection on your heart, that you have forgotten. Here I am reminded of what I have said on the subject of representation--to be qualified for the office of legislation you should have felt like the bulk of mankind; their sorrows should be familiar to you, of which, if you are ignorant, how can you redress them? As a member of the assembly which, from a confidence in its experience, sagacity, and wisdom, the constitution has invested with the supreme appellant jurisdiction to determine the most doubtful points of an intricate jurisprudence, your Lordship cannot, I presume, be ignorant of the consuming expense of our never-ending process, the verbosity of unintelligible statutes, and the perpetual contrariety in our judicial decisions.

'The greatest freedom that can be enjoyed by man in a state of civil society, the greatest security that can be given with respect to the protection of his character, property, personal liberty, limb, and life, is afforded to every individual by our present constitution.'

'Let it never be forgotten by ourselves, and let us impress the observation upon the hearts of our children, that we are in possession of both (liberty and equality), of as much of both as can be consistent with the end for which civil society was introduced among mankind.'

Many of my readers will hardly believe me when I inform them that these passages are copied verbatim from your Appendix. Mr. Burke roused the indignation of all ranks of men when, by a refinement in cruelty superior to that which in the East yokes the living to the dead, he strove to persuade us that we and our posterity to the end of time were riveted to a constitution by the indissoluble compact of--a dead parchment, and were bound to cherish a corpse at the bosom when reason might call aloud that it should be entombed. Your Lordship aims at the same detestable object by means more criminal, because more dangerous and insidious. Attempting to lull the people of England into a belief that any inquiries directed towards the nature of liberty and equality can in no other way lead to their happiness than by convincing them that they have already arrived at perfection in the science of government, what is your object but to exclude them for ever from the most fruitful field of human knowledge? Besides, it is another cause to execrate this doctrine that the consequence of such fatal delusion would be that they must entirely draw off their attention, not only from the government, but from their governors; that the stream of public vigilance, far from clearing and enriching the prospect of society, would by its stagnation consign it to barrenness, and by its putrefaction infect it with death. You have aimed an arrow at liberty and philosophy, the eyes of the human race; why, like the inveterate enemy of Philip, in putting your name to the shaft, did you not declare openly its destination?

As a teacher of religion, your Lordship cannot be ignorant of a class of breaches of duty which may be denominated faults of omission. You profess to give your opinions upon the present turbulent crisis, expressing a wish that they may have some effect in tranquillising the minds of the people. Whence comes it, then, that the two grand causes of this working of the popular mind are passed over in silence? Your Lordship's conduct may bring to mind the story of a company of strolling comedians, who gave out the play of "Hamlet" as the performance of the evening. The audience were not a little surprised to be told, on the drawing up of the curtain, that from circumstances of particular convenience it was hoped they would dispense with the omission of the character of--Hamlet! But to be serious--for the subject is serious in the extreme--from your silence respecting the general call for a PARLIAMENTARY REFORM, supported by your assertion that we at present enjoy as great a portion of liberty and equality as is consistent with civil society, what can be supposed but that you are a determined enemy to the redress of what the people of England call and feel to be grievances?

From your omitting to speak upon the war, and your general disapprobation of French measures and French principles, expressed particularly at this moment, we are necessarily led also to conclude that you have no wish to dispel an infatuation which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor, and consigning the rest to the more slow and more painful consumption of want. I could excuse your silence on this point, as it would ill become an English bishop at the close of the eighteenth century to make the pulpit the vehicle of exhortations which would have disgraced the incendiary of the Crusades, the hermit Peter. But you have deprived yourself of the plea of decorum by giving no opinion on the REFORM OF THE LEGISLATURE. As undoubtedly you have some secret reason for the reservation of your sentiments on this latter head, I cannot but apply the same reason to the former. Upon what principle is your conduct to be explained? In some parts of England it is quaintly said, when a drunken man is seen reeling towards his home, that he has business on both sides of the road. Observing your Lordship's tortuous path, the spectators will be far from insinuating that you have partaken of Mr. Burke's intoxicating bowl; they will content themselves, shaking their heads as you stagger along, with remarking that you have business on both sides of the road.

The friends of Liberty congratulate themselves upon the odium under which they are at present labouring, as the causes which have produced it have obliged so many of her false adherents to disclaim with officious earnestness any desire to promote her interests; nor are they disheartened by the diminution which their body is supposed already to have sustained. Conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us, that the unblushing aristocracy of a Maury or a Cazalès is far less dangerous than the insidious mask of patriotism assumed by a La Fayette or a Mirabeau, we thank you for your desertion. Political convulsions have been said particularly to call forth concealed abilities, but it has been seldom observed how vast is their consumption of them. Reflecting upon the fate of the greatest portion of the members of the constituent and legislative assemblies, we must necessarily be struck with a prodigious annihilation of human talents. Aware that this necessity is attached to a struggle for Liberty, we are the less sorry that we can expect no advantage from the mental endowments of your Lordship.

APPENDIX to Bishop Watson's Sermon.

[It is deemed expedient to reprint here the Appendix to Bishop Watson's Sermon, which is animadverted on in the preceding Apology. G.]

The Sermon which is now, for the first time, published, was written many years ago; it may, perhaps, on that account be more worthy of the attention of those for whose benefit it is designed. If it shall have any effect in calming the perturbation which has been lately excited, and which still subsists in the minds of the lower classes of the community, I shall not be ashamed of having given to the world a composition in every other light uninteresting. I will take this opportunity of adding, with the same intention, a few reflections on the present circumstances of our own and of a neighbouring country.

With regard to France--I have no hesitation in declaring, that the object which the French seemed to have in view at the commencement of their revolution had my hearty approbation. The object was to free themselves and their posterity from arbitrary power. I hope there is not a man in Great Britain so little sensible of the blessings of that free constitution under which he has the happiness to live, so entirely dead to the interests of general humanity, as not to wish that a constitution similar to our own might be established, not only in France, but in every despotic state in Europe; not only in Europe, but in every quarter of the globe.

It is one thing to approve of an end, another to approve of the means by which an end is accomplished. I did not approve of the means by which the first revolution was effected in France. I thought that it would have been a wiser measure to have abridged the oppressive privileges, and to have lessened the enormous number of the nobility, than to have abolished the order. I thought that the State ought not in justice to have seized any part of the property of the Church, till it had reverted, as it were, to the community, by the death of its immediate possessors. I thought that the king was not only treated with unmerited indignity, but that too little authority was left him to enable him, as the chief executive magistrate, to be useful to the State. These were some of my reasons for not approving the means by which the first revolution in France was brought about. As to other evils which took place on the occasion, I considered them certainly as evils of importance; but at the same time as evils inseparable from a state of civil commotion, and which I conceived would be more than compensated by the establishment of a limited monarchy.

The French have abandoned the constitution they had at first established, and have changed it for another. No one can reprobate with more truth than I do both the means and the end of this change. The end has been the establishment of a republic. Now a republic is a form of government which, of all others, I most dislike--and I dislike it for this reason; because of all forms of government, scarcely excepting the most despotic, I think a republic the most oppressive to the bulk of the people: they are deceived in it with the show of liberty; but they live in it under the most odious of all tyrannies, the tyranny of their equals. With respect to the means by which this new republic has been erected in France, they have been sanguinary, savage, more than brutal. They not merely fill the heart of every individual with commiseration for the unfortunate sufferers, but they exhibit to the eye of contemplation an humiliating picture of human nature, when its passions are not regulated by religion, or controlled by law. I fly with terror and abhorrence even from the altar of Liberty, when I see it stained with the blood of the aged, of the innocent, of the defenceless sex, of the ministers of religion, and of the faithful adherents of a fallen monarch. My heart sinks within me when I see it streaming with the blood of the monarch himself. Merciful God! strike speedily, we beseech Thee, with deep contrition and sincere remorse, the obdurate hearts of the relentless perpetrators and projectors of these horrid deeds, lest they should suddenly sink into eternal and extreme perdition, loaded with an unutterable weight of unrepented and, except through the blood of Him whose religion they reject, inexpiable sin.

The monarch, you will tell me, was guilty of perfidy and perjury. I know not that he was guilty of either; but admitting that he has been guilty of both, who, alas, of the sons of men is so confident in the strength of his own virtue, so assured of his own integrity and intrepidity of character, as to be certain that, under similar temptations, he would not have been guilty of similar offences? Surely it would have been no diminution of the sternness of new republican virtue, no disgrace to the magnanimity of a great nation, if it had pardoned the perfidy which its own oppression had occasioned, if it had remitted the punishment of the perjury of the king to the tribunal of Him by whom "kings reign and princes decree justice".

And are there any men in this kingdom, except such as find their account in public confusion, who would hazard the introduction of such scenes of rapine, barbarity, and bloodshed, as have disgraced France and outraged humanity, for the sake of obtaining--what?--Liberty and Equality. I suspect that the meaning of these terms is not clearly and generally understood: it may be of use to explain them.

The liberty of a man in a state of nature consists in his being subject to no law but the law of nature; and the liberty of a man in a state of society consists in his being subject to no law but to the law enacted by the general will of the society to which he belongs. And to what other law is any man in Great Britain subject? The king, we are all justly persuaded, has not the inclination, and we all know that if he had the inclination, he has not the power, to substitute his will in the place of the law. The House of Lords has no such power; the House of Commons has no such power; the Church has no such power; the rich men of the country have no such power. The poorest man amongst us, the beggar at our door, is governed--not by the uncertain, passionate, arbitrary will of an individual--not by the selfish insolence of an aristocratic faction--not by the madness of democratic violence--but by the fixed, impartial, deliberate voice of law, enacted by the general suffrage of a free people. Is your property injured? Law, indeed, does not give you property; but it ascertains it. Property is acquired by industry and probity; by the exercise of talents and ingenuity; and the possession of it is secured by the laws of the community. Against whom think you is it secured? It is secured against thieves and robbers; against idle and profligate men, who, however low your condition may be, would be glad to deprive you of the little you possess. It is secured, not only against such disturbers of the public peace, but against the oppression of the noble, the rapacity of the powerful, and the avarice of the rich. The courts of British justice are impartial and incorrupt; they respect not the persons of men; the poor man's lamb is, in their estimation, as sacred as the monarch's crown; with inflexible integrity they adjudge to every man his own. Your property under their protection is secure. If your personal liberty be unjustly restrained, though but for an hour, and that by the highest servants of the crown, the crown cannot screen them; the throne cannot hide them; the law, with an undaunted arm, seizes them, and drags them with irresistible might to the judgment of whom?--of your equals--of twelve of your neighbours. In such a constitution as this, what is there to complain of on the score of liberty?

The greatest freedom that can be enjoyed by man in a state of civil society, the greatest security that can be given him with respect to the protection of his character, property, personal liberty, limb, and life, is afforded to every individual by our present constitution.

The equality of men in a state of nature does not consist in an equality of bodily strength or intellectual ability, but in their being equally free from the dominion of each other. The equality of men in a state of civil society does not consist in an equality of wisdom, honesty, ingenuity, industry, nor in an equality of property resulting from a due exertion of these talents; but in being equally subject to, equally protected by the same laws. And who knows not that every individual in this great nation is, in this respect, equal to every other? There is not one law for the nobles, another for the commons of the land--one for the clergy, another for the laity--one for the rich, another for the poor. The nobility, it is true, have some privileges annexed to their birth; the judges, and other magistrates, have some annexed to their office; and professional men have some annexed to their professions:--but these privileges are neither injurious to the liberty or property of other men. And you might as reasonably contend, that the bramble ought to be equal to the oak, the lamb to the lion, as that no distinctions should take place between the members of the same society. The burdens of the State are distributed through the whole community, with as much impartiality as the complex nature of taxation will admit; every man sustains a part in proportion to his strength; no order is exempted from the payment of taxes. Nor is any order of men exclusively entitled to the enjoyment of the lucrative offices of the State. All cannot enjoy them, but all enjoy a capacity of acquiring them. The son of the meanest man in the nation may become a general or an admiral, a lord chancellor or an archbishop. If any persons have been so simple as to suppose that even the French ever intended, by the term equality, an equality of property, they have been quite mistaken in their ideas. The French never understood by it anything materially different from what we and our ancestors have been in full possession of for many ages.

Other nations may deluge their land with blood in struggling for liberty and equality; but let it never be forgotten by ourselves, and let us impress the observation upon the hearts of our children, that we are in possession of both, of as much of both as can be consistent with the end for which civil society was introduced amongst mankind.

The provision which is made for the poor in this kingdom is so liberal, as, in the opinion of some, to discourage industry. The rental of the lands in England and Wales does not, I conjecture, amount to more than eighteen millions a year; and the poor rates amount to two millions. The poor then, at present, possess a ninth part of the landed rental of the country; and, reckoning ten pounds for the annual maintenance of each pauper, it may be inferred, that those who are maintained by the community do not constitute a fortieth part of the people. An equal division of land would be to the poor a great misfortune; they would possess far less than by the laws of the land they are at present entitled to. When we add to this consideration an account of the immense sums annually subscribed by the rich for the support of hospitals, infirmaries, dispensaries--for the relief of sufferers by fire, tempests, famine, loss of cattle, great sickness, and other misfortunes, all of which charities must cease were all men on a level, for all men would then be equally poor,--it cannot but excite one's astonishment that so foolish a system should have ever been so much as mentioned by any man of common sense. It is a system not practicable; and was it practicable, it would not be useful; and was it useful, it would not be just.

But some one may think, and, indeed, it has been studiously inculcated into the minds of the multitude, that a monarchy, even a limited one, is a far more expensive mode of civil government than a republic; that a civil-list of a million a year is an enormous sum, which might be saved to the nation. Supposing that every shilling of this sum could be saved, and that every shilling of it was expended in supporting the dignity of the crown--both which suppositions are entirely false--still should I think the liberty, the prosperity, the tranquillity, the happiness of this great nation cheaply purchased by such a sum; still should I think that he would be a madman in politics who would, by a change of the constitution, risk these blessings (and France supplies us with a proof that infinite risk would be run) for a paltry saving of expense. I am not, nor have ever been, the patron of corruption. So far as the civil-list has a tendency to corrupt the judgment of any member of either house of parliament, it has a bad tendency, which I wish it had not; but I cannot wish to see the splendour of the crown reduced to nothing, lest its proper weight in the scale of the constitution should be thereby destroyed. A great portion of this million is expended in paying the salaries of the judges, the interpreters of our law, the guardians of our lives and properties; another portion is expended in maintaining ambassadors at different courts, to protect the general concerns of the nation from foreign aggression; another portion is expended in pensions and donations to men of letters and ingenuity; to men who have, by naval, military, or civil services, just claims to the attention of their country; to persons of respectable families and connections, who have been humbled and broken down by misfortunes. I do not speak with accuracy, nor on such a subject is accuracy requisite; but I am not far wide of truth in saying, that a fifth part of the million is more than sufficient to defray the expenses of the royal household. What a mighty matter is it to complain of, that each individual contributes less than sixpence a year towards the support of the monarchy!

That the constitution of this country is so perfect as neither to require or admit of any improvement, is a proposition to which I never did or ever can assent; but I think it far too excellent to be amended by peasants and mechanics. I do not mean to speak of peasants and mechanics with any degree of disrespect; I am not so ignorant of the importance, either of the natural or social chain by which all the individuals of the human race are connected together, as to think disrespectfully of any link of it. Peasants and mechanics are as useful to the State as any other order of men; but their utility consists in their discharging well the duties of their respective stations; it ceases when they affect to become legislators; when they intrude themselves into concerns for which their education has not fitted them. The liberty of the press is a main support of the liberty of the nation; it is a blessing which it is our duty to transmit to posterity; but a bad use is sometimes made of it: and its use is never more pernicious than when it is employed to infuse into the minds of the lowest orders of the community disparaging ideas concerning the constitution of their country. No danger need be apprehended from a candid examination of our own constitution, or from a display of the advantages of any other; it will bear to be contrasted with the best: but all men are not qualified to make the comparison; and there are so many men, in every community, who wish to have no government at all, that an appeal to them on such a point ought never to be made.

There are, probably, in every government upon earth, circumstances which a man, accustomed to the abstract investigation of truth, may easily prove to be deviations from the rigid rule of strict political justice; but whilst these deviations are either generally not known, or, though known, generally acquiesced in as matters of little moment to the general felicity, I cannot think it to be the part, either of a good man or of a good citizen, to be zealous in recommending such matters to the discussion of ignorant and uneducated men.

I am far from insinuating, that the science of politics is involved in mystery; or that men of plain understandings should be debarred from examining the principles of the government to which they yield obedience. All that I contend for is this--that the foundations of our government ought not to be overturned, nor the edifice erected thereon tumbled into ruins, because an acute politician may pretend that he has discovered a flaw in the building, or that he could have laid the foundation after a better model.

What would you say to a stranger who should desire you to pull down your house, because, forsooth, he had built one in France or America, after what he thought a better plan? You would say to him: No, sir--my ancestors have lived in this mansion comfortably and honourably for many generations; all its walls are strong, and all its timbers sound: if I should observe a decay in any of its parts, I know how to make the reparation without the assistance of strangers; and I know too that the reparation, when made by myself, may be made without injury either to the strength or beauty of the building. It has been buffeted, in the course of ages, by a thousand storms; yet still it stands unshaken as a rock, the wonder of all my neighbours, each of whom sighs for one of a similar construction. Your house may be suited to your climate and temper, this is suited to mine. Permit me, however, to observe to you, that you have not yet lived long enough in your new house to be sensible of all the inconveniences to which it may be liable, nor have you yet had any experience of its strength; it has yet sustained no shocks; the first whirlwind may scatter its component members in the air; the first earthquake may shake its foundation; the first inundation may sweep the superstructure from the surface of the earth. I hope no accident will happen to your house, but I am satisfied with mine own.

Great calamities of every kind attend the breaking up of established governments:--yet there are some forms of government, especially when they happen to be badly administered, so exceedingly destructive of the happiness of mankind, that a change of them is not improvidently purchased at the expense of the mischief accompanying their subversion. Our government is not of that kind; look round the globe, and see if you can discover a single nation on all its surface so powerful, so rich, so beneficent, so free and happy as our own. May Heaven avert from the minds of my countrymen the slightest wish to abolish their constitution!

'Kingdoms,' observes Mr. Locke, 'have been overturned by the pride, ambition, and turbulency of private men; by the people's wantonness and desire to cast off the lawful authority of their rulers, as well as by the rulers' insolence, and endeavours to get and exercise an arbitrary power over the people.' The recent danger to our constitution was in my opinion small; for I considered its excellence to be so obvious to men even of the most unimproved understandings, that I looked upon it as an idle and fruitless effort, either in foreign or domestic incendiaries, to endeavour to persuade the bulk of the people to consent to an alteration of it in favour of a republic. I knew, indeed, that in every country the flagitious dregs of a nation were always ripe for revolutions; but I was sensible, at the same time, that it was the interest, not only of the opulent and powerful, not only of the mercantile and middle classes of life, but even of honest labourers and manufacturers, of every sober and industrious man, to resist the licentious principles of such pestilent members, shall I call them, or outcasts of society. Men better informed and wiser than myself thought that the constitution was in great danger. Whether in fact the danger was great or small, it is not necessary now to inquire; it may be more useful to declare that, in my humble opinion, the danger, of whatever magnitude it may have been, did not originate in any encroachments of either the legislative or executive power on the liberties or properties of the people; but in the wild fancies and turbulent tempers of discontented or ill-informed individuals. I sincerely rejoice that, through the vigilance of administration, this turbulency has received a check. The hopes of bad men have been disappointed, and the understandings of mistaken men have been enlightened, by the general and unequivocal judgment of a whole nation; a nation not more renowned for its bravery and its humanity, though justly celebrated for both, than for its loyalty to its princes, and, what is perfectly consistent with loyalty, for its love of liberty and attachment to the constitution. Wise men have formed it, brave men have bled for it; it is our part to preserve it.

R. LANDAFF.

"London, Jan. 25, 1793".

II. THE CONVENTION OF CINTRA,

1809.

NOTE.

On the 'Convention of Cintra' see Preface in the present volume. G.

CONCERNING THE RELATIONS OF GREAT BRITAIN, SPAIN, AND PORTUGAL, TO EACH OTHER, AND TO THE COMMON ENEMY, AT THIS CRISIS; AND SPECIFICALLY AS AFFECTED BY THE CONVENTION OF CINTRA:

"The whole brought to the test of those Principles, by which alone the Independence and Freedom of Nations can be Preserved or Recovered".

* * * * *

Qui didicit patriae quid debeat;-------- Quod sit conscripti, quod judicis officium; quae Partes in bellum missi ducis.

* * * * *

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

* * * * *

London:

PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, HURST, REES, AND ORME, PATERNOSTER-ROW.

* * * * *

1809.

Bitter and earnest writing must not hastily be condemned; for men cannot contend coldly, and without affection, about things which they hold dear and precious. A politic man may write from his brain, without touch and sense of his heart; as in a speculation that appertaineth not unto him;--but a feeling Christian will express, in his words, a character of zeal or love. "Lord Bacon".

ADVERTISEMENT.

The following pages originated in the opposition which was made by his Majesty's ministers to the expression, in public meetings and otherwise, of the opinions and feelings of the people concerning the Convention of Cintra. For the sake of immediate and general circulation, I determined (when I had made a considerable progress in the manuscript) to print it in different portions in one of the daily newspapers. Accordingly two portions of it (extending to page 25) were printed, in the months of December and January, in the "Courier",--as being one of the most impartial and extensively circulated journals of the time. The reader is requested to bear in mind this previous publication: otherwise he will be at a loss to account for the arrangement of the matter in one instance in the earlier part of the work. An accidental loss of several sheets of the manuscript delayed the continuance of the publication in that manner, till the close of the Christmas holidays; and--the pressure of public business rendering it then improbable that room could be found, in the columns of the paper, regularly to insert matter extending to such a length--this plan of publication was given up.

It may be proper to state that, in the extracts which have been made from the Spanish Proclamations, I have been obliged to content myself with the translations which appeared in the public journals; having only in one instance had access to the original. This is, in some cases, to be regretted--where the language falls below the dignity of the matter: but in general it is not so; and the feeling has suggested correspondent expressions to the translators; hastily as, no doubt, they must have performed their work.

I must entreat the reader to bear in mind that I began to write upon this subject in November last; and have continued without bringing my work earlier to a conclusion, partly from accident, and partly from a wish to possess additional documents and facts. Passing occurrences have made changes in the situation of certain objects spoken of; but I have not thought it necessary to accommodate what I had previously written to these changes: the whole stands without alteration; except where additions have been made, or errors corrected.

As I have spoken without reserve of things (and of persons as far as it was necessary to illustrate things, but no further); and as this has been uniformly done according to the light of my conscience; I have deemed it right to prefix my name to these pages, in order that this last testimony of a sincere mind might not be wanting.

"May 20th", 1809.

CONCERNING THE CONVENTION OF CINTRA.

* * * * *

The Convention, recently concluded by the Generals at the head of the British army in Portugal, is one of the most important events of our time. It would be deemed so in France, if the Ruler of that country could dare to make it public with those merely of its known bearings and dependences with which the English people are acquainted; it has been deemed so in Spain and Portugal as far as the people of those countries have been permitted to gain, or have gained, a knowledge of it; and what this nation has felt and still feels upon the subject is sufficiently manifest. Wherever the tidings were communicated, they carried agitation along with them--a conflict of sensations in which, though sorrow was predominant, yet, through force of scorn, impatience, hope, and indignation, and through the universal participation in passions so complex, and the sense of power which this necessarily included--the whole partook of the energy and activity of congratulation and joy. Not a street, not a public room, not a fire-side in the island which was not disturbed as by a local or private trouble; men of all estates, conditions, and tempers were affected apparently in equal degrees. Yet was the event by none received as an open and measurable affliction: it had indeed features bold and intelligible to every one; but there was an under-expression which was strange, dark, and mysterious--and, accordingly as different notions prevailed, or the object was looked at in different points of view, we were astonished like men who are overwhelmed without forewarning--fearful like men who feel themselves to be helpless, and indignant and angry like men who are betrayed. In a word, it would not be too much to say that the tidings of this event did not spread with the commotion of a storm which sweeps visibly over our heads, but like an earthquake which rocks the ground under our feet.

How was it possible that it could be otherwise? For that army had been sent upon a service which appealed so strongly to all that was human in the heart of this nation--that there was scarcely a gallant father of a family who had not his moments of regret that he was not a soldier by profession, which might have made it his duty to accompany it; every high-minded youth grieved that his first impulses, which would have sent him upon the same errand, were not to be yielded to, and that after-thought did not sanction and confirm the instantaneous dictates or the reiterated persuasions of an heroic spirit. The army took its departure with prayers and blessings which were as widely spread as they were fervent and intense. For it was not doubted that, on this occasion, every person of which it was composed, from the General to the private soldier, would carry both into his conflicts with the enemy in the field, and into his relations of peaceful intercourse with the inhabitants, not only the virtues which might be expected from him as a soldier, but the antipathies and sympathies, the loves and hatreds of a citizen--of a human being--acting, in a manner hitherto unprecedented under the obligation of his human and social nature. If the conduct of the rapacious and merciless adversary rendered it neither easy nor wise--made it, I might say, impossible to give way to that unqualified admiration of courage and skill, made it impossible in relation to him to be exalted by those triumphs of the courteous affections, and to be purified by those refinements of civility which do, more than any thing, reconcile a man of thoughtful mind and humane dispositions to the horrors of ordinary war; it was felt that for such loss the benign and accomplished soldier would upon this mission be abundantly recompensed by the enthusiasm of fraternal love with which his Ally, the oppressed people whom he was going to aid in rescuing themselves, would receive him; and that this, and the virtues which he would witness in them, would furnish his heart with never-failing and far nobler objects of complacency and admiration. The discipline of the army was well known; and as a machine, or a vital organized body, the Nation was assured that it could not but be formidable; but thus to the standing excellence of mechanic or organic power seemed to be superadded, at this time, and for this service, the force of "inspiration": could any thing therefore be looked for, but a glorious result? The army proved its prowess in the field; and what has been the result is attested, and long will be attested, by the downcast looks--the silence--the passionate exclamations--the sighs and shame of every man who is worthy to breathe the air or to look upon the green-fields of Liberty in this blessed and highly-favoured Island which we inhabit.

If I were speaking of things however weighty, that were long past and dwindled in the memory, I should scarcely venture to use this language; but the feelings are of yesterday--they are of to-day; the flower, a melancholy flower it is! is still in blow, nor will, I trust, its leaves be shed through months that are to come: for I repeat that the heart of the nation is in this struggle. This just and necessary war, as we have been accustomed to hear it styled from the beginning of the contest in the year 1793, had, some time before the Treaty of Amiens, viz. after the subjugation of Switzerland, and not till then, begun to be regarded by the body of the people, as indeed both just and necessary; and this justice and necessity were by none more clearly perceived, or more feelingly bewailed, than by those who had most eagerly opposed the war in its commencement, and who continued most bitterly to regret that this nation had ever borne a part in it. Their conduct was herein consistent: they proved that they kept their eyes steadily fixed upon principles; for, though there was a shifting or transfer of hostility in their minds as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same enemy opposed to them under a different shape; and that enemy was the spirit of selfish tyranny and lawless ambition. This spirit, the class of persons of whom I have been speaking, (and I would now be understood, as associating them with an immense majority of the people of Great Britain, whose affections, notwithstanding all the delusions which had been practised upon them, were, in the former part of the contest, for a long time on the side of their nominal enemies,) this spirit, when it became undeniably embodied in the French government, they wished, in spite of all dangers, should be opposed by war; because peace was not to be procured without submission, which could not but be followed by a communion, of which the word of greeting would be, on the one part, insult,--and, on the other, degradation. The people now wished for war, as their rulers had done before, because open war between nations is a defined and effectual partition, and the sword, in the hands of the good and the virtuous, is the most intelligible symbol of abhorrence. It was in order to be preserved from spirit-breaking submissions--from the guilt of seeming to approve that which they had not the power to prevent, and out of a consciousness of the danger that such guilt would otherwise actually steal upon them, and that thus, by evil communications and participations, would be weakened and finally destroyed, those moral sensibilities and energies, by virtue of which alone, their liberties, and even their lives, could be preserved,--that the people of Great Britain determined to encounter all perils which could follow in the train of open resistance.--There were some, and those deservedly of high character in the country, who exerted their utmost influence to counteract this resolution; nor did they give to it so gentle a name as want of prudence, but they boldly termed it blindness and obstinacy. Let them be judged with charity! But there are promptings of wisdom from the penetralia of human nature, which a people can hear, though the wisest of their practical Statesmen be deaf towards them. This authentic voice, the people of England had heard and obeyed: and, in opposition to French tyranny growing daily more insatiate and implacable, they ranged themselves zealously under their Government; though they neither forgot nor forgave its transgressions, in having first involved them in a war with a people then struggling for its own liberties under a twofold infliction--confounded by inbred faction, and beleagured by a cruel and imperious external foe. But these remembrances did not vent themselves in reproaches, nor hinder us from being reconciled to our Rulers, when a change or rather a revolution in circumstances had imposed new duties: and, in defiance of local and personal clamour, it may be safely said, that the nation united heart and hand with the Government in its resolve to meet the worst, rather than stoop its head to receive that which, it was felt, would not be the garland but the yoke of peace. Yet it was an afflicting alternative; and it is not to be denied, that the effort, if it had the determination, wanted the cheerfulness of duty. Our condition savoured too much of a grinding constraint--too much of the vassalage of necessity;--it had too much of fear, and therefore of selfishness, not to be contemplated in the main with rueful emotion. We desponded though we did not despair. In fact a deliberate and preparatory fortitude--a sedate and stern melancholy, which had no sunshine and was exhilarated only by the lightnings of indignation--this was the highest and best state of moral feeling to which the most noble-minded among us could attain.

But, from the moment of the rising of the people of the Pyrenëan peninsula, there was a mighty change; we were instantaneously animated; and, from that moment, the contest assumed the dignity, which it is not in the power of any thing but hope to bestow: and, if I may dare to transfer language, prompted by a revelation of the state of being that admits not of decay or change, to the concerns and interests of our transitory planet, from that moment 'this corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.' This sudden elevation was on no account more welcome--was by nothing more endeared, than by the returning sense which accompanied it of inward liberty and choice, which gratified our moral yearnings, inasmuch as it would give henceforward to our actions as a people, an origination and direction unquestionably moral--as it was free--as it was manifestly in sympathy with the species--as it admitted therefore of fluctuations of generous feeling--of approbation and of complacency. We were intellectualized also in proportion; we looked backward upon the records of the human race with pride, and, instead of being afraid, we delighted to look forward into futurity. It was imagined that this new-born spirit of resistance, rising from the most sacred feelings of the human heart, would diffuse itself through many countries; and not merely for the distant future, but for the present, hopes were entertained as bold as they were disinterested and generous.

Never, indeed, was the fellowship of our sentient nature more intimately felt--never was the irresistible power of justice more gloriously displayed than when the British and Spanish Nations, with an impulse like that of two ancient heroes throwing down their weapons and reconciled in the field, cast off at once their aversions and enmities, and mutually embraced each other--to solemnize this conversion of love, not by the festivities of peace, but by combating side by side through danger and under affliction in the devotedness of perfect brotherhood. This was a conjunction which excited hope as fervent as it was rational. On the one side was a nation which brought with it sanction and authority, inasmuch as it had tried and approved the blessings for which the other had risen to contend: the one was a people which, by the help of the surrounding ocean and its own virtues, had preserved to itself through ages its liberty, pure and inviolated by a foreign invader; the other a high-minded nation, which a tyrant, presuming on its decrepitude, had, through the real decrepitude of its Government, perfidiously enslaved. What could be more delightful than to think of an intercourse beginning in this manner? On the part of the Spaniards their love towards us was enthusiasm and adoration; the faults of our national character were hidden from them by a veil of splendour; they saw nothing around us but glory and light; and, on our side, we estimated "their" character with partial and indulgent fondness;--thinking on their past greatness, not as the undermined foundation of a magnificent building, but as the root of a majestic tree recovered from a long disease, and beginning again to flourish with promise of wider branches and a deeper shade than it had boasted in the fulness of its strength. If in the sensations with which the Spaniards prostrated themselves before the religion of their country we did not keep pace with them--if even their loyalty was such as, from our mixed constitution of government and from other causes, we could not thoroughly sympathize with,--and if, lastly, their devotion to the person of their Sovereign appeared to us to have too much of the alloy of delusion,--in all these things we judged them gently: and, taught by the reverses of the French revolution, we looked upon these dispositions as more human--more social--and therefore as wiser, and of better omen, than if they had stood forth the zealots of abstract principles, drawn out of the laboratory of unfeeling philosophists. Finally, in this reverence for the past and present, we found an earnest that they were prepared to contend to the death for as much liberty as their habits and their knowledge enabled them to receive. To assist them and their neighbours the Portugueze in the attainment of this end, we sent to them in love and in friendship a powerful army to aid--to invigorate--and to chastise:--they landed; and the first proof they afforded of their being worthy to be sent on such a service--the first pledge of amity given by them was the victory of Vimiera; the second pledge (and this was from the hand of their Generals,) was the Convention of Cintra.

The reader will by this time have perceived, what thoughts were uppermost in my mind, when I began with asserting, that this Convention is among the most important events of our times:--an assertion, which was made deliberately, and after due allowance for that infirmity which inclines us to magnify things present and passing, at the expence of those which are past. It is my aim to prove, wherein the real importance of this event lies: and, as a necessary preparative for forming a right judgment upon it, I have already given a representation of the sentiments, with which the people of Great Britain and those of Spain looked upon each other. I have indeed spoken rather of the Spaniards than of the Portugueze; but what has been said, will be understood as applying in the main to the whole Peninsula. The wrongs of the two nations have been equal, and their cause is the same: they must stand or fall together. What their wrongs have been, in what degree they considered themselves united, and what their hopes and resolutions were, we have learned from public Papers issued by themselves and by their enemies. These were read by the people of this Country, at the time when they were severally published, with due impression.--- Pity, that those impressions could not have been as faithfully retained as they were at first received deeply! Doubtless, there is not a man in these Islands, who is not convinced that the cause of Spain is the most righteous cause in which, since the opposition of the Greek Republics to the Persian Invader at Thermopylae and Marathon, sword ever was drawn! But this is not enough. We are actors in the struggle; and, in order that we may have steady PRINCIPLES to controul and direct us, (without which we may do much harm, and can do no good,) we ought to make it a duty to revive in the memory those words and facts, which first carried the conviction to our hearts: that, as far as it is possible, we may see as we then saw, and feel as we then felt. Let me therefore entreat the Reader seriously to peruse once more such parts of those Declarations as I shall extract from them. I feel indeed with sorrow, that events are hurrying us forward, as down the Rapid of an American river, and that there is too much danger "before", to permit the mind easily to turn back upon the course which is past. It is indeed difficult.--But I need not say, that to yield to the difficulty, would be degrading to rational beings. Besides, if from the retrospect, we can either gain strength by which we can overcome, or learn prudence by which we may avoid, such submission is not only degrading, but pernicious. I address these words to those who have feeling, but whose judgment is overpowered by their feelings:--such as have not, and who are mere slaves of curiosity, calling perpetually for something new, and being able to create nothing new for themselves out of old materials, may be left to wander about under the yoke of their own unprofitable appetite.--Yet not so! Even these I would include in my request: and conjure them, as they are men, not to be impatient, while I place before their eyes, a composition made out of fragments of those Declarations from various parts of the Peninsula, which, disposed as it were in a tesselated pavement, shall set forth a story which may be easily understood; which will move and teach, and be consolatory to him who looks upon it. I say, consolatory: and let not the Reader shrink from the word. I am well aware of the burthen which is to be supported, of the discountenance from recent calamity under which every thing, which speaks of hope for the Spanish people, and through "them" for mankind, will be received. But this, far from deterring, ought to be an encouragement; it makes the duty more imperious. Nevertheless, whatever confidence any individual of meditative mind may have in these representations of the principles and feelings of the people of Spain, both as to their sanctity and truth, and as to their competence in ordinary circumstances to make these acknowledged, it would be unjust to recall them to the public mind, stricken as it is by present disaster, without attempting to mitigate the bewildering terror which accompanies these events, and which is caused as much by their nearness to the eye, as by any thing in their own nature. I shall, however, at present confine myself to suggest a few considerations, some of which will be developed hereafter, when I resume the subject.

It appears then, that the Spanish armies have sustained great defeats, and have been compelled to abandon their positions, and that these reverses have been effected by an army greatly superior to the Spanish forces in number, and far excelling them in the art and practice of war. This is the sum of those tidings, which it was natural we should receive with sorrow, but which too many have received with dismay and despair, though surely no events could be more in the course of rational expectation. And what is the amount of the evil?--It is manifest that, though a great army may easily defeat or disperse another "army", less or greater, yet it is not in a like degree formidable to a determined "people", nor efficient in a like degree to subdue them, or to keep them in subjugation--much less if this people, like those of Spain in the present instance, be numerous, and, like them, inhabit a territory extensive and strong by nature. For a great army, and even several great armies, cannot accomplish this by marching about the country, unbroken, but each must split itself into many portions, and the several detachments become weak accordingly, not merely as they are small in size, but because the soldiery, acting thus, necessarily relinquish much of that part of their superiority, which lies in what may be called the enginery of war; and far more, because they lose, in proportion as they are broken, the power of profiting by the military skill of the Commanders, or by their own military habits. The experienced soldier is thus brought down nearer to the plain ground of the inexperienced, man to the level of man: and it is then, that the truly brave man rises, the man of good hopes and purposes; and superiority in moral brings with it superiority in physical power. Hence, if the Spanish armies have been defeated, or even dispersed, it not only argues a want of magnanimity, but of sense, to conclude that the cause "therefore" is lost. Supposing that the spirit of the people is not crushed, the war is now brought back to that plan of conducting it, which was recommended by the Junta of Seville in that inestimable paper entitled 'PRECAUTIONS,' which plan ought never to have been departed from, except by compulsion, or with a moral certainty of success; and which the Spaniards will now be constrained to re-adopt, with the advantage, that the lesson, which has been received, will preclude the possibility of their ever committing the same error. In this paper it is said, 'let the first object be to avoid all general actions, and to convince ourselves of the very great hazards without any advantage or the hope of it, to which they would expose us.' The paper then gives directions, how the war ought to be conducted as a war of partizans, and shews the peculiar fitness of the country for it. Yet, though relying solely on this unambitious mode of warfare, the framers of the paper, which is in every part of it distinguished by wisdom, speak with confident thoughts of success. To this mode of warfare, then, after experience of calamity from not having trusted in it; to this, and to the people in whom the contest originated, and who are its proper depository, that contest is now referred.

Secondly, if the spirits of the Spaniards be not broken by defeat, which is impossible, if the sentiments that have been publicly expressed be fairly characteristic of the nation, and do not belong only to particular spots or to a few individuals of superior mind,--a doubt, which the internal evidence of these publications, sanctioned by the resistance already made, and corroborated by the universal consent with which certain qualities have been attributed to the Spaniards in all ages, encourages us to repel;--then are there mighty resources in the country which have not yet been called forth. For all has hitherto been done by the spontaneous efforts of the people, acting under little or no compulsion of the Government, but with its advice and exhortation. It is an error to suppose, that, in proportion as a people are strong, and act largely for themselves, the Government must therefore be weak. This is not a necessary consequence even in the heat of Revolution, but only when the people are lawless from want of a steady and noble object among themselves for their love, or in the presence of a foreign enemy for their hatred. In the early part of the French Revolution, indeed as long as it was evident that the end was the common safety, the National Assembly had the power to turn the people into any course, to constrain them to any task, while their voluntary efforts, as far as these could be exercised, were not abated in consequence. That which the National Assembly did for France, the Spanish Sovereign's authority acting through those whom the people themselves have deputed to represent him, would, in their present enthusiasm of loyalty, and condition of their general feelings, render practicable and easy for Spain. The Spaniards, it is true, with a thoughtfulness most hopeful for the cause which they have undertaken, have been loth to depart from established laws, forms, and practices. This dignified feeling of self-restraint they would do well to cherish so far as never to depart from it without some reluctance;--but, when old and familiar means are not equal to the exigency, new ones must, without timidity, be resorted to, though by many they may be found harsh and ungracious. Nothing but good would result from such conduct. The well-disposed would rely more confidently upon a Government which thus proved that it had confidence in itself. Men, less zealous, and of less comprehensive minds, would soon be reconciled to measures from which at first they had revolted; the remiss and selfish might be made servants of their country, through the influence of the same passions which had prepared them to become slaves of the Invader; or, should this not be possible, they would appear in their true character, and the main danger to be feared from them would be prevented. The course which ought to be pursued is plain. Either the cause has lost the people's love, or it has not. If it has, let the struggle be abandoned. If it has not, let the Government, in whatever shape it may exist, and however great may be the calamities under which it may labour, act up to the full stretch of its rights, nor doubt that the people will support it to the full extent of their power. If, therefore, the Chiefs of the Spanish Nation be men of wise and strong minds, they will bring both the forces, those of the Government and of the people, into their utmost action; tempering them in such a manner that neither shall impair or obstruct the other, but rather that they shall strengthen and direct each other for all salutary purposes.

Thirdly, it was never dreamt by any thinking man, that the Spaniards were to succeed by their army; if by their "army" be meant any thing but the people. The whole people is their army, and their true army is the people, and nothing else. Five hundred men, who in the early part of the struggle had been taken prisoners,--I think it was at the battle of Rio Seco--were returned by the French General under the title of Galician Peasants, a title, which the Spanish General, Blake, rejected and maintained in his answer that they were genuine soldiers, meaning regular troops. The conduct of the Frenchman was politic, and that of the Spaniard would have been more in the spirit of his cause and of his own noble character, if, waiving on this occasion the plea of any subordinate and formal commission which these men might have, he had rested their claim to the title of soldiers on its true ground, and affirmed that this was no other than the rights of the cause which they maintained, by which rights every Spaniard was a soldier who could appear in arms, and was authorized to take that place, in which it was probable, to those under whom he acted, and on many occasions to himself, that he could most annoy the enemy. But these patriots of Galicia were not clothed alike, nor perhaps armed alike, nor had the outward appearance of those bodies, which are called regular troops; and the Frenchman availed himself of this pretext, to apply to them that insolent language, which might, I think, have been more nobly repelled on a more comprehensive principle. For thus are men of the gravest minds imposed upon by the presumptuous; and through these influences it comes, that the strength of a tyrant is in opinion--not merely in the opinion of those who support him, but alas! even of those who willingly resist, and who would resist effectually, if it were not that their own understandings betray them, being already half enslaved by shews and forms. The whole Spanish nation ought to be encouraged to deem themselves an army, embodied under the authority of their country and of human nature. A military spirit should be there, and a military action, not confined like an ordinary river in one channel, but spreading like the Nile over the whole face of the land. Is this possible? I believe it is: if there be minds among them worthy to lead, and if those leading minds cherish a "civic" spirit by all warrantable aids and appliances, and, above all other means, by combining a reverential memory of their elder ancestors with distinct hopes of solid advantage, from the privileges of freedom, for themselves and their posterity--to which the history and the past state of Spain furnish such enviable facilities; and if they provide for the sustenance of this spirit, by organizing it in its primary sources, not timidly jealous of a people, whose toils and sacrifices have approved them worthy of all love and confidence, and whose failing of excess, if such there exist, is assuredly on the side of loyalty to their Sovereign, and predilection for all established institutions. We affirm, then, that a universal military spirit may be produced; and not only this, but that a much more rare and more admirable phenomenon may be realized--the civic and military spirit united in one people, and in enduring harmony with each other. The people of Spain, with arms in their hands, are already in an elevated mood, to which they have been raised by the indignant passions, and the keen sense of insupportable wrong and insult from the enemy, and its infamous instruments. But they must be taught, not to trust too exclusively to the violent passions, which have already done much of their peculiar task and service. They must seek additional aid from affections, which less imperiously exclude all individual interests, while at the same time they consecrate them to the public good.--But the enemy is in the heart of their Land! We have not forgotten this. We would encourage their military zeal, and all qualities especially military, by all rewards of honourable ambition, and by rank and dignity conferred on the truly worthy, whatever may be their birth or condition, the elevating influence of which would extend from the individual possessor to the class from which he may have sprung. For the necessity of thus raising and upholding the military spirit, we plead: but yet the "professional" excellencies of the soldier must be contemplated according to their due place and relation. Nothing is done, or worse than nothing, unless something higher be taught, "as" higher, something more fundamental, "as" more fundamental. In the moral virtues and qualities of passion which belong to a people, must the ultimate salvation of a people be sought for. Moral qualities of a high order, and vehement passions, and virtuous as vehement, the Spaniards have already displayed; nor is it to be anticipated, that the conduct of their enemies will suffer the heat and glow to remit and languish. These may be trusted to themselves, and to the provocations of the merciless Invader. They must now be taught, that their strength "chiefly" lies in moral qualities, more silent in their operation, more permanent in their nature; in the virtues of perseverance, constancy, fortitude, and watchfulness, in a long memory and a quick feeling, to rise upon a favourable summons, a texture of life which, though cut through (as hath been feigned of the bodies of the Angels) unites again--these are the virtues and qualities on which the Spanish People must be taught "mainly" to depend. These it is not in the power of their Chiefs to create; but they may preserve and procure to them opportunities of unfolding themselves, by guarding the Nation against an intemperate reliance on other qualities and other modes of exertion, to which it could never have resorted in the degree in which it appears to have resorted to them without having been in contradiction to itself, paying at the same time an indirect homage to its enemy. Yet, in hazarding this conditional censure, we are still inclined to believe, that, in spite of our deductions on the score of exaggeration, we have still given too easy credit to the accounts furnished by the enemy, of the rashness with which the Spaniards engaged in pitched battles, and of their dismay after defeat. For the Spaniards have repeatedly proclaimed, and they have inwardly felt, that their strength was from their cause--of course, that it was moral. Why then should they abandon this, and endeavour to prevail by means in which their opponents are confessedly so much superior? Moral strength is their's; but physical power for the purposes of immediate or rapid destruction is on the side of their enemies. This is to them no disgrace, but, as soon as they understand themselves, they will see that they are disgraced by mistrusting their appropriate stay, and throwing themselves upon a power which for them must be weak. Nor will it then appear to them a sufficient excuse, that they were seduced into this by the splendid qualities of courage and enthusiasm, which, being the frequent companions, and, in given circumstances, the necessary agents of virtue, are too often themselves hailed as virtues by their own title. But courage and enthusiasm have equally characterized the best and the worst beings, a Satan, equally with an ABDIEL--a BONAPARTE equally with a LEONIDAS. They are indeed indispensible to the Spanish soldiery, in order that, man to man, they may not be inferior to their enemies in the field of battle. But inferior they are and long must be in warlike skill and coolness; inferior in assembled numbers, and in blind mobility to the preconceived purposes of their leader. If therefore the Spaniards are not superior in some superior quality, their fall may be predicted with the certainty of a mathematical calculation. Nay, it is right to acknowledge, however depressing to false hope the thought may be, that from a people prone and disposed to war, as the French are, through the very absence of those excellencies which give a contra-distinguishing dignity to the Spanish character; that, from an army of men presumptuous by nature, to whose presumption the experience of constant success has given the confidence and stubborn strength of reason, and who balance against the devotion of patriotism the superstition so naturally attached by the sensual and disordinate to the strange fortunes and continual felicity of their Emperor; that, from the armies of such a people a more manageable enthusiasm, a courage less under the influence of accidents, may be expected in the confusion of immediate conflict, than from forces like the Spaniards, united indeed by devotion to a common cause, but not equally united by an equal confidence in each other, resulting from long fellowship and brotherhood in all conceivable incidents of war and battle. Therefore, I do not hesitate to affirm, that even the occasional flight of the Spanish levies, from sudden panic under untried circumstances, would not be so injurious to the Spanish cause; no, nor so dishonourable to the Spanish character, nor so ominous of ultimate failure, as a paramount reliance on superior valour, instead of a principled reposal on superior constancy and immutable resolve. Rather let them have fled once and again, than direct their prime admiration to the blaze and explosion of animal courage, in slight of the vital and sustaining warmth of fortitude; in slight of that moral contempt of death and privation, which does not need the stir and shout of battle to call it forth or support it, which can smile in patience over the stiff and cold wound, as well as rush forward regardless, because half senseless of the fresh and bleeding one. Why did we give our hearts to the present cause of Spain with a fervour and elevation unknown to us in the commencement of the late Austrian or Prussian resistance to France? Because we attributed to the former an heroic temperament which would render their transfer to such domination an evil to human nature itself, and an affrightening perplexity in the dispensations of Providence. But if in oblivion of the prophetic wisdom of their own first leaders in the cause, they are surprised beyond the power of rallying, utterly cast down and manacled by fearful thoughts from the first thunder-storm of defeat in the field, wherein do they differ from the Prussians and Austrians? Wherein are they a People, and not a mere army or set of armies? If this be indeed so, what have we to mourn over but our own honourable impetuosity, in hoping where no just ground of hope existed? A nation, without the virtues necessary for the attainment of independence, have failed to attain it. This is all. For little has that man understood the majesty of true national freedom, who believes that a population, like that of Spain, in a country like that of Spain, may want the qualities needful to fight out their independence, and yet possess the excellencies which render men susceptible of true liberty. The Dutch, the Americans, did possess the former; but it is, I fear, more than doubtful whether the one ever did, or the other ever will, evince the nobler morality indispensible to the latter.

It was not my intention that the subject should at present have been pursued so far. But I have been carried forward by a strong wish to be of use in raising and steadying the minds of my countrymen, an end to which every thing that I shall say hereafter (provided it be true) will contribute. For all knowledge of human nature leads ultimately to repose; and I shall write to little purpose if I do not assist some portion of my readers to form an estimate of the grounds of hope and fear in the present effort of liberty against oppression, in the present or any future struggle which justice will have to maintain against might. In fact, this is my main object, 'the sea-mark of my utmost sail:' in order that, understanding the sources of strength and seats of weakness, both in the tyrant and in those who would save or rescue themselves from his grasp, we may act as becomes men who would guard their own liberties, and would draw a good use from the desire which they feel, and the efforts which they are making, to benefit the less favoured part of the family of mankind. With these as my ultimate objects, I have undertaken to examine the Convention of Cintra; and, as an indispensible preparative for forming a right judgment of this event, I have already faithfully exhibited the feelings of the people of Great Britain and of Spain towards each other, and have shewn by what sacred bonds they were united. With the same view, I shall next proceed to shew by what barrier of aversion, scarcely less sacred, the people of the "Peninsula" were divided from their enemies,--their feelings towards them, and their hopes for themselves; trusting, that I have already mitigated the deadening influences of recent calamity, and that the representation I shall frame, in the manner which has been promised, will speak in its true colours and life to the eye and heart of the spectator.

The government of Asturias, which was the first to rise against their oppressors, thus expresses itself in the opening of its Address to the People of that Province. 'Loyal Asturians! beloved Countrymen! your wishes are already fulfilled. The Principality, discharging those duties which are most sacred to men, has already declared war against France. You may perhaps dread this vigorous resolution. But what other measure could or ought we to adopt? Shall there be found one single man among us, who prefers the vile and ignominious death of slaves, to the glory of dying on the field of honour, with arms in his hand, defending our unfortunate monarch; our homes, our children, and our wives? If, in the very moment when those bands of banditti were receiving the kindest offices and favours from the inhabitants of our Capital, they murdered in cold blood upwards of two thousand people, for no other reason than their having defended their insulted brethren, what could we expect from them, had we submitted to their dominion? Their perfidious conduct towards our king and his whole family, whom they deceived and decoyed into France under the promise of an eternal armistice, in order to chain them all, has no precedent in history. Their conduct towards the whole nation is more iniquitous, than we had the right to expect from a horde of Hottentots. They have profaned our temples; they have insulted our religion; they have assailed our wives; in fine, they have broken all their promises, and there exists no right which they have not violated. To arms, Asturians! to arms!' The Supreme Junta of Government, sitting at Seville, introduces its declaration of war in words to the same effect. 'France, under the government of the emperor Napoleon the First, has violated towards Spain the most sacred compacts--has arrested her monarchs--obliged them to a forced and manifestly void abdication and renunciation; has behaved with the same violence towards the Spanish Nobles whom he keeps in his power--has declared that he will elect a king of Spain, the most horrible attempt that is recorded in history--has sent his troops into Spain, seized her fortresses and her Capital, and scattered his troops throughout the country--has committed against Spain all sorts of assassinations, robberies, and unheard-of cruelties; and this he has done with the most enormous ingratitude to the services which the Spanish nation has rendered France, to the friendship it has shewn her, thus treating it with the most dreadful perfidy, fraud, and treachery, such as was never committed against any nation or monarch by the most barbarous or ambitious king or people. He has in fine declared, that he will trample down our monarchy, our fundamental laws, and bring about the ruin of our holy catholic religion.--The only remedy therefore to such grievous ills, which are so manifest to all Europe, is in war, which we declare against him.' The injuries, done to the Portugueze Nation and Government, previous to its declaration of war against the Emperor of the French, are stated at length in the manifesto of the Court of Portugal, dated Rio Janeiro, May 1st, 1808; and to that the reader may he referred: but upon this subject I will beg leave to lay before him, the following extract from the Address of the supreme Junta of Seville to the Portugueze nation, dated May 30th, 1808. 'PORTUGUESE,--Your lot is, perhaps, the hardest ever endured by any people on the earth. Your princes were compelled to fly from you, and the events in Spain have furnished an irrefragable proof of the absolute necessity of that measure.--You were ordered not to defend yourselves, and you did not defend yourselves. Junot offered to make you happy, and your happiness has consisted in being treated with greater cruelty than the most ferocious conquerors inflict on the people whom they have subdued by force of arms and after the most obstinate resistance. You have been despoiled of your princes, your laws, your usages, your customs, your property, your liberty, even your lives, and your holy religion, which your enemies never have respected, however they may, according to their custom, have promised to protect it, and however they may affect and pretend to have any sense of it themselves. Your nobility has been annihilated,--its property confiscated in punishment of its fidelity and loyalty. You have been basely dragged to foreign countries, and compelled to prostrate yourselves at the feet of the man who is the author of all your calamities, and who, by the most horrible perfidy, has usurped your government, and rules you with a sceptre of iron. Even now your troops have left your borders, and are travelling in chains to die in the defence of him who has oppressed you; by which means his deep malignity may accomplish his purpose,--by destroying those who should constitute your strength, and by rendering their lives subservient to his triumphs, and to the savage glory to which he aspires.--Spain beheld your slavery, and the horrible evils which followed it, with mingled sensations of grief and despair. You are her brother, and she panted to fly to your assistance. But certain Chiefs, and a Government either weak or corrupt, kept her in chains, and were preparing the means by which the ruin of our king, our laws, our independence, our liberty, our lives, and even the holy religion in which we are united, might accompany your's,--by which a barbarous people might consummate their own triumph, and accomplish the slavery of every nation in Europe:--our loyalty, our honour, our justice, could not submit to such flagrant atrocity! We have broken our chains,--let us then to action.' But the story of Portugueze sufferings shall be told by Junot himself; who, in his proclamation to the people of Portugal (dated Palace of Lisbon, June 26,) thus speaks to them: 'You have earnestly entreated of him a king, who, aided by the omnipotence of that great monarch, might raise up again your unfortunate Country, and replace her in the rank which belongs to her. Doubtless at this moment your new monarch is on the point of visiting you.--He expects to find faithful Subjects--shall he find only rebels? I expected to have delivered over to him a peaceable kingdom and flourishing cities--shall I be obliged to shew him only ruins and heaps of ashes and dead bodies?--Merit pardon by prompt submission, and a prompt obedience to my orders; if not, think of the punishment which awaits you.--Every city, town, or village, which shall take up arms against my forces, and whose inhabitants shall rise upon the French troops, shall be delivered up to pillage and totally destroyed, and the inhabitants shall be put to the sword--every individual taken in arms shall be instantly shot.' That these were not empty threats, we learn from the bulletins published by authority of the same Junot, which at once shew his cruelty, and that of the persons whom he employed, and the noble resistance of the Portugueze. 'We entered Beia,' says one of those dismal chronicles, 'in the midst of great carnage. The rebels left 1200 dead on the field of battle; all those taken with arms in their hands were put to the sword, and all the houses from which we had been fired upon were burned.' Again in another, 'The spirit of insanity, which had led astray the inhabitants of Beia and rendered necessary the terrible chastisement which they have received, has likewise been exercised in the north of Portugal.' Describing another engagement, it is said, 'the lines endeavoured to make a stand, but they were forced; the massacre was terrible--more than a thousand dead bodies remained on the field of battle, and General Loison, pursuing the remainder of these wretches, entered Guerda with fixed bayonets.' On approaching Alpedrinha, they found the "rebels" posted in a kind of redoubt--'it was forced, the town of Alpedrinha taken, and delivered to the flames:' the whole of this tragedy is thus summed up--'In the engagements fought in these different marches, we lost twenty men killed, and 30 or 40 wounded. The insurgents have left at least 13000 dead in the field, the melancholy consequence of a frenzy which nothing can justify, which forces us to multiply victims, whom we lament and regret, but whom a terrible necessity obliges us to sacrifice.' 'It is thus,' continues the writer, 'that deluded men, ungrateful children as well as culpable citizens, exchange all their claims to the benevolence and protection of Government for misfortune and wretchedness; ruin their families; carry into their habitations desolation, conflagrations, and death; change flourishing cities into heaps of ashes--into vast tombs; and bring on their whole country calamities which they deserve, and from which (feeble victims!) they cannot escape. In fine, it is thus that, covering themselves with opprobrium and ridicule at the same time that they complete their destruction, they have no other resource but the pity of those they have wished to assassinate--a pity which they never have implored in vain, when acknowledging their crime, they have solicited pardon from Frenchmen, who, incapable of departing from their noble character, are ever as generous as they are brave.'--By order of Monseigneur le duc d'Abrantés, Commander in chief.'--Compare this with the Address of Massaredo to the Biscayans, in which there is the like avowal that the Spaniards are to be treated as Rebels. He tells them, that he is commanded by his master, Joseph Bonaparte, to assure them--'that, in case they disapprove of the insurrection in the City of Bilboa, his majesty will consign to oblivion the mistake and error of the Insurgents, and that he will punish only the heads and beginners of the insurrection, with regard to whom "the law must take its course".'

To be the victim of such bloody-mindedness is a doleful lot for a Nation; and the anguish must have been rendered still more poignant by the scoffs and insults, and by that heinous contempt of the most awful truths, with which the Perpetrator of those cruelties has proclaimed them.--Merciless ferocity is an evil familiar to our thoughts; but these combinations of malevolence historians have not yet been called upon to record; and writers of fiction, if they have ever ventured to create passions resembling them, have confined, out of reverence for the acknowledged constitution of human nature, those passions to reprobate Spirits. Such tyranny is, in the strictest sense, intolerable; not because it aims at the extinction of life, but of every thing which gives life its value--of virtue, of reason, of repose in God, or in truth. With what heart may we suppose that a genuine Spaniard would read the following impious address from the Deputation, as they were falsely called, of his apostate countrymen at Bayonne, seduced or compelled to assemble under the eye of the Tyrant, and speaking as he dictated? 'Dear Spaniards, Beloved Countrymen!--Your habitations, your cities, your power, and your property, are as dear to us as ourselves; and we wish to keep all of you in our eye, that we may be able to establish your security.--We, as well as yourselves, are bound in allegiance to the old dynasty--to her, to whom an end has been put by that God-like Providence which rules all thrones and sceptres. We have seen the greatest states fall under the guidance of this rule, and our land alone has hitherto escaped the same fate. An unavoidable destiny has now overtaken our country, and brought us under the protection of the invincible Emperor of France.--We know that you will regard our present situation with the utmost consideration; and we have accordingly, in this conviction, been uniformly conciliating the friendship to which we are tied by so many obligations. With what admiration must we see the benevolence and humanity of his imperial and royal Majesty outstep our wishes--qualities which are even more to be admired than his great power! He has desired nothing else, than that we should be indebted to him for our welfare. Whenever he gives us a sovereign to reign over us in the person of his magnanimous brother Joseph, he will consummate our prosperity.--As he has been pleased to change our old system of laws, it becomes us to obey, and to live in tranquillity: as he has also promised to re-organize our financial system, we may hope that then our naval and military power will become terrible to our enemies, &c.'--That the Castilians were horror-stricken by the above blasphemies, which are the habitual language of the French Senate and Ministers to their Emperor, is apparent from an address dated Valladolid,--'He (Bonaparte) carries his audacity the length of holding out to us offers of happiness and peace, while he is laying waste our country, pulling down our churches, and slaughtering our brethren. His pride, cherished by a band of villains who are constantly anxious to offer incense on his shrine, and tolerated by numberless victims who pine in his chains, has caused him to conceive the fantastical idea of proclaiming himself Lord and Ruler of the whole world. There is no atrocity which he does not commit to attain that end.... Shall these outrages, these iniquities, remain unpunished while Spaniards--and Castilian Spaniards--yet exist?'

Many passages might be adduced to prove that carnage and devastation spread over their land have not afflicted this noble people so deeply as this more searching warfare against the conscience and the reason. They groan less over the blood which has been shed, than over the arrogant assumptions of beneficence made by him from whose order that blood has flowed. Still to be talking of bestowing and conferring, and to be happy in the sight of nothing but what he thinks he has bestowed or conferred, this, in a man to whom the weakness of his fellows has given great power, is a madness of pride more hideous than cruelty itself. We have heard of Attila and Tamerlane who called themselves the scourges of God, and rejoiced in personating the terrors of Providence; but such monsters do less outrage to the reason than he who arrogates to himself the gentle and gracious attributes of the Deity: for the one acts professedly from the temperance of reason, the other avowedly in the gusts of passion. Through the terrors of the Supreme Ruler of things, as set forth by works of destruction and ruin, we see but darkly; we may reverence the chastisement, may fear it with awe, but it is not natural to incline towards it in love: moreover, devastation passes away--a perishing power among things that perish: whereas to found, and to build, to create and to institute, to bless through blessing, this has to do with objects where we trust we can see clearly,--it reminds us of what we love,--it aims at permanence,--and the sorrow is, (as in the present instance the people of Spain feel) that it may last; that, if the giddy and intoxicated Being who proclaims that he does these things with the eye and through the might of Providence be not overthrown, it will last; that it needs must last:--and therefore would they hate and abhor him and his pride, even if he were not cruel; if he were merely an image of mortal presumption thrust in between them and the piety which is natural to the heart of man; between them and that religious worship which, as authoritatively as his reason forbids idolatry, that same reason commands. Accordingly, labouring under these violations done to their moral nature, they describe themselves, in the anguish of their souls, treated as a people at once dastardly and "insensible". In the same spirit they make it even matter of complaint, as comparatively a far greater evil, that they have not fallen by the brute violence of open war, but by deceit and perfidy, by a subtle undermining, or contemptuous overthrow of those principles of good faith, through prevalence of which, in some degree, or under some modification or other, families, communities, a people, or any frame of human society, even destroying armies themselves can exist.

But enough of their wrongs; let us now see what were their consolations, their resolves, and their hopes. First, they neither murmur nor repine; but with genuine religion and philosophy they recognize in these dreadful visitations the ways of a benign Providence, and find in them cause for thankfulness. The Council of Castile exhort the people of Madrid 'to cast off their lethargy, and purify their manners, and to acknowledge the calamities which the kingdom and that great capital had endured as a punishment necessary to their correction.' General Morla in his address to the citizens of Cadiz thus speaks to them:--'The commotion, more or less violent, which has taken place in the whole peninsula of Spain, has been of eminent service to rouse us from the state of lethargy in which we indulged, and to make us acquainted with our rights, our glory, and the inviolable duty which we owe to our holy religion and our monarch. We wanted some electric stroke to rouse us from our paralytic state of inactivity; we stood in need of a hurricane to clear the atmosphere of the insalubrious vapours with which it was loaded.'--The unanimity with which the whole people were affected they rightly deem, an indication of wisdom, an authority, and a sanction,--and they refer it to its highest source. 'The defence of our country and our king,' (says a manifesto of the Junta of Seville) 'that of our laws, our religion, and of all the rights of man, trodden down and violated in a manner which is without example, by the Emperor of the French, Napoleon I. and by his troops in Spain, compelled the whole nation to take up arms, and choose itself a form of government; and, in the difficulties and dangers into which the French had plunged it, all, or nearly all the provinces, as it were by the inspiration of heaven, and in a manner little short of miraculous, created Supreme Juntas, delivered themselves up to their guidance, and placed in their hands the rights and the ultimate fate of Spain. The effects have hitherto most happily corresponded with the designs of those who formed them.'

With this general confidence, that the highest good may be brought out of the worst calamities, they have combined a solace, which is vouchsafed only to such nations as can recall to memory the illustrious deeds of their ancestors. The names of Pelayo and The Cid are the watch-words of the address to the people of León; and they are told that to these two deliverers of their country, and to the sentiments of enthusiasm which they excited in every breast, Spain owes the glory and happiness which she has "so long" enjoyed. The Biscayans are called to cast their eyes upon the ages which are past, and they will see their ancestors at one time repulsing the Carthaginians, at another destroying the hordes of Rome; at one period was granted to them the distinction of serving in the van of the army; at another the privilege of citizens. 'Imitate,' says the address, 'the glorious example of your worthy progenitors.' The Asturians, the Gallicians, and the city of Cordova, are exhorted in the same manner. And surely to a people thus united in their minds with the heroism of years which have been long departed, and living under such obligation of gratitude to their ancestors, it is not difficult, nay it is natural, to take upon themselves the highest obligations of duty to their posterity; to enjoy in the holiness of imagination the happiness of unborn ages to which they shall have eminently contributed; and that each man, fortified by these thoughts, should welcome despair for himself, because it is the assured mother of hope for his country.--'Life or Death,' says a proclamation affixed in the most public places of Seville, 'is in this crisis indifferent;--ye who shall return shall receive the reward of gratitude in the embraces of your country, which shall proclaim you her deliverers;--ye whom heaven destines to seal with your blood the independence of your nation, the honour of your women, and the purity of the religion which ye profess, do not dread the anguish of the last moments; remember in these moments that there are in our hearts inexhaustible tears of tenderness to shed over your graves, and fervent prayers, to which the Almighty Father of mercies will lend an ear, to grant you a glory superior to that which they who survive you shall enjoy.' And in fact it ought never to be forgotten, that the Spaniards have not wilfully blinded themselves, but have steadily fixed their eyes not only upon danger and upon death, but upon a deplorable issue of the contest. They have contemplated their subjugation as a thing possible. The next extract, from the paper entitled Precautions, (and the same language is holden by many others) will show in what manner alone they reconcile themselves to it. 'Therefore, it is necessary to sacrifice our lives and property in defence of the king, and of the country; and, though our lot (which we hope will never come to pass) should destine us to become slaves, let us become so fighting and dying like gallant men, not giving ourselves up basely to the yoke like sheep, as the late infamous government would have done, and fixing upon Spain and her slavery eternal ignominy and disgrace.'

But let us now hear them, as becomes men with such feelings, express more cheering and bolder hopes rising from a confidence in the supremacy of justice,--hopes which, however the Tyrant from the iron fortresses of his policy may scoff at them and at those who entertained them, will render their memory dear to all good men, when his name will be pronounced with universal abhorrence.

'All Europe,' says the Junta of Seville, 'will applaud our efforts and hasten to our assistance: Italy, Germany, and the whole North, which suffer under the despotism of the French nation, will eagerly avail themselves of the favourable opportunity, held out to them by Spain, to shake off the yoke and recover their liberty, their laws, their monarchs, and all they have been robbed of by that nation. France herself will hasten to erase the stain of infamy, which must cover the tools and instruments of deeds so treacherous and heinous. She will not shed her blood in so vile a cause. She has already suffered too much under the idle pretext of peace and happiness, which never came, and can never be attained, but under the empire of reason, peace, religion, and laws, and in a state where the rights of other nations are respected and preserved.' To this may be added a hope, the fulfilment of which belongs more to themselves, and lies more within their own power, namely, a hope that they shall be able in their progress towards liberty, to inflict condign punishment on their cruel and perfidious enemies. The Junta of Seville, in an Address to the People of Madrid, express themselves thus: 'People of Madrid! Seville has learned, with consternation and surprize, your dreadful catastrophe of the second of May; the weakness of a government which did nothing in our favour,--which ordered arms to be directed against you; and your heroic sacrifices. Blessed be ye, and your memory shall shine immortal in the annals of our nation!--She has seen with horror that the author of all your misfortunes and of our's has published a proclamation, in which he distorted every fact, and pretended that you gave the first provocation, while it was he who provoked you. The government was weak enough to sanction and order that proclamation to be circulated; and saw, with perfect composure, numbers of you put to death for a pretended violation of laws which did not exist. The French were told in that proclamation, that French blood profusely shed was crying out for vengeance! And the Spanish blood, does not "it" cry out for vengeance? That Spanish blood, shed by an army which hesitated not to attack a disarmed and defenceless people, living under their laws and their king, and against whom cruelties were committed, which shake the human frame with horror. We, all Spain, exclaim--the Spanish blood shed in Madrid cries aloud for revenge! Comfort yourselves, we are your brethren: we will fight like you, until we perish in defending our king and country. Assist us with your good wishes, and your continual prayers offered up to the Most High, whom we adore, and who cannot forsake us, because he never forsakes a just cause.' Again, in the conclusion of their address to the People of Portugal, quoted before, 'The universal cry of Spain is, we will die in defence of our country, but we will take care that those infamous enemies shall die with us. Come then, ye generous Portugueze, and unite with us. You have among yourselves the objects of your vengeance--obey not the authors of your misfortunes--attack them--they are but a handful of miserable panic-struck men, humiliated and conquered already by the perfidy and cruelties which they have committed, and which have covered them with disgrace in the eyes of Europe and the world! Rise then in a body, but avoid staining your honourable hands with crimes, for your design is to resist them and to destroy them--our united efforts will do for this perfidious nation; and Portugal, Spain, nay, all Europe, shall breathe or die free like men.'--Such are their hopes; and again see, upon this subject, the paper entitled '"Precautions";' a contrast this to the impious mockery of Providence, exhibited by the Tyrant in some passages heretofore quoted! 'Care shall be taken to explain to the nation, and to convince them that, when free, as we trust to be, from this civil war, to which the French have forced us, and when placed in a state of tranquillity, our Lord and King, Ferdinand VII, being restored to the throne of Spain, under him and by him, "the Cortes will be assembled, abuses reformed", and such laws shall be enacted, as the circumstances of the time and experience may dictate for the public good and happiness. Things which we Spaniards know how to do, which we have done as well as other nations, without any necessity that the vile French should come to instruct us, and, according to their custom, under the mask of friendship, should deprive us of our liberty, our laws, &c. &c.'

One extract more and I shall conclude. It is from a proclamation dated Oviedo, July 17th. 'Yes--Spain with the energies of Liberty has to contend with France debilitated by slavery. If she remain firm and constant, Spain will triumph. A whole people is more powerful than disciplined armies. Those, who unite to maintain the independence of their country, must triumph over tyranny. Spain will inevitably conquer, in a cause the most just that has ever raised the deadly weapon of war; for she fights, not for the concerns of a day, but for the security and happiness of ages; not for an insulated privilege, but for the rights of human nature; not for temporal blessings, but for eternal happiness; not for the benefit of one nation, but for all mankind, and even for France herself.'

I will now beg of my reader to pause a moment, and to review in his own mind the whole of what has been laid before him. He has seen of what kind, and how great have been the injuries endured by these two nations; what they have suffered, and what they have to fear; he has seen that they have felt with that unanimity which nothing but the light of truth spread over the inmost concerns of human nature can create; with that simultaneousness which has led Philosophers upon like occasions to assert, that the voice of the people is the voice of God. He has seen that they have submitted as far as human nature could bear; and that at last these millions of suffering people have risen almost like one man, with one hope; for whether they look to triumph or defeat, to victory or death, they are full of hope--despair comes not near them--they will die, they say--each individual knows the danger, and, strong in the magnitude of it, grasps eagerly at the thought that he himself is to perish; and more eagerly, and with higher confidence, does he lay to his heart the faith that the nation will survive and be victorious;--or, at the worst, let the contest terminate how it may as to superiority of outward strength, that the fortitude and the martyrdom, the justice and the blessing, are their's and cannot be relinquished. And not only are they moved by these exalted sentiments of universal morality, and of direct and universal concern to mankind, which have impelled them to resist evil and to endeavour to punish the evil-doer, but also they descend (for even this, great as in itself it is, may be here considered as a descent) to express a rational hope of reforming domestic abuses, and of re-constructing, out of the materials of their ancient institutions, customs, and laws, a better frame of civil government, the same in the great outlines of its architecture, but exhibiting the knowledge, and genius, and the needs of the present race, harmoniously blended with those of their forefathers. Woe, then, to the unworthy who intrude with their help to maintain this most sacred cause! It calls aloud, for the aid of intellect, knowledge, and love, and rejects every other. It is in vain to send forth armies if these do not inspire and direct them. The stream is as pure as it is mighty, fed by ten thousand springs in the bounty of untainted nature; any augmentation from the kennels and sewers of guilt and baseness may clog, but cannot strengthen it.--It is not from any thought that I am communicating new information, that I have dwelt thus long upon this subject, but to recall to the reader his own knowledge, and to re-infuse into that knowledge a breath and life of appropriate feeling; because the bare sense of wisdom is nothing without its powers, and it is only in these feelings that the powers of wisdom exist. If then we do not forget that the Spanish and Portugueze Nations stand upon the loftiest ground of principle and passion, and do not suffer on our part those sympathies to languish which a few months since were so strong, and do not negligently or timidly descend from those heights of magnanimity to which as a Nation we were raised, when they first represented to us their wrongs and entreated our assistance, and we devoted ourselves sincerely and earnestly to their service, making with them a common cause under a common hope; if we are true in all this to them and to ourselves, we shall not be at a loss to conceive what actions are entitled to our commendation as being in the spirit of a friendship so nobly begun, and tending assuredly to promote the common welfare; and what are abject, treacherous, and pernicious, and therefore to be condemned and abhorred. Is then, I may now ask, the Convention of Cintra an act of this latter kind? Have the Generals, who signed and ratified that agreement, thereby proved themselves unworthy associates in such a cause? And has the Ministry, by whose appointment these men were enabled to act in this manner, and which sanctioned the Convention by permitting them to carry it into execution, thereby taken to itself a weight of guilt, in which the Nation must feel that it participates, until the transaction shall be solemnly reprobated by the Government, and the remote and immediate authors of it brought to merited punishment? An answer to each of these questions will be implied in the proof which will be given that the condemnation, which the People did with one voice pronounce upon this Convention when it first became known, was just; that the nature of the offence of those who signed it was such, and established by evidence of such a kind, making so imperious an exception to the ordinary course of action, that there was no need to wait here for the decision of a Court of Judicature, but that the People were compelled by a necessity involved in the very constitution of man as a moral Being to pass sentence upon them. And this I shall prove by trying this act of their's by principles of justice which are of universal obligation, and by a reference to those moral sentiments which rise out of that retrospect of things which has been given.

I shall now proceed to facts. The dispatches of Sir Arthur Wellesley, containing an account of his having defeated the enemy in two several engagements, spread joy through the Nation. The latter action appeared to have been decisive, and the result may be thus briefly reported, in a never to be forgotten sentence of Sir Arthur's second letter. 'In this action,' says he, 'in which the whole of the French force in Portugal was employed, under the command of the DUC D'ABRANTES in person, in which the enemy was certainly superior in cavalry and artillery, and in which not more than half of the British army was actually engaged, he sustained a signal defeat, and has lost thirteen pieces of cannon, &c. &c.' In the official communication, made to the public of these dispatches, it was added, that 'a General officer had arrived at the British head-quarters to treat for terms.' This was joyful intelligence! First, an immediate, effectual, and honourable deliverance of Portugal was confidently expected: secondly, the humiliation and captivity of a large French army, and just punishment, from the hands of the Portugueze government, of the most atrocious offenders in that army and among those who, having held civil offices under it, (especially if Portugueze) had, in contempt of all law, civil and military, notoriously abused the power which they had treasonably accepted: thirdly, in this presumed surrender of the army, a diminution of the enemy's military force was looked to, which, after the losses he had already sustained in Spain, would most sensibly weaken it: and lastly, and far above this, there was an anticipation of a shock to his power, where that power is strongest, in the imaginations of men, which are sure to fall under the bondage of long-continued success. The judicious part of the Nation fixed their attention chiefly on these results, and they had good cause to rejoice. They also received with pleasure this additional proof (which indeed with the unthinking many, as after the victory of Maida, weighed too much,) of the superiority in courage and discipline of the British soldiery over the French, and of the certainty of success whenever our army was led on by men of even respectable military talents against any equal or not too greatly disproportionate number of the enemy. But the pleasure was damped in the minds of reflecting persons by several causes. It occasioned regret and perplexity, that they had not heard more of the Portugueze. They knew what that People had suffered, and how they had risen;--remembered the language of the proclamation addressed to them, dated August the 4th, and signed CHARLES COTTON and ARTHUR WELLESLEY, in which they (the Portugueze) were told, that 'The British Army had been sent in consequence of ardent supplications from all parts of Portugal; that the glorious struggle, in which they are engaged, is for all that is dear to man; that the noble struggle against the tyranny and usurpation of France will be "jointly" maintained by Portugal, Spain, and England.' Why then, it was asked, do we not hear more of those who are at least coequals with us, if not principals, in this contest? They appeared to have had little share in either engagement; ("See Appendix A".) and, while the French were abundantly praised, no word of commendation was found for "them". Had they deserved to be thus neglected? The body of the People by a general rising had proved their zeal and courage, their animosity towards their enemies, their hatred of them. It was therefore apprehended, from this silence respecting the Portugueze, that their Chiefs might either be distracted by factions, or blinded by selfish interests, or that they mistrusted their Allies. Situated as Portugal then was, it would argue gross ignorance of human nature to have expected that unanimity should prevail among all the several authorities or leading persons, as to the "means" to be employed: it was enough, that they looked with one feeling to the "end", namely, an honourable deliverance of their country and security for its Independence in conjunction with the liberation and independence of Spain. It was therefore absolutely necessary to make allowance for some division in conduct from difference of opinion. Instead of acquiescing in the first feelings of disappointment, our Commanders ought to have used the best means to win the confidence of the Portugueze Chiefs, and to induce them to regard the British as dispassionate arbiters; they ought to have endeavoured to excite a genuine patriotic spirit where it appeared wanting, and to assist in creating for it an organ by which it might act. Were these things done? or, if such evils existed among the Portugueze, was "any" remedy or alleviation attempted? Sir Arthur Wellesley has told us, before the Board of Inquiry, that he made applications to the Portugueze General, FRERE, for assistance, which were acceded to by General FRERE upon such conditions only as made Sir Arthur deem it more advisable to refuse than accept his co-operation: and it is alleged that, in his general expectations of assistance, he was greatly disappointed. We are not disposed to deny, that such cause for complaint "might" exist; but that it "did", and upon no provocation on our part, requires confirmation by other testimony. And surely, the Portugueze have a right to be heard in answer to this accusation, before they are condemned. For they have supplied no fact from their own hands, which tends to prove that they were languid in the cause, or that they had unreasonable jealousies of the British Army or Nation, or dispositions towards them which were other than friendly. Now there is a fact, furnished by Sir Arthur Wellesley himself, which may seem to render it in the highest degree probable that, previously to any recorded or palpable act of disregard or disrespect to the situation and feelings of the Portugueze, the general tenour of his bearing towards them might have been such that they could not look favourably upon him; that he was not a man framed to conciliate them, to compose their differences, or to awaken or strengthen their zeal. I allude to the passage in his letter above quoted, where, having occasion to speak of the French General, he has found no name by which to designate him but that of DUC D'ABRANTES--words necessarily implying, that Bonaparte, who had taken upon himself to confer upon General Junot this Portugueze title with Portugueze domains to support it, was lawful Sovereign of that Country, and that consequently the Portugueze Nation were rebels, and the British Army, and he himself at the head of it, aiders and abettors of that rebellion. It would be absurd to suppose, that Sir Arthur Wellesley, at the time when he used these words, was aware of the meaning really involved in them: let them be deemed an oversight. But the capability of such an oversight affords too strong suspicion of a deadness to the moral interests of the cause in which he was engaged, and of such a want of sympathy with the just feelings of his injured Ally as could exist only in a mind narrowed by exclusive and overweening attention to the "military" character, led astray by vanity, or hardened by general habits of contemptuousness. These words, 'DUKE OF ABRANTES "in person",' were indeed words of bad omen: and thinking men trembled for the consequences. They saw plainly, that, in the opinion of the exalted Spaniards--of those assuredly who framed, and of all who had felt, that affecting Proclamation addressed by the Junta of Seville to the Portugueze people, he must appear utterly unworthy of the station in which he had been placed. He had been sent as a deliverer--as an assertor and avenger of the rights of human nature. But these words would carry with them every where the conviction, that Portugal and Spain, yea, all which was good in England, or iniquitous in France or in Frenchmen, was forgotten, and his head full only of himself, miserably conceiting that he swelled the importance of his conquered antagonist by sounding titles and phrases, come from what quarter they might; and that, in proportion as this was done, he magnified himself and his achievements. It was plain, then, that here was a man, who, having not any fellow-feeling with the people whom he had been commissioned to aid, could not know where their strength lay, and therefore could not turn it to account, nor by his example call it forth or cherish it; but that, if his future conduct should be in the same spirit, he must be a blighting wind wherever his influence was carried: for he had neither felt the wrongs of his Allies nor been induced by common worldly prudence to affect to feel them, or at least to disguise his insensibility; and therefore what could follow, but, in despite of victory and outward demonstrations of joy, inward disgust and depression? These reflections interrupted the satisfaction of many; but more from fear of future consequences than for the immediate enterprize, for here success seemed inevitable; and a happy and glorious termination was confidently expected, yet not without that intermixture of apprehension, which was at once an acknowledgment of the general condition of humanity, and a proof of the deep interest attached to the impending event.

Sir Arthur Wellesley's dispatches had appeared in the Gazette on the 2d of September, and on the 16th of the same month suspence was put an end to by the publication of Sir Hew Dalrymple's letter, accompanied with the Armistice and Convention. The night before, by order of ministers, an attempt had been made at rejoicing, and the Park and Tower guns had been fired in sign of good news.--Heaven grant that the ears of that great city may be preserved from such another outrage! As soon as the truth was known, never was there such a burst of rage and indignation--such an overwhelming of stupefaction and sorrow. But I will not, I cannot dwell upon it--it is enough to say, that Sir Hew Dalrymple and Sir Arthur Wellesley must he bold men if they can think of what must have been reported to them, without awe and trembling; the heart of their country was turned against them, and they were execrated in bitterness.

For they had changed all things into their contraries, hope into despair; triumph into defeat; confidence into treachery, which left no place to stand upon; justice into the keenest injury.--Whom had they delivered but the Tyrant in captivity? Whose hands had they bound but those of their Allies, who were able of themselves to have executed their own purposes? Whom had they punished but the innocent sufferer? Whom rewarded but the guiltiest of Oppressors? They had reversed every thing:--favour and honour for their enemies--insult for their friends--and robbery (they had both protected the person of the robber and secured to him his booty) and opprobrium for themselves;--to those over whom they had been masters, who had crouched to them by an open act of submission, they had made themselves servants, turning the British Lion into a beast of burthen, to carry a vanquished enemy, with his load of iniquities, when and whither it had pleased him.

Such issue would have been a heavy calamity at any time; but now, when we ought to have risen above ourselves, and if possible to have been foremost in the strife of honour and magnanimity; now, when a new-born power had been arrayed against the Tyrant, the only one which ever offered a glimpse of hope to a sane mind, the power of popular resistance rising out of universal reason, and from the heart of human nature,--and by a peculiar providence disembarrassed from the imbecility, the cowardice, and the intrigues of a worn-out government--that at this time we, the most favoured Nation upon earth, should have acted as if it had been our aim to level to the ground by one blow this long-wished-for spirit, whose birth we had so joyfully hailed, and by which even our own glory, our safety, our existence, were to be maintained; this was verily a surpassing affliction to every man who had a feeling of life beyond his meanest concerns!

As soon as men had recovered from the shock, and could bear to look somewhat steadily at these documents, it was found that the gross body of the transaction, considered as a military transaction, was this; that the Russian fleet, of nine sail of the line, which had been so long watched, and could not have escaped, was to be delivered up to us; the ships to be detained till six months after the end of the war, and the sailors sent home by us, and to be by us protected in their voyage through the Swedish fleet, and to be at liberty to fight immediately against our ally, the king of Sweden. Secondly, that a French army of more than twenty thousand men, already beaten, and no longer able to appear in the field, cut off from all possibility of receiving reinforcements or supplies, and in the midst of a hostile country loathing and abhorring it, was to be transported with its arms, ammunition, and plunder, at the expence of Great Britain, in British vessels, and landed within a few days march of the Spanish frontier,--there to be at liberty to commence hostilities immediately!

Omitting every characteristic which distinguishes the present contest from others, and looking at this issue merely as an affair between two armies, what stupidity of mind to provoke the accusation of not merely shrinking from future toils and dangers, but of basely shifting the burthen to the shoulders of an ally, already overpressed!--What infatuation, to convey the imprisoned foe to the very spot, whither, if he had had wings, he would have flown! This last was an absurdity as glaring as if, the French having landed on our own island, we had taken them from Yorkshire to be set on shore in Sussex; but ten thousand times worse! from a place where without our interference they had been virtually blockaded, where they were cut off, hopeless, useless, and disgraced, to become an efficient part of a mighty host, carrying the strength of their numbers, and alas! the strength of their glory, (not to mention the sight of their plunder) to animate that host; while the British army, more numerous in the proportion of three to two, with all the population and resources of the peninsula to aid it, within ten days sail of it's own country, and the sea covered with friendly shipping at it's back, was to make a long march to encounter this same enemy, (the British forfeiting instead of gaining by the treaty as to superiority of numbers, for that this would be the case was clearly foreseen) to encounter, in a new condition of strength and pride, those whom, by its deliberate act, it had exalted,--having taken from itself, meanwhile, all which it had conferred, and bearing into the presence of its noble ally an infection of despondency and disgrace. The motive assigned for all this, was the great importance of gaining time; fear of an open beach and of equinoctial gales for the shipping; fear that reinforcements could not be landed; fear of famine;--fear of every thing but dishonour! ("See Appendix B".)

The nation had expected that the French would surrender immediately at discretion; and, supposing that Sir Arthur Wellesley had told them the whole truth, they had a right to form this expectation. It has since appeared, from the evidence given before the Board of Inquiry, that Sir Arthur Wellesley earnestly exhorted his successor in command (Sir Harry Burrard) to pursue the defeated enemy at the battle of Vimiera; and that, if this had been done, the affair, in Sir Arthur Wellesley's opinion, would have had a much more satisfactory termination. But, waiving any considerations of this advice, or of the fault which might be committed in not following it; and taking up the matter from the time when Sir Hew Dalrymple entered upon the command, and when the two adverse armies were in that condition, relatively to each other, that none of the Generals has pleaded any difference of opinion as to their ability to advance against the enemy, I will ask what confirmation has appeared before the Board of Inquiry, of the reasonableness of the causes, assigned by Sir Hew Dalrymple in his letter, for deeming a Convention adviseable. A want of cavalry, (for which they who occasioned it are heavily censurable,) has indeed been proved; and certain failures of duty in the Commissariat department with respect to horses, &c.; but these deficiencies, though furnishing reasons against advancing upon the enemy in the open field, had ceased to be of moment, when the business was to expel him from the forts to which he might have the power of retreating. It is proved, that, though there are difficulties in landing upon that coast, (and what military or marine operation can be carried on without difficulty?) there was not the slightest reason to apprehend that the army, which was then abundantly supplied, would suffer hereafter from want of provisions; proved also that heavy ordnance, for the purpose of attacking the forts, was ready on ship-board, to be landed when and where it might be needed. Therefore, so far from being exculpated by the facts which have been laid before the Board of Inquiry, Sir Hew Dalrymple and the other Generals, who deemed "any" Convention necessary or expedient upon the grounds stated in his letter, are more deeply criminated. But grant, (for the sake of looking at a different part of the subject,) grant a case infinitely stronger than Sir Hew Dalrymple has even hinted at;--why was not the taste of some of those evils, in apprehension so terrible, actually tried? It would not have been the first time that Britons had faced hunger and tempests, had endured the worst of such enmity, and upon a call, under an obligation, how faint and feeble, compared with that which the brave men of that army must have felt upon the present occasion! In the proclamation quoted before, addressed to the Portugueze, and signed Charles Cotton and Arthur Wellesley, they were told, that the objects, for which they contended, 'could only be attained by distinguished examples of fortitude and constancy.' Where were the fortitude and constancy of the teachers? When Sir Hew Dalrymple had been so busy in taking the measure of his own weakness, and feeding his own fears, how came it to escape him, that General Junot must also have had "his" weaknesses and "his" fears? Was it nothing to have been defeated in the open field, where he himself had been the assailant? Was it nothing that so proud a man, the servant of so proud a man, had stooped to send a General Officer to treat concerning the evacuation of the country? Was the hatred and abhorrence of the Portugueze and Spanish Nations nothing? the people of a large metropolis under his eye--detesting him, and stung almost to madness, nothing? The composition of his own army made up of men of different nations and languages, and forced into the service,--was there no cause of mistrust in this? And, finally, among the many unsound places which, had his mind been as active in this sort of inquiry as Sir Hew Dalrymple's was, he must have found in his constitution, could a bad cause have been missed--a worse cause than ever confounded the mind of a soldier when boldly pressed upon, or gave courage and animation to a righteous assailant? But alas! in Sir Hew Dalrymple and his brethren, we had Generals who had a power of sight only for the strength of their enemies and their own weakness.

Let me not be misunderstood. While I am thus forced to repeat things, which were uttered or thought of these men in reference to their military conduct, as heads of that army, it is needless to add, that their personal courage is in no wise implicated in the charge brought against them. But, in the name of my countrymen, I do repeat these accusations, and tax them with an utter want of "intellectual" courage--of that higher quality, which is never found without one or other of the three accompaniments, talents, genius, or principle;--talents matured by experience, without which it cannot exist at all; or the rapid insight of peculiar genius, by which the fitness of an act may be instantly determined, and which will supply higher motives than mere talents can furnish for encountering difficulty and danger, and will suggest better resources for diminishing or overcoming them. Thus, through the power of genius, this quality of intellectual courage may exist in an eminent degree, though the moral character be greatly perverted; as in those personages, who are so conspicuous in history, conquerors and usurpers, the Alexanders, the Caesars, and Cromwells; and in that other class still more perverted, remorseless and energetic minds, the Catilines and Borgias, whom poets have denominated 'bold, bad men.' But, though a course of depravity will neither preclude nor destroy this quality, nay, in certain circumstances will give it a peculiar promptness and hardihood of decision, it is not on this account the less true, that, to "consummate" this species of courage, and to render it equal to all occasions, (especially when a man is not acting for himself, but has an additional claim on his resolution from the circumstance of responsibility to a superior) "Principle" is indispensibly requisite. I mean that fixed and habitual principle, which implies the absence of all selfish anticipations, whether of hope or fear, and the inward disavowal of any tribunal higher and more dreaded than the mind's own judgment upon its own act. The existence of such principle cannot but elevate the most commanding genius, add rapidity to the quickest glance, a wider range to the most ample comprehension; but, without this principle, the man of ordinary powers must, in the trying hour, be found utterly wanting. Neither, without it, can the man of excelling powers be trustworthy, or have at all times a calm and confident repose in himself. But he, in whom talents, genius, and principle are united, will have a firm mind, in whatever embarrassment he may be placed; will look steadily at the most undefined shapes of difficulty and danger, of possible mistake or mischance; nor will they appear to him more formidable than they really are. For HIS attention is not distracted--he has but one business, and that is with the object before him. Neither in general conduct nor in particular emergencies, are HIS plans subservient to considerations of rewards, estate, or title: these are not to have precedence in his thoughts, to govern his actions, but to follow in the train of his duty. Such men, in ancient times, were Phocion, Epaminondas, and Philopoemen; and such a man was Sir Philip Sidney, of whom it has been said, that he first taught this country "the majesty of honest dealing". With these may be named, the honour of our own age, Washington, the deliverer of the American Continent; with these, though in many things unlike, Lord Nelson, whom we have lately lost. Lord Peterborough, who fought in Spain a hundred years ago, had the same excellence; with a sense of exalted honour, and a tinge of romantic enthusiasm, well suited to the country which was the scene of his exploits. Would that we had a man, like Peterborough or Nelson, at the head of our army in Spain at this moment! I utter this wish with more earnestness, because it is rumoured, that some of those, who have already called forth such severe reprehension from their countrymen, are to resume a command, which must entrust to them a portion of those sacred hopes in which, not only we, and the people of Spain and Portugal, but the whole human race are so deeply interested. ("See Appendix C".)

I maintain then that, merely from want of this intellectual courage, of courage as generals or chiefs, (for I will not speak at present of the want of other qualities equally needful upon this service,) grievous errors were committed by Sir Hew Dalrymple and his colleagues in estimating the relative state of the two armies. A precious moment, it is most probable, had been lost after the battle of Vimiera; yet still the inferiority of the enemy had been proved; they themselves had admitted it--not merely by withdrawing from the field, but by proposing terms:--monstrous terms! and how ought they to have been received? Repelled undoubtedly with scorn, as an insult. If our Generals had been men capable of taking the measure of their real strength, either as existing in their own army, or in those principles of liberty and justice which they were commissioned to defend, they must of necessity have acted in this manner;--if they had been men of common sagacity for business, they must have acted in this manner;--nay, if they had been upon a level with an ordinary bargain-maker in a Fair or a market, they could not have acted otherwise.--Strange that they should so far forget the nature of their calling! They were soldiers, and their business was to fight. Sir Arthur Wellesley had fought, and gallantly; it was not becoming his high situation, or that of his successors, to treat, that is, to beat down, to chaffer, or on their part to propose: it does not become any general at the head of a victorious army so to do.[19]

[19] Those rare cases are of course excepted, in which the superiority on the one side is not only fairly to be presumed but positive--and so prominently obtrusive, that to "propose" terms is to "inflict" terms.

They were to "accept",--and, if the terms offered were flagrantly presumptuous, our commanders ought to have rejected them with dignified scorn, and to have referred the proposer to the sword for a lesson of decorum and humility. This is the general rule of all high-minded men upon such occasions; and meaner minds copy them, doing in prudence what they do from principle. But it has been urged, before the Board of Inquiry, that the conduct of the French armies upon like occasions, and their known character, rendered it probable that a determined resistance would in the present instance be maintained. We need not fear to say that this conclusion, from reasons which have been adverted to, was erroneous. But, in the mind of him who had admitted it upon whatever ground, whether false or true, surely the first thought which followed, ought to have been, not that we should bend to the enemy, but that, if they were resolute in defence, we should learn from that example to be courageous in attack. The tender feelings, however, are pleaded against this determination; and it is said, that one of the motives for the cessation of hostilities was to prevent the further effusion of human blood.--When, or how? The enemy was delivered over to us; it was not to be hoped that, cut off from all assistance as they were, these, or an equal number of men, could ever be reduced to such straits as would ensure their destruction as an enemy, with so small a sacrifice of life on their part, or on ours. What then was to be gained by this tenderness? The shedding of a few drops of blood is not to be risked in Portugal to-day, and streams of blood must shortly flow from the same veins in the fields of Spain! And, even if this had not been the assured consequence, let not the consideration, though it be one which no humane man can ever lose sight of, have more than its due weight. For national independence and liberty, and "that" honour by which these and other blessings are to be preserved, honour--which is no other than the most elevated and pure conception of justice which can be formed, these are more precious than life: else why have we already lost so many brave men in this struggle?--Why not submit at once, and let the Tyrant mount upon his throne of universal dominion, while the world lies prostrate at his feet in indifference and apathy, which he will proclaim to it is peace and happiness? But peace and happiness can exist only by knowledge and virtue; slavery has no enduring connection with tranquillity or security--she cannot frame a league with any thing which is desirable--she has no charter even for her own ignoble ease and darling sloth. Yet to this abject condition, mankind, betrayed by an ill-judging tenderness, would surely be led; and in the face of an inevitable contradiction! For neither in this state of things would the shedding of blood be prevented, nor would warfare cease. The only difference would be, that, instead of wars like those which prevail at this moment, presenting a spectacle of such character that, upon one side at least, a superior Being might look down with favour and blessing, there would follow endless commotions and quarrels without the presence of justice any where,--in which the alternations of success would not excite a wish or regret; in which a prayer could not be uttered for a decision either this way or that;--wars from no impulse in either of the combatants, but rival instigations of demoniacal passion. If, therefore, by the faculty of reason we can prophecy concerning the shapes which the future may put on,--if we are under any bond of duty to succeeding generations, there is high cause to guard against a specious sensibility, which may encourage the hoarding up of life for its own sake, seducing us from those considerations by which we might learn when it ought to be resigned. Moreover, disregarding future ages, and confining ourselves to the present state of mankind, it may be safely affirmed that he, who is the most watchful of the honour of his country, most determined to preserve her fair name at all hazards, will be found, in any view of things which looks beyond the passing hour, the best steward of the "lives" of his countrymen. For, by proving that she is of a firm temper, that she will only submit or yield to a point of her own fixing, and that all beyond is immutable resolution, he will save her from being wantonly attacked; and, if attacked, will awe the aggressor into a speedier abandonment of an unjust and hopeless attempt. Thus will he preserve not only that which gives life its value, but life itself; and not for his own country merely, but for that of his enemies, to whom he will have offered an example of magnanimity, which will ensure to them like benefits; an example, the re-action of which will be felt by his own countrymen, and will prevent them from becoming assailants unjustly or rashly. Nations will thus be taught to respect each other, and mutually to abstain from injuries. And hence, by a benign ordinance of our nature, genuine honour is the hand-maid of humanity; the attendant and sustainer--both of the sterner qualities which constitute the appropriate excellence of the male character, and of the gentle and tender virtues which belong more especially to motherliness and womanhood. These general laws, by which mankind is purified and exalted, and by which Nations are preserved, suggest likewise the best rules for the preservation of individual armies, and for the accomplishment of all equitable service upon which they can be sent.

Not therefore rashly and unfeelingly, but from the dictates of thoughtful humanity, did I say that it was the business of our Generals to fight, and to persevere in fighting; and that they did not bear this duty sufficiently in mind; this, almost the sole duty which professional soldiers, till our time, (happily for mankind) used to think of. But the victories of the French have been attended every where by the subversion of Governments; and their generals have accordingly united "political" with military functions: and with what success this has been done by them, the present state of Europe affords melancholy proof. But have they, on this account, ever neglected to calculate upon the advantages which might fairly be anticipated from future warfare? Or, in a treaty of to-day, have they ever forgotten a victory of yesterday? Eager to grasp at the double honour of captain and negociator, have they ever sacrificed the one to the other; or, in the blind effort, lost both? Above all, in their readiness to flourish with the pen, have they ever overlooked the sword, the symbol of their power, and the appropriate instrument of their success and glory? I notice this assumption of a double character on the part of the French, not to lament over it and its consequences, but to render somewhat more intelligible the conduct of our own Generals; and to explain how far men, whom we have no reason to believe other than brave, have, through the influence of such example, lost sight of their primary duties, apeing instead of imitating, and following only to be misled.

It is indeed deplorable, that our Generals, from this infirmity, or from any other cause, did not assume that lofty deportment which the character and relative strength of the two armies authorized them, and the nature of the service upon which they were sent, enjoined them to assume;--that they were in such haste to treat--that, with such an enemy (let me say at once,) and in such circumstances, they should have treated at all. Is it possible that they could ever have asked themselves who that enemy was, how he came into that country, and what he had done there? From the manifesto of the Portugueze government, issued at Rio Janeiro, and from other official papers, they might have learned, what was notorious to all Europe, that this body of men commissioned by Bonaparte, in the time of profound peace, without a declaration of war, had invaded Portugal under the command of Junot, who had perfidiously entered the country, as the General of a friendly and allied Power, assuring the people, as he advanced, that he came to protect their Sovereign against an invasion of the English; and that, when in this manner he had entered a peaceable kingdom, which offered no resistance, and had expelled its lawful Sovereign, he wrung from it unheard-of contributions, ravaged it, cursed it with domestic pillage and open sacrilege; and that, when this unoffending people, unable to endure any longer, rose up against the tyrant, he had given their towns and villages to the flames, and put the whole country, thus resisting, under military execution.--Setting aside all natural sympathy with the Portugueze and Spanish nations, and all prudential considerations of regard or respect for "their feelings" towards these men, and for "their expectations" concerning the manner in which they ought to be dealt with, it is plain that the French had forfeited by their crimes all right to those privileges, or to those modes of intercourse, which one army may demand from another according to the laws of war. They were not soldiers in any thing but the power of soldiers, and the outward frame of an army. During their occupation of Portugal, the laws and customs of war had never been referred to by them, but as a plea for some enormity, to the aggravated oppression of that unhappy country! Pillage, sacrilege, and murder--sweeping murder and individual assassination, had been proved against them by voices from every quarter. They had outlawed themselves by their offences from membership in the community of war, and from every species of community acknowledged by reason. But even, should any one be so insensible as to question this, he will not at all events deny, that the French ought to have been dealt with as having put on a double character. For surely they never considered themselves merely as an army. They had dissolved the established authorities of Portugal, and had usurped the civil power of the government; and it was in this compound capacity, under this twofold monstrous shape, that they had exercised, over the religion and property of the country, the most grievous oppressions. What then remained to protect them but their power?--Right they had none,--and power! it is a mortifying consideration, but I will ask if Bonaparte, (nor do I mean in the question to imply any thing to his honour,) had been in the place of Sir Hew Dalrymple, what would he have thought of their power?--Yet before this shadow the solid substance of "justice" melted away.

And this leads me from the contemplation of their errors in the estimate and application of means, to the contemplation of their heavier errors and worse blindness in regard to ends. The British Generals acted as if they had no purpose but that the enemy should be removed from the country in which they were, upon "any" terms. Now the evacuation of Portugal was not the prime object, but the manner in which that event was to be brought about; this ought to have been deemed first both in order and importance;--the French were to be subdued, their ferocious warfare and heinous policy to be confounded; and in this way, and no other, was the deliverance of that country to be accomplished. It was not for the soil, or for the cities and forts, that Portugal was valued, but for the human feeling which was there; for the rights of human nature which might be there conspicuously asserted; for a triumph over injustice and oppression there to be achieved, which could neither be concealed nor disguised, and which should penetrate the darkest corner of the dark Continent of Europe by its splendour. We combated for victory in the empire of reason, for strongholds in the imagination. Lisbon and Portugal, as city and soil, were chiefly prized by us as a "language"; but our Generals mistook the counters of the game for the stake played for. The nation required that the French should surrender at discretion;--grant that the victory of Vimiera had excited some unreasonable impatience--we were not so overweening as to demand that the enemy should surrender within a given time, but that they should surrender. Every thing, short of this, was felt to be below the duties of the occasion; not only no service, but a grievous injury. Only as far as there was a prospect of forcing the enemy to an unconditional submission, did the British Nation deem that they had a right to interfere;--if that prospect failed, they expected that their army would know that it became it to retire, and take care of itself. But our Generals have told us, that the Convention would not have been admitted, if they had not judged it right to effect, even upon these terms, the evacuation of Portugal--as ministerial to their future services in Spain. If this had been a common war between two established governments measuring with each other their regular resources, there might have been some appearance of force in this plea. But who does not cry out at once, that the affections and opinions, that is, the souls of the people of Spain and Portugal, must be the inspiration and the power, if this labour is to be brought to a happy end? Therefore it was worse than folly to think of supporting Spain by physical strength, at the expence of moral. Besides, she was strong in men; she never earnestly solicited troops from us; some of the Provinces had even refused them when offered,--and all had been lukewarm in the acceptance of them. The Spaniards could not "ultimately" be benefited but by Allies acting under the same impulses of honour, roused by a sense of their wrongs, and sharing their loves and hatreds--above all, their "passion" for justice. They had themselves given an example, at Baylen, proclaiming to all the world what ought to be aimed at by those who would uphold their cause, and be associated in arms with them. And was the law of justice, which Spaniards, Spanish peasantry, I might almost say, would not relax in favour of Dupont, to be relaxed by a British army in favour of Junot? Had the French commander at Lisbon, or his army, proved themselves less perfidious, less cruel, or less rapacious than the other? Nay, did not the pride and crimes of Junot call for humiliation and punishment far more importunately, inasmuch as his power to do harm, and therefore his will, keeping pace with it, had been greater? Yet, in the noble letter of the Governor of Cadiz to Dupont, he expressly tells him, that his conduct, and that of his army, had been such, that they owed their lives only to that honour which forbad the Spanish army to become executioners. The Portugueze also, as appears from various letters produced before the Board of Inquiry, have shewn to our Generals, as boldly as their respect for the British Nation would permit them to do, what "they" expected. A Portugueze General, who was also a member of the regency appointed by the Prince Regent, says, in a protest addressed to Sir Hew Dalrymple, that he had been able to drive the French out of the provinces of Algarve and Alentejo; and therefore he could not be convinced, that such a Convention was necessary. What was this but implying that it was dishonourable, and that it would frustrate the efforts which his country was making, and destroy the hopes which it had built upon its own power? Another letter from a magistrate inveighs against the Convention, as leaving the crimes of the French in Portugal unpunished; as giving no indemnification for all the murders, robberies, and atrocities which had been committed by them. But I feel that I shall be wanting in respect to my countrymen if I pursue this argument further. I blush that it should be necessary to speak upon the subject at all. And these are men and things, which we have been reproved for condemning, because evidence was wanting both as to fact and person! If there ever was a case, which could not, in any rational sense of the word, be prejudged, this is one. As to the fact--it appears, and sheds from its own body, like the sun in heaven, the light by which it is seen; as to the person--each has written down with his own hand, "I am the man". Condemnation of actions and men like these is not, in the minds of a people, (thanks to the divine Being and to human nature!) a matter of choice; it is like a physical necessity, as the hand must be burned which is thrust into the furnace--the body chilled which stands naked in the freezing north-wind. I am entitled to make this assertion here, when the "moral" depravity of the Convention, of which I shall have to speak hereafter, has not even been touched upon. Nor let it be blamed in any man, though his station be in private life, that upon this occasion he speaks publicly, and gives a decisive opinion concerning that part of this public event, and those measures, which are more especially military. All have a right to speak, and to make their voices heard, as far as they have power. For these are times, in which the conduct of military men concerns us, perhaps, more intimately than that of any other class; when the business of arms comes unhappily too near to the fire-side; when the character and duties of a soldier ought to be understood by every one who values his liberty, and bears in mind how soon he may have to fight for it. Men will and ought to speak upon things in which they are so deeply interested; how else are right notions to spread, or is error to be destroyed? These are times also in which, if we may judge from the proceedings and result of the Court of Inquiry, the heads of the army, more than at any other period, stand in need of being taught wisdom by the voice of the people. It is their own interest, both as men and as soldiers, that the people should speak fervently and fearlessly of their actions:--from no other quarter can they be so powerfully reminded of the duties which they owe to themselves, to their country, and to human nature. Let any one read the evidence given before that Court, and he will there see, how much the intellectual and moral constitution of many of our military officers, has suffered by a profession, which, if not counteracted by admonitions willingly listened to, and by habits of meditation, does, more than any other, denaturalize--and therefore degrade the human being;--he will note with sorrow, how faint are their sympathies with the best feelings, and how dim their apprehension of some of the most awful truths, relating to the happiness and dignity of man in society. But on this I do not mean to insist at present; it is too weighty a subject to be treated incidentally: and my purpose is--not to invalidate the authority of military men, "positively" considered, upon a military question, but "comparatively";--to maintain that there are military transactions upon which the people have a right to be heard, and upon which their authority is entitled to far more respect than any man or number of men can lay claim to, who speak merely with the ordinary professional views of soldiership;--that there are such military transactions;--and that "this" is one of them.

The condemnation, which the people of these islands pronounced upon the Convention of Cintra considered as to its main "military" results, that is, as a treaty by which it was established that the Russian fleet should be surrendered on the terms specified; and by which, not only the obligation of forcing the French army to an unconditional surrender was abandoned, but its restoration in freedom and triumph to its own country was secured;--the condemnation, pronounced by the people upon a treaty, by virtue of which these things were to be done, I have recorded--accounted for--and thereby justified.--I will now proceed to another division of the subject, on which I feel a still more earnest wish to speak; because, though in itself of the highest importance, it has been comparatively neglected;--mean the political injustice and moral depravity which are stamped upon the front of this agreement, and pervade every regulation which it contains. I shall shew that our Generals (and with them our Ministers, as far as they might have either given directions to this effect, or have countenanced what has been done)--when it was their paramount duty to maintain at all hazards the noblest principles in unsuspected integrity; because, upon the summons of these, and in defence of them, their Allies had risen, and by these alone could stand--not only did not perform this duty, but descended as far below the level of ordinary principles as they ought to have mounted above it;--imitating not the majesty of the oak with which it lifts its branches towards the heavens, but the vigour with which, in the language of the poet, it strikes its roots downwards towards hell:--

Radice in Tartara tendit.

The Armistice is the basis of the Convention; and in the first article we find it agreed, 'That there shall be a suspension of hostilities between the forces of his Britannic Majesty, and those of his Imperial and Royal Majesty, Napoleon I.' I will ask if it be the practice of military officers, in instruments of this kind, to acknowledge, in the person of the head of the government with which they are at war, titles which their own government--for which they are acting--has not acknowledged. If this be the practice, which I will not stop to determine, it is grossly improper; and ought to be abolished. Our Generals, however, had entered Portugal as Allies of a Government by which this title had been acknowledged; and they might have pleaded this circumstance in mitigation of their offence; but surely not in an instrument, where we not only look in vain for the name of the Portugueze Sovereign, or of the Government which he appointed, or of any heads or representatives of the Portugueze armies or people as a party in the contract,--but where it is stipulated (in the 4th article) that the British General shall engage to include the Portugueze armies in this Convention. What an outrage!--We enter the Portugueze territory as Allies; and, without their consent--or even consulting them, we proceed to form the basis of an agreement, relating--- not to the safety or interests of our own army--but to Portugueze territory, Portugueze persons, liberties, and rights,--and engage, out of our own will and power, to include the Portugueze army, they or their Government willing or not, within the obligation of this agreement. I place these things in contrast, viz. the acknowledgement of Bonaparte as emperor and king, and the utter neglect of the Portugueze Sovereign and Portugueze authorities, to shew in what spirit and temper these agreements were entered upon. I will not here insist upon what was our duty, on this occasion, to the Portugueze--as dictated by those sublime precepts of justice which it has been proved that they and the Spaniards had risen to defend,--and without feeling the force and sanctity of which, they neither could have risen, nor can oppose to their enemy resistance which has any hope in it; but I will ask, of any man who is not dead to the common feelings of his social nature--and besotted in understanding, if this be not a cruel mockery, and which must have been felt, unless it were repelled with hatred and scorn, as a heart-breaking insult. Moreover, this conduct acknowledges, by implication, that principle which by his actions the enemy has for a long time covertly maintained, and now openly and insolently avows in his words--that power is the measure of right;--and it is in a steady adherence to this abominable doctrine that his strength mainly lies. I do maintain then that, as far as the conduct of our Generals in framing these instruments tends to reconcile men to this course of action, and to sanction this principle, they are virtually his Allies: their weapons may be against him, but he will laugh at their weapons,--for he knows, though they themselves do not, that their souls are for him. Look at the preamble to the Armistice! In what is omitted and what is inserted, the French Ruler could not have fashioned it more for his own purpose if he had traced it with his own hand. We have then trampled upon a fundamental principle of justice, and countenanced a prime maxim of iniquity; thus adding, in an unexampled degree, the foolishness of impolicy to the heinousness of guilt. A conduct thus grossly unjust and impolitic, without having the hatred which it inspires neutralised by the contempt, is made contemptible by utterly wanting that colour of right which authority and power, put forth in defence of our Allies--in asserting their just claims and avenging their injuries, might have given. But we, instead of triumphantly displaying our power towards our enemies, have ostentatiously exercised it upon our friends; reversing here, as every where, the practice of sense and reason;--conciliatory even to abject submission where we ought to have been haughty and commanding,--and repulsive and tyrannical where we ought to have been gracious and kind. Even a common law of good breeding would have served us here, had we known how to apply it. We ought to have endeavoured to raise the Portugueze in their own estimation by concealing our power in comparison with theirs; dealing with them in the spirit of those mild and humane delusions, which spread such a genial grace over the intercourse, and add so much to the influence of love in the concerns of private life. It is a common saying, presume that a man is dishonest, and that is the readiest way to make him so: in like manner it may be said, presume that a nation is weak, and that is the surest course to bring it to weakness,--if it be not rouzed to prove its strength by applying it to the humiliation of your pride. The Portugueze had been weak; and, in connection with their Allies the Spaniards, they were prepared to become strong. It was, therefore, doubly incumbent upon us to foster and encourage them--to look favourably upon their efforts--generously to give them credit upon their promises--to hope with them and for them; and, thus anticipating and foreseeing, we should, by a natural operation of love, have contributed to create the merits which were anticipated and foreseen. I apply these rules, taken from the intercourse between individuals, to the conduct of large bodies of men, or of nations towards each other, because these are nothing but aggregates of individuals; and because the maxims of all just law, and the measures of all sane practice, are only an enlarged or modified application of those dispositions of love and those principles of reason, by which the welfare of individuals, in their connection with each other, is promoted. There was also here a still more urgent call for these courteous and humane principles as guides of conduct; because, in exact proportion to the physical weakness of Governments, and to the distraction and confusion which cannot but prevail, when a people is struggling for independence and liberty, are the well-intentioned and the wise among them remitted for their support to those benign elementary feelings of society, for the preservation and cherishing of which, among other important objects, government was from the beginning ordained.

Therefore, by the strongest obligations, we were bound to be studious of a delicate and respectful bearing towards those ill-fated nations, our Allies: and consequently, if the government of the Portugueze, though weak in power, possessed their affections, and was strong in right, it was incumbent upon us to turn our first thoughts to that government,--to look for it if it were hidden--to call it forth,--and, by our power combined with that of the people, to assert its rights. Or, if the government were dissolved and had no existence, it was our duty, in such an emergency, to have resorted to the nation, expressing its will through the most respectable and conspicuous authority, through that which seemed to have the best right to stand forth as its representative. In whatever circumstances Portugal had been placed, the paramount right of the Portugueze nation, or government, to appear not merely as a party but a principal, ought to have been established as a primary position, without the admission of which, all proposals to treat would be peremptorily rejected. But the Portugueze "had" a government; they had a lawful prince in Brazil; and a regency, appointed by him, at home; and generals, at the head of considerable bodies of troops, appointed also by the regency or the prince. Well then might one of those generals enter a formal protest against the treaty, on account of its being 'totally void of that deference due to the prince regent, or the government that represents him; as being hostile to the sovereign authority and independence of that government; and as being against the honour, safety, and independence of the nation.' I have already reminded the reader, of the benign and happy influences which might have attended upon a different conduct; how much good we might have added to that already in existence; how far we might have assisted in strengthening, among our Allies, those powers, and in developing those virtues, which were producing themselves by a natural process, and to which these breathings of insult must have been a deadly check and interruption. Nor would the evil be merely negative; for the interference of professed friends, acting in this manner, must have superinduced dispositions and passions, which were alien to the condition of the Portugueze;--scattered weeds which could not have been found upon the soil, if our ignorant hands had not sown them. Of this I will not now speak, for I have already detained the reader too long at the threshold;--but I have put the master key into his possession; and every chamber which he opens will be found loathsome as the one which he last quitted. Let us then proceed.

By the first article of the Convention it is covenanted, that all the places and forts in the kingdom of Portugal, occupied by the French troops, shall be delivered to the British army. Articles IV. and XII. are to the same effect--determining the surrender of Portugueze fortified places, stores, and ships, to the English forces; but not a word of their being to be holden in trust for the prince regent, or his government, to whom they belonged! The same neglect or contempt of justice and decency is shewn here, as in the preamble to these instruments. It was further shewn afterwards, by the act of hoisting the British flag instead of the Portugueze upon these forts, when they were first taken possession of by the British forces. It is no excuse to say that this was not intended. Such inattentions are among the most grievous faults which can be committed; and are "impossible", when the affections and understandings of men are of that quality, and in that state, which are required for a service in which there is any thing noble or virtuous. Again, suppose that it was the purpose of the generals, who signed and ratified a Convention containing the articles in question, that the forts and ships, &c. should be delivered immediately to the Portugueze government,--would the delivering up of them wipe away the affront? Would it not rather appear, after the omission to recognize the right, that we had ostentatiously taken upon us to bestow--as a boon--- that which they felt to be their own?

Passing by, as already deliberated and decided upon, those conditions, (Articles II. and III.) by which it is stipulated, that the French army shall not be considered as prisoners of war, shall be conveyed with arms, &c. to some port between Rochefort and L'Orient, and be at liberty to serve; I come to that memorable condition, (Article V.) 'that the French army shall carry with it all its equipments, that is to say, its military chests and carriages, attached to the field commissariat and field hospitals, or shall be allowed to dispose of such part, as the Commander in Chief may judge it unnecessary to embark. In like manner all individuals of the army shall be at liberty to dispose of "their private property" of "every" description, with full security hereafter for the purchasers.' This is expressed still more pointedly in the Armistice,--though the meaning, implied in the two articles, is precisely the same. For, in the fifth article of the Armistice, it is agreed provisionally, 'that all those, of whom the French army consists, shall be conveyed to France with arms and baggage, "and" all their private property of every description, no part of which shall be wrested from them.' In the Convention it is only expressed, that they shall be at liberty to depart, (Article II.) with arms and baggage, and (Article V.) to dispose of their private property of every description. But, if they had a right to dispose of it, "this" would include a right to carry it away--which was undoubtedly understood by the French general. And in the Armistice it is expressly said, that their private property of every description shall be conveyed to France along with their persons. What then are we to understand by the words, "their private property of every description"? Equipments of the army in general, and baggage of individuals, had been stipulated for before: now we all know that the lawful professional gains and earnings of a soldier must be small; that he is not in the habit of carrying about him, during actual warfare, any accumulation of these or other property; and that the ordinary private property, which he can be supposed to have a "just" title to, is included under the name of his "baggage";--therefore this was something more; and what it was--is apparent. No part of their property, says the Armistice, shall be "wrested from them". Who does not see in these words the consciousness of guilt, an indirect self-betraying admission that they had in their hands treasures which might be lawfully taken from them, and an anxiety to prevent that act of justice by a positive stipulation? Who does not see, on what sort of property the Frenchman had his eye; that it was not property by right, but their "possessions"--their plunder--every thing, by what means soever acquired, that the French army, or any individual in it, was possessed of? But it has been urged, that the monstrousness of such a supposition precludes this interpretation, renders it impossible that it could either be intended by the one party, or so understood by the other. What right they who signed, and he who ratified this Convention, have to shelter themselves under this plea--will appear from the 16th and 17th articles. In these it is stipulated, 'that all subjects of France, or of Powers in alliance with France, domiciliated in Portugal, or accidentally in the country, shall have their property of every kind--moveable and immoveable--guaranteed to them, with liberty of retaining or disposing of it, and passing the produce into France:' the same is stipulated, (Article XVII.) for such natives of Portugal as have sided with the French, or occupied situations under "the French Government". Here then is a direct avowal, still more monstrous, that every Frenchman, or native of a country in alliance with France, however obnoxious his crimes may have made him, and every traitorous Portugueze, shall have his property guaranteed to him (both previously to and after the reinstatement of the Portugueze government) by the British army! Now let us ask, what sense the word property must have had fastened to it in "these" cases. Must it not necessarily have included all the rewards which the Frenchman had received for his iniquity, and the traitorous Portugueze for his treason? (for no man would bear a part in such oppressions, or would be a traitor for nothing; and, moreover, all the rewards, which the French could bestow, must have been taken from the Portugueze, extorted from the honest and loyal, to be given to the wicked and disloyal.) These rewards of iniquity must necessarily have been included; for, on our side, no attempt is made at a distinction; and, on the side of the French, the word "immoveable" is manifestly intended to preclude such a distinction, where alone it could have been effectual. Property, then, here means--possessions thus infamously acquired; and, in the instance of the Portugueze, the fundamental notion of the word is subverted; for a traitor can have no property, till the government of his own country has remitted the punishment due to his crimes. And these wages of guilt, which the master by such exactions was enabled to pay, and which the servant thus earned, are to be guaranteed to him by a British "army"! Where does there exist a power on earth that could confer this right? If the Portugueze government itself had acted in this manner, it would have been guilty of wilful suicide; and the nation, if it had acted so, of high treason against itself. Let it not, then, be said, that the monstrousness of covenanting to convey, along with the persons of the French, their plunder, secures the article from the interpretation which the people of Great Britain gave, and which, I have now proved, they were bound to give to it.--But, conceding for a moment, that it was not intended that the words should bear this sense, and that, neither in a fair grammatical construction, nor as illustrated by other passages or by the general tenour of the document, they actually did bear it, had not unquestionable voices proclaimed the cruelty and rapacity--the acts of sacrilege, assassination, and robbery, by which these treasures had been amassed? Was not the perfidy of the French army, and its contempt of moral obligation, both as a body and as to the individuals which composed it, infamous through Europe?--Therefore, the concession would signify nothing: for our Generals, by allowing an army of this character to depart with its equipments, waggons, military chest, and baggage, had provided abundant means to enable it to carry off whatsoever it desired, and thus to elude and frustrate any stipulations which might have been made for compelling it to restore that which had been so iniquitously seized. And here are we brought back to the fountain-head of all this baseness; to that apathy and deadness to the principle of justice, through the influence of which, this army, outlawed by its crimes, was suffered to depart from the Land, over which it had so long tyrannized--other than as a band of disarmed prisoners.--I maintain, therefore, that permission to carry off the booty was distinctly expressed; and, if it had not been so, that the principle of justice could not here be preserved; as a violation of it must necessarily have followed from other conditions of the treaty. Sir Hew Dalrymple himself, before the Court of Inquiry, has told us, in two letters (to Generals Beresford and Friere,) that 'such part of the plunder as was in money, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify;' and, consequently, the French could not be prevented from carrying it away with them. From the same letters we learn, that 'the French were intending to carry off a considerable part of their plunder, by calling it public money, and saying that it belonged to the military chest; and that their evasions of the article were most shameful, and evinced a want of probity and honour, which was most disgraceful to them.' If the French had given no other proofs of their want of such virtues, than those furnished by this occasion, neither the Portugueze, nor Spanish, nor British nations would condemn them, nor hate them as they now do; nor would this article of the Convention have excited such indignation. For the French, by so acting, could not deem themselves breaking an engagement; no doubt they looked upon themselves as injured,--that the failure in good faith was on the part of the British; and that it was in the lawlessness of power, and by a mere quibble, that this construction was afterwards put upon the article in question.

Widely different from the conduct of the British was that of the Spaniards in a like case:--with high feeling did they, abating not a jot or a tittle, enforce the principle of justice. 'How,' says the governor of Cadiz to General Dupont in the same noble letter before alluded to, 'how,' says he, after enumerating the afflictions which his army, and the tyrant who had sent it, had unjustly brought upon the Spanish nation, (for of these, in "their" dealings with the French, they never for a moment lost sight,) 'how,' asks he, 'could you expect, that your army should carry off from Spain the fruit of its rapacity, cruelty, and impiety? how could you conceive this possible, or that we should be so stupid or senseless?' And this conduct is as wise in reason as it is true to nature. The Spanish people could have had no confidence in their government, if it had not acted thus. These are the sympathies which, prove that a government is paternal,--that it makes one family with the people: besides, it is only by such adherence to justice, that, in times of like commotion, popular excesses can either be mitigated or prevented. If we would be efficient allies of Spain, nay, if we would not run the risk of doing infinite harm, these sentiments must not only be ours as a nation, but they must pervade the hearts of our ministers and our generals--our agents and our ambassadors. If it be not so, they, who are sent abroad, must either be conscious how unworthy they are, and with what unworthy commissions they appear, or not: if they do feel this, then they must hang their heads, and blush for their country and themselves; if they do not, the Spaniards must blush for them and revolt from them; or, what would be ten thousand times more deplorable, they must purchase a reconcilement and a communion by a sacrifice of all that is excellent in themselves. Spain must either break down her lofty spirit, her animation and fiery courage, to run side by side in the same trammels with Great Britain; or she must start off from her intended yoke-fellow with contempt and aversion. This is the alternative, and there is no avoiding it.

I have yet to speak of the influence of such concessions upon the French Ruler and his army. With what Satanic pride must he have contemplated the devotion of his servants and adherents to "their" law, the steadiness and zeal of their perverse loyalty, and the faithfulness with which they stand by him and each other! How must his heart have distended with false glory, while he contrasted these qualities of his subjects with the insensibility and slackness of his British enemies! This notice has, however, no especial propriety in this place; for, as far as concerns Bonaparte, his pride and depraved confidence may be equally fed by almost all the conditions of this instrument. But, as to his army, it is plain that the permission (whether it be considered as by an express article formally granted, or only involved in the general conditions of the treaty), to bear away in triumph the harvest of its crimes, must not only have emboldened and exalted it with arrogance, and whetted its rapacity; but that hereby every soldier, of which this army was composed, must, upon his arrival in his own country, have been a seed which would give back plenteously in its kind. The French are at present a needy people, without commerce or manufactures,--unsettled in their minds and debased in their morals by revolutionary practices and habits of warfare; and the youth of the country are rendered desperate by oppression, which, leaving no choice in their occupation, discharges them from all responsibility to their own consciences. How powerful then must have been the action of such incitements upon a people so circumstanced! The actual sight, and, far more, the imaginary sight and handling of these treasures, magnified by the romantic tales which must have been spread about them, would carry into every town and village an antidote for the terrors of conscription; and would rouze men, like the dreams imported from the new world when the first discoverers and adventurers returned, with their ingots and their gold dust--their stories and their promises, to inflame and madden the avarice of the old. 'What an effect,' says the Governor of Cadiz, 'must it have upon the people,' (he means the Spanish people,) 'to know that a single soldier was carrying away 2580 livres tournois!' What an effect, (he might have said also,) must it have upon the French!--I direct the reader's attention to this, because it seems to have been overlooked; and because some of the public journals, speaking of the Convention, (and, no doubt, uttering the sentiments of several of their readers,)--say 'that they are disgusted with the transaction, not because the French have been permitted to carry off a few diamonds, or some ingots of silver; but because we confessed, by consenting to the treaty, that an army of 35,000 British troops, aided by the Portugueze nation, was not able to compel 20,000 French to surrender at discretion.' This is indeed the root of the evil, as hath been shewn; and it is the curse of this treaty, that the several parts of it are of such enormity as singly to occupy the attention and to destroy comparison and coexistence. But the people of Great Britain are disgusted both with the one and the other. They bewail the violation of the principle: if the value of the things carried off had been in itself trifling, their grief and their indignation would have been scarcely less. But it is manifest, from what has been said, that it was not trifling; and that therefore, (upon that account as well as upon others,) this permission was no less impolitic than it was unjust and dishonourable.

In illustrating these articles of the Armistice and Convention, by which the French were both expressly permitted and indirectly enabled to carry off their booty, we have already seen, that a concession was made which is still more enormous; viz. that all subjects of France, or of powers in alliance with France, domiciliated in Portugal or resident there, and all natives of Portugal who have accepted situations under "the French government", &c., shall have their "property" of every kind guaranteed to them by the British army. By articles 16th and 17th, their "persons" are placed under the like protection. 'The French' (Article XVI.) 'shall be at liberty either to accompany the French army, or to remain in Portugal;' 'And the Portugueze' (Article XVII.) 'shall not be rendered accountable for their political conduct during the period of the occupation of the country by the French army: they all are placed under the protection of the British commanders, and shall sustain no injury in their property or persons.'

I have animadverted, heretofore, upon the unprofessional eagerness of our Generals to appear in the character of negotiators when the sword would have done them more service than the pen. But, if they had confined themselves to mere military regulations, they might indeed with justice have been grievously censured as injudicious commanders, whose notion of the honour of armies was of a low pitch, and who had no conception of the peculiar nature of the service in which they were engaged: but the censure must have stopped here. Whereas, by these provisions, they have shewn that they have never reflected upon the nature of military authority as contra-distinguished from civil. French example had so far dazzled and blinded them, that the French army is suffered to denominate itself '"the French government";' and, from the whole tenour of these instruments, (from the preamble, and these articles especially,) it should seem that our Generals fancied themselves and their army to be "the British government". For these regulations, emanating from a mere military authority, are purely civil; but of such a kind, that no power on earth could confer a right to establish them. And this trampling upon the most sacred rights--this sacrifice of the consciousness of a self-preserving principle, without which neither societies nor governments can exist, is not made by our generals in relation to subjects of their own sovereign, but to an independent nation, our ally, into whose territories we could not have entered but from its confidence in our friendship and good faith. Surely the persons, who (under the countenance of too high authority) have talked so loudly of prejudging this question, entirely overlooked or utterly forgot this part of it. What have these monstrous provisions to do with the relative strength of the two armies, or with any point admitting a doubt? What need here of a Court of Judicature to settle who were the persons (their names are subscribed by their own hands), and to determine the quality of the thing? Actions and agents like these, exhibited in this connection with each other, must of necessity be condemned the moment they are known: and to assert the contrary, is to maintain that man is a being without understanding, and that morality is an empty dream. And, if this condemnation must after this manner follow, to utter it is less a duty than a further inevitable consequence from the constitution of human nature. They, who hold that the formal sanction of a Court of Judicature is in this case required before a people has a right to pass sentence know not to what degree they are enemies to that people and to mankind; to what degree selfishness, whether arising from their peculiar situation or from other causes, has in them prevailed over those faculties which are our common inheritance, and cut them off from fellowship with the species. Most deplorable would be the result, if it were possible that the injunctions of these men could be obeyed, or their remonstrances acknowledged to be just. For, (not to mention that, if it were not for such prompt decisions of the public voice, misdemeanours of men high in office would rarely be accounted for at all,) we must bear in mind, at this crisis, that the adversary of all good is hourly and daily extending his ravages; and, according to such notions of fitness, our indignation, our sorrow, our shame, our sense of right and wrong, and all those moral affections, and powers of the understanding, by which alone he can be effectually opposed, are to enter upon a long vacation; their motion is to be suspended--a thing impossible; if it could, it would be destroyed.

Let us now see what language the Portugueze speak upon that part of the treaty which has incited me to give vent to these feelings, and to assert these truths. 'I protest,' says General Friere, 'against Article XVII., one of the two now under examination, because it attempts to tie down the government of this kingdom not to bring to justice and condign punishment those persons, who have been notoriously and scandalously disloyal to their prince and the country by joining and serving the French party: and, even if the English army should be allowed to screen them from the punishment they have deserved, still it should not prevent their expulsion--whereby this country would no longer have to fear being again betrayed by the same men.' Yet, while the partizans of the French are thus guarded, not a word is said to protect the loyal Portugueze, whose fidelity to their country and their prince must have rendered them obnoxious to the French army; and who in Lisbon and the environs, were left at its mercy from the day when the Convention was signed, till the departure of the French. Couple also with this the first additional article, by which it is agreed, 'that the individuals in the civil employment of the army,' (including all the agitators, spies, informers, all the jackals of the ravenous lion,) 'made prisoners either by the British troops or the Portugueze in any part of Portugal, will be restored ("as is customary") without exchange.' That is, no stipulations being made for reciprocal conditions! In fact, through the whole course of this strange interference of a military power with the administration of civil justice in the country of an Ally, there is only one article (the 15th) which bears the least shew of attention to Portugueze interests. By this it is stipulated, 'That, from the date of the ratification of the Convention, all arrears of contributions, requisitions, or claims whatever of the French Government against subjects of Portugal, or any other individuals residing in this country, founded on the occupation of Portugal by the French troops in the month of December 1807, which may not have been paid up, are cancelled: and all sequestrations, laid upon their property moveable or immoveable, are removed; and the free disposal of the same is restored to the proper owners.' Which amounts to this. The French are called upon formally to relinquish, in favour of the Portugueze, that to which they never had any right; to abandon false claims, which they either had a power to enforce, or they had not: if they departed immediately and had "not" power, the article was nugatory; if they remained a day longer and "had" power, there was no security that they would abide by it. Accordingly, loud complaints were made that, after the date of the Convention, all kinds of ravages were committed by the French upon Lisbon and its neighbourhood: and what did it matter whether these were upon the plea of old debts and requisitions; or new debts were created more greedily than ever--from the consciousness that the time for collecting them was so short? This article, then, the only one which is even in shew favourable to the Portugueze, is, in substance, nothing: inasmuch as, in what it is silent upon, (viz. that the People of Lisbon and its neighbourhood shall not be vexed and oppressed by the French, during their stay, with new claims and robberies,) it is grossly cruel or negligent; and, in that for which it actually stipulates, wholly delusive. It is in fact insulting; for the very admission of a formal renunciation of these claims does to a certain degree acknowledge their justice. The only decent manner of introducing matter to this effect would have been by placing it as a bye clause of a provision that secured the Portugueze from further molestations, and merely alluding to it as a thing understood of course. Yet, from the place which this specious article occupies, (preceding immediately the 16th and 17th which we have been last considering,) it is clear that it must have been intended by the French General as honey smeared upon the edge of the cup--to make the poison, contained in those two, more palateable.

Thus much for the Portugueze, and their particular interests. In one instance, a concern of the Spanish Nation comes directly under notice; and that Nation also is treated without delicacy or feeling. For by the 18th article it is agreed, 'that the Spaniards, (4000 in number) who had been disarmed, and were confined on ship-board in the port of Lisbon by the French, should be liberated.' And upon what consideration? Not upon their "right" to be free, as having been treacherously and cruelly dealt with by men who were part of a Power that was labouring to subjugate their country, and in this attempt had committed inhuman crimes against it;--not even exchanged as soldiers against soldiers:--but the condition of their emancipation is, that the British General engages 'to obtain of the Spaniards to restore such French subjects, either military or civil, as have been detained in Spain, without having been taken in battle or in consequence of military operations, but on account of the "occurrences" of the 29th of last May and the days immediately following. '"Occurrences"!' I know not what are exactly the features of the face for which this word serves as a veil: I have no register at hand to inform me what these events precisely were: but there can be no doubt that it was a time of triumph for liberty and humanity; and that the persons, for whom these noble-minded Spaniards were to be exchanged, were no other than a horde from among the most abject of the French Nation; probably those wretches, who, having never faced either the dangers or the fatigues of war, had been most busy in secret preparations or were most conspicuous in open acts of massacre, when the streets of Madrid, a few weeks before, had been drenched with the blood of two thousand of her bravest citizens. Yet the liberation of these Spaniards, upon these terms, is recorded (in the report of the Court of Enquiry) 'as one of the advantages which, in the contemplation of the Generals, would result from the Convention!'

Finally, 'If there shall be any doubt (Article XIV.) as to the meaning of any article, it shall be explained favourably to the French Army; and Hostages (Article XX.) of the rank of Field Officers, on the part of the British Army and Navy, shall be furnished for the guarantee of the present Convention.'

I have now gone through the painful task of examining the most material conditions of the CONVENTION of CINTRA:--the whole number of the articles is twenty-two, with three additional ones--a long ladder into a deep abyss of infamy!--

Need it be said that neglects--injuries--and insults--like these which we have been contemplating, come from what quarter they may, let them be exhibited towards whom they will, must produce not merely mistrust and jealousy, but alienation and hatred. The passions and feelings may be quieted or diverted for a short time; but, though out of sight or seemingly asleep, they must exist; and the life which they have received cannot, but by a long course of justice and kindness, be overcome and destroyed. But why talk of a long course of justice and kindness, when the immediate result must have been so deplorable? Relying upon our humanity, our fellow-feeling, and our justice, upon these instant and urgent claims, sanctioned by the more mild one of ancient alliance, the Portugueze People by voices from every part of their land entreated our succour; the arrival of a British Army upon their coasts was joyfully hailed; and the people of the country zealously assisted in landing the troops; without which help, as a British General has informed us, that landing could not have been effected. And it is in this manner that they are repaid! Scarcely have we set foot upon their country before we sting them into self-reproaches, and act in every thing as if it were our wish to make them ashamed of their generous confidence as of a foolish simplicity--proclaiming to them that they have escaped from one thraldom only to fall into another. If the French had any traitorous partizans in Portugal, (and we have seen that such there were; and that nothing was left undone on our part, which could be done, to keep them there, and to strengthen them) what answer could have been given to one of these, if (with this treaty in his hand) he had said, 'The French have dealt hardly with us, I allow; but we have gained nothing: the change is not for the better, but for the worse: for the appetite of their tyranny was palled; but this, being new to its food, is keen and vigorous. If you have only a choice between two masters, (such an advocate might have argued) chose always the stronger: for he, after his evil passions have had their first harvest, confident in his strength, will not torment you wantonly in order to prove it. Besides, the property which he has in you he can maintain; and there will be no risk of your being torn in pieces--the unsettled prey of two rival claimants. You will thus have the advantage of a fixed and assured object of your hatred: and your fear, being stripped of doubt, will lose its motion and its edge: both passions will relax and grow mild; and, though they may not turn into reconcilement and love, though you may not be independent nor be free, yet you will at least exist in tranquillity,--and possess, if not the activity of hope, the security of despair.' No effectual answer, I say, could have been given to a man pleading thus in such circumstances. So much for the choice of evils. But, for the hope of good!--what is to become of the efforts and high resolutions of the Portugueze and Spanish Nations, manifested by their own hand in the manner which we have seen? They may live indeed and prosper; but not by us, but in despite of us.

Whatever may be the character of the Portugueze Nation; be it true or not, that they had a becoming sense of the injuries which they had received from the French Invader, and were rouzed to throw off oppression by a universal effort, and to form a living barrier against it;--certain it is that, betrayed and trampled upon as they had been, they held unprecedented claims upon humanity to secure them from further outrages.--Moreover, our conduct towards them was grossly inconsistent. For we entered their country upon the supposition that they had such sensibility and virtue; we announced to them publickly and solemnly our belief in this: and indeed to have landed a force in the Peninsula upon any other inducement would have been the excess of folly and madness. But the Portugueze "are" a brave people--a people of great courage and worth! Conclusions, drawn from intercourse with certain classes of the depraved inhabitants of Lisbon only, and which are true only with respect to them, have been hastily extended to the whole Nation, which has thus unjustly suffered both in our esteem and in that of all Europe. In common with their neighbours the Spaniards, they "were" making a universal, zealous, and fearless effort; and, whatever may be the final issue, the very act of having risen under the pressure and in the face of the most tremendous military power which the earth has ever seen--is itself evidence in their favour, the strongest and most comprehensive which can be given; a transcendent glory! which, let it be remembered, no subsequent failures in duty on their part can forfeit. This they must have felt--that they had furnished an illustrious example; and that nothing can abolish their claim upon the good wishes and upon the gratitude of mankind, which is--and will be through all ages their due. At such a time, then, injuries and insults from any quarter would have been deplorable; but, proceeding from us, the evil must have been aggravated beyond calculation. For we have, throughout Europe, the character of a sage and meditative people. Our history has been read by the degraded Nations of the Continent with admiration, and some portions of it with awe; with a recognition of superiority and distance, which was honourable to us--salutary for those to whose hearts, in their depressed state, it could find entrance--and promising for the future condition of the human race. We have been looked up to as a people who have acted nobly; whom their constitution of government has enabled to speak and write freely, and who therefore have thought comprehensively; as a people among whom philosophers and poets, by their surpassing genius--their wisdom--and knowledge of human nature, have circulated--and made familiar--divinely-tempered sentiments and the purest notions concerning the duties and true dignity of individual and social man in all situations and under all trials. By so readily acceding to the prayers with which the Spaniards and Portugueze entreated our assistance, we had proved to them that we were not wanting in fellow-feeling. Therefore might we be admitted to be judges between them and their enemies--unexceptionable judges--more competent even than a dispassionate posterity, which, from the very want comparatively of interest and passion, might be in its examination remiss and negligent, and therefore in its decision erroneous. We, their contemporaries, were drawn towards them as suffering beings; but still their sufferings were not ours, nor could be; and we seemed to stand at that due point of distance from which right and wrong might be fairly looked at and seen in their just proportions. Every thing conspired to prepossess the Spaniards and Portugueze in our favour, and to give the judgment of the British Nation authority in their eyes. Strange, then, would be their first sensations, when, upon further trial, instead of a growing sympathy, they met with demonstrations of a state of sentiment and opinion abhorrent from their own. A s