In his last Spanish battle, the victory of the Pyrenees, where he had to defend a frontier of sixty miles, he drove Soult over the mountains, and was the first of all the generals engaged in Continental hostilities, to plant his columns on French ground!

Those are the facts of seven years of the most perilous war, against the most powerful monarch whom Europe had seen for a thousand years. The French army in the Peninsula had varied from 150,000 to 300,000 men. It was constantly recruited from a national force of 600,000. It was under the authority of a great military sovereign, wholly irresponsible, and commanding the entire resources of the most populous, warlike, and powerful of Continental states. The British general, on the other hand, was exposed to every difficulty which could embarrass the highest military skill. He had to guide the councils of the two most self-willed nations in existence. He had to train native armies, which scoffed at English discipline; he had the scarcely less difficult task of contending with the fluctuating opinions of public men in England yet he never shrank; he never was shaken in council, and he never was defeated in the field.

But by what means were all this succession of unbroken victories achieved? Who can listen to the French babbling, which tells us that it was done, simply by standing still to be beaten? The very nature of the war, with an army composed of the raw battalions of England, which had not seen a shot fired since the invasion of Holland in 1794, a period of fourteen years; his political anxieties from his position with the suspicious governments of Spain and Portugal, and not less with his own fluctuating Legislature; his encounters with a force quadruple his own, commanded by the most practised generals in Europe, and under the supreme direction of the conqueror of the Continent-A condition of things so new, perplexing, and exposed to perpetual hazard, in itself implies enterprise, a character of sleepless activity, unwearied resource, and unhesitating intrepidity-all the very reverse of passiveness.

That this illustrious warrior did not plunge into conflict on every fruitless

caprice; that he was not for ever fighting for the Gazette; that he valued the lives of his brave men; that he never made a march without a rational object, nor ever fought a battle without a rational calculation of victoryall this is only to say, that he fulfilled the duties of a great officer, and deserved the character of a great man. But, that he made more difficult campaigns, fought against a greater inequality of force, held out against more defective means, and accomplished more decisive successes, than any general on record, is mere matter of history.

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His last and greatest triumph was Waterloo,-a victory less over army than an empire,-a triumph gained less for England than for Europe,-the glorious termination of a contest for the welfare of mankind. Waterloo was a defensive battle. But it was not the rule, but the exception. The object of the enemy was Brussels: "To-night you shall sleep in Brussels," was the address of the French Emperor to his troops. Wellington's was but the wing of a great army spread over leagues to meet the march of the French to Brussels. His force consisted of scarcely more than 40,000 British and Hanoverians, chiefly new troops; the rest were foreigners, who could scarcely be relied on. The enemy in front of him were 80,000 veterans, commanded by Napoleon in person. The left wing of the Allied force-the Prussians-could not arrive till seven in the evening; after the battle had continued eight hours. The British general, under those circumstances, could not move; but he was not to be beaten. he had 80,000 British troops, he would have finished the battle in an hour. On seeing the Prussian troops in a position to follow up success, he gave the order to advance; and in a single charge swept the French army, the Emperor, and his fortunes, from the field! Thus closed the 18th of June 1815.

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Within three days, this " man of passiveness" crossed the French frontier, (June 21,) took every town in his way, (and all the French towns on that route are fortified,) and, on the 30th, the English and Prussians invested Paris. On the 3d of July, the capitulation of Paris, garrisoned by

50,000 regular troops and the national guard, was signed at St Cloud, and the French army was marched to the Loire, where it was disbanded.

We have now given the answer which common sense gives, and which history will always give, to the childishness of accounting for Wellington's unrivalled successes by his "doing nothing" until the "invincible" French chose to grow weary of being invincible. The historic fact is, that their generals met a superior general; that their troops met Englishmen, commanded by an officer worthy of such a command; and that "enterprise" of the most daring, sagacious, and brilliant order, was the especial, peculiar, and unequalled character of Wellington.

The volumes of M. Gravière are interesting; but he must unlearn his prejudices; or, if that be nationally impossible, he must palliate them into something like probability. He must do this even in consideration of the national passion for "glory." To be beaten by eminent military qualities softens the shame of defeat; but to be

beaten by mere passiveness,-to be driven from a scene of possession by phlegm, and to be stript of laurels by the hand of indolence and inaptitude, must be the last aggravation of military misfortune.

Yet, this stain they must owe to the pen of men who subscribe to the doctrine, that the great soldier of England conquered simply by his incapacity for action!

We think differently of the French people and of the French soldiery. The people are intelligent and ingenious; the soldiery are faithful and brave. England has no prejudices against either. Willing to do justice to the merits of all, she rejoices in making allies of nations, whom she has never feared as enemies. She wants no conquest, she desires no victories. Her glory is the peace of mankind.

But, she will not suffer the tombs of her great men to be defaced, nor their names to be taken down from the temple consecrated to the renown of their country.

In the absence of any real history of Ireland, the memoirs of its distinguished persons are of the first importance. They are the landmarks within which the broad and general track of historic narrative must be led. They fix character-the most necessary aid to the larger views of the historian. They disclose to us those secret springs which regulate the great social machinery; and by an especial faculty, more valuable than all, they bring us face to face with minds of acknowledged eminence, teach us the course which the known conquerors of difficulties have pursued, and exhibit the training by which the championship of nations is to be sustained. As the old lawgiver commanded that beautiful statues should be placed before the Spartan wives, to impress their infants with beauty of countenance and stateliness of form, the study of greatness has a tendency to elevate our nature; and though camps and councils may be above our course, yet the light shed from those higher spheres may guide our steps through the tangled paths of our humbler world.

The present memoir gives evidence of an additional merit in biography: it assists justice; it offers the power of clearing character, which might have been refused to the living; it brings forward means of justification, which the dignity of the injured, his contempt of calumny, or the circumstances of his time, might have locked up in his bosom. It is an appeal from the passion of the hour to the soberness of years. It has the sincerity and the sanctity of a voice from the world of the future.

The Stewarts, ancestors of the Marquis of Londonderry, came originally from Scotland, and, settling in Ireland in the reign of James I., obtained large possessions among the forfeited lands in Ulster. The family were Protestants, and distinguished themselves by Protestant loyalty in the

troubled times of Ireland-a country where trouble seems to be indigenous. One of those loyalists was Colonel William Stewart, who, during the Irish war, under James II., raised a troop of horse at his own expense, and skirmished vigorously against the Popish enemy at the siege of Londonderry. For this good service he was attainted, with all the chief gentry of the kingdom, in the confiscating parliament of James. But the confiscation was not carried into effect, and the estate remained to a long line of successors.

The father of the late Marquis of Londonderry was the first of the family who was ennobled. He was an active, intelligent, and successful man. Representing his county in two parliaments, and, acting with the government, he partook of that golden shower which naturally falls from the treasury. He became in succession the possessor of office and the possessor of title

baron, viscount, earl, and marquis and wisely allied himself with English nobility, marrying, first, a daughter of the Earl of Hertford, and, secondly, a sister of Lord Camden. The subject of this memoir was a son of the first marriage, and was born in Ireland on the 18th of June 1769. From boyhood he was remarkable for coolness and intrepidity, and was said to have exhibited both qualities in saving a young companion in the lake of Strangford. At the age of seventeen he was entered of St John's College, Cambridge, where he seems to have applied himself actively to the general studies of the place-elementary mathematics, classics, logic, and moral philosophy. This sufficiently answers the subsequent taunts at the narrowness of his education.

As his father had been a politician, his son and heir was naturally intended for political life. The first step of his ambition was a costly one. County elections in those days were formidable affairs. The Hillsborough

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family had formerly monopolised the county. Young Stewart was put forward, according to custom, as the champion of independence." He gained but half the day, for the Hillsboroughs still retained one nominee. The young candidate became a member of parliament, but this step cost £60,000.

The sacrifice was enormous, and perhaps, in our day, might startle the proudest rent-roll in England: but, seventy years ago, and in Ireland, the real expenditure was probably equivalent to £100,000 in our day. And it must have been still more distressing to the family, from the circumstance, that the sum had been accumulated to build a mansion; that the expense of the election also required the sale of a fine old collection of family portraits; and that the old lord was forced to spend the remainder of his life in what the biographer states to be an old barn, with a few rooms added. But his son was now launched on public life-that stream in which. many dashing swimmers sink, but in which talent, guided by caution, seldom fails to float along, until nature or weariness finishes the effort, and the man disappears, like all who went before.

The young member, fresh from college, and flushed with triumph over "parliamentary monopoly," was, of course, a Whig. Plutarch's Lives, and the history of the classic commonwealths, make every boy at school a Whig. It is only when they emerge from the cloudy imaginations of republicanism, and the fabulous feats of Greek championship, that they acquire common sense, and act according to the realities of things. The future statesman commenced his career by the ultra-patriotism of giving a written pledge," on the hustings, to the support of "parliamentary reform."

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With this act of boyishness he was, of course, taunted in after-life by the Whigs. But his answer was natural and just: it was in substance, that he had been, in 1790, an advocate for Irish reform; and if the Irish parliament had continued under the same circumstances, he would be an advocate for its reform still. in 1793 a measure had been carried,

VOL. LXIV.-NO. CCCXCVII.

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which made all change perilous: the Popish peasantry had been suffered to obtain the right of voting; and thenceforward he should not aid parliamentary reform.

It is to be observed, that this language was not used under the temptation of office, for he did not possess any share in administration until four years afterwards, in 1797.

The forty-shilling franchise was the monster evil of Ireland. Every measure of corruption, of conspiracy, and of public convulsion, originated in that most mischievous, factious, and false step. It put the whole parliamentary power of the country into the hands of faction; made public counsel the dictation of the populace; turned every thing into a job; and finally, by the pampering of the rabble, inflamed them into civil war, and, by swamping the constituency, rendered the extinction of the parliament a matter of necessity to the existence of the constitution.

To this measure-at once weak and ruinous, at once the triumph of faction and the deathblow of Irish tranquillity; at once paralysing all the powers of the legislature for good, and sinking the peasantry into deeper degradation-we must give a few words.

The original condition of the peasantry in Ireland was serfdom. A few hereditary chiefs, with the power of life and death, ruled the whole lower population, as the master of the herd rules his cattle. English law raised them from this condition, and gave them the rights of Englishmen. But no law of earth could give the Celt the industry, frugality, or perseverance of the Englishman. The result was, that the English artificer, husbandman, and trader, became men of property, while the Celt lingered out life in the idleness of his forefathers. Robbery was easier than work, and he robbed; rebellion was more tempting than loyalty, and he rebelled

the result was the frequent forfeiture of the lands of chiefs, who, prompted by their priests, excited by their passions, and urged by the hope of plunder, were continually rebelling, and necessarily punished for their rebellion. Portions of their lands were distributed as the pay of the soldiery

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