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of guards,* and at which he was said to have been present; he turned away to easier triumphs, and committed to Soult the rough experiment of" driving the British into the sea. As it was his habitual policy to keep the marshal's baton at a-sufficient distance from the sceptre; he had, probably, no dis inclination to see Soult's pride, which had already given him some disturbance in Portugal, slightly lectured by the English sword. He now left him to pursue fortune to the borders of the English element. Never was commander more baffled. He was un

able to gain a single advantage in the most disas trous march of the war. Moore reached Corunna, with his army in a state of almost total ruin; without cavalry, artillery, or baggage; without tents, shoes, medicine, money, or food. They had expected to find provisions on the road,-they found every hut deserted; the fleet was to have been ready to receive them at Corunna,-from the heights they could not see a sail round the horizon.

The Spaniards had nothing in their magazines but

This action delighted the French infantry. They saw every feature of it from the heights, and were rejoiced at the defeat of the guard. The French cavalry had assumed that air of superiority over the other branches of the service, which those branches, in all countries, so naturally repay with dislike; and the cavalry of the imperial guard were only the more remarkable for this military coxcombry. They added to their pride in themselves and their horses, in their mustaches, and the vulgar nummeries of court soldiership, demands of a choice of quarters, and other privileges, which excited the gall of the regiments of the line more than their tinsel and feathers.

On this occasion, they had rode down, under Le Clerc, a favourite aid-de camp of the emperor, to " annihilate the English ;" for their contempt of our dismantled troops was in the highest tone. The whole French camp ran out to see this easy victory. They were not kept long in suspense; the British hussars made quick work of it; they no sooner saw the showy garde, than they dashed at them, broke them in all directions, drove one part back through the river, and made the rest, with their general, prisoners. The fugitives, on reascending the hill, were received with a general shout of scorn by the infantry; taunted with all kinds of insolent questions, and asked "how they liked annihilating the enemy?"-"whether they were pleased with the cold bath after their promenade ?"—and, above all," what quarters they would prefer for the night?" The guards were in no condition to retort, but sullenly rode to the rear, and were hazarded no more in skirmishes.

brandy, which made them phrensied and furious; or the impoverished wine of the province, which produced disorders. But the sight of the French columns overtopping the heights round Corúnna, made them soldiers once more. They bore the shock of their well-appointed antagonists with national fortitude, rushed upon them in return, with half their numbers drove thein back on every point, and, covering the ground with slaughter, remained masters of the field. Moore fell, in the moment of victory, cancelling all his errors by his gallant death, and earning for himself a record in the hearts of his countrymen. The army embarked without a shot being fired by the enemy. Soult had received too severe a lesson to hazard a second trial. The lion had turned round on the hunter, given him a grasp that paralyzed him, and then walked quietly away.

The Spanish war lingered. The enthusiasm of the multitude must always be transitory. Their means of life are too dependent on daily exertion, and too much exposed to an invader, to make them capable of long enduring a warfare in the bosom of the land. The beginning of the second campaign found the insurrection melted away, the enemy masters of the chief cities, and the people in despair. The hatred subsisted; but the lofty passion, the valour in the field, and the zeal of public sacrifice, were gone.The dagger was freely substituted for the sword; and the blood of Frenchman and Spaniard was spilled in the gloomy and useless interchanges of private vengeance and military retribution.

Now was fulfilled the evil of a despotic government. It is the instinct of all despotisms to extinguish individual character. They have no fear of a generation of nobles, such as cling to the skirts of foreign courts, fed on the emoluments of fictitious offices, and content to discover dignity in stars and strings. They have no fear of a peasantry, who are too remote, and too busy in toiling for their daily bread, to

be objects of alarm. But their terror is the middle order, the natural deposite of the virtue, manliness, and vigour of a state; the trunk of the tree, which both root and leaf were created to feed, and without which they would both be but cumberers of the ground.

There was no middle order in Spain. A Roman Catholic throne and priesthood had long trampled it into the grave. For centuries, every vigorous intellect or free spirit that started up in Spain, had expiated its offence by the dungeons of the Inquisition, or death. The hour of national peril came; the hero and the statesman were then wildly called for, but the call was unanswered; they were not in existence; the soul was in the grave, or on the winds; and Spain, once so admirable for the brilliancy of its warlike and political genius, exhibited the extraordinary reverse, of ten millions of brave men without a soldier to lead them, and juntas and councils in every province without a statesman capable of directing them to any measure of common wisdom. The burden soon fell on the British, and it was heroically sustained. But the successes of the peninsular war are too familiar to be detailed here. Six years of almost uninterrupted campaigns, in which all the resources of the art of war were displayed on both sides, proved that England could be as invincible by land as on the ocean, placed the Duke of Wellington in a rank with Marlborough, planted the British standard in France for the first time since the Henries and Edwards, and gave the first blow, within his own frontiers, to the hitherto unchecked and unrivalled career of Napoleon.

The British army alone had interposed between Spain and total slavery. For some years its strength was inadequate to the extent of the field, and to the vast resources of the French empire. But a large share of its difficulties arose from the Spaniards themselves. The successive parties which assumed

the government were found equally feeble. The spirit of the juntas was timid, frivolous, and formalizing. With the most worthless part of national pride, they felt it an insult to be saved by the sword of strangers; with the lowest part of national prudence, they dreaded to irritate the enemy by defeating him. They hated the French, but they would not be helped by the English, and they could not help themselves. In this decrepitude, they solaced their wounded vanity by satires and ballads, determinations of future heroism, and the grand recollectionthat their forefathers had expelled the Moors, though the feat had cost them three hundred years!

Those absurdities should be remembered for higher purposes than ridicule. They show how totally the spirit of a grave and high-hearted people may be perverted by a false system of government. The old, generous virtue of the Spanish soil had now force enough only to throw up those flaunting weeds. With liberty, it had lost the rich productiveness of liberty. The juntas differed from the courtiers of the Philips and Ferdinands in nothing but a cockade.

A few years saw them sink into insignificance; and they merited their fate. They had made no use of the highest advantages of their connexion with England. From the great land of freedom, literature, and religion, they borrowed nothing but money and arms. They shrank from the natural and only means of renovating the national heart. While Spain was under the foot of her enemy, with the blood gushing from a thousand wounds, they would suffer no infusion of that living stream of health and virtue which glowed under the impregnable corslet of England.→ They turned away their purblind eyes from the splendours which should have taught them to see; and. abjured her press, her legislature, and, above all, her religion. The cry of "Heresy" was as keen as in the days of Loyola. They dug up the bodies of the English soldiers, as unworthy to sleep in the

same clay with a Spaniard. They repelled and suppressed the Bible! that first book which a true legislator would put into the hands of his people, even as the noblest manual of patriotism.

All the art of man was never able to reconcile religious slavery with civil freedom. What can be the independence of him who, but by the permission of a priest, dares not read the Bible-that first and most perennial source of freedom; that highest fount of stainless principle, unhesitating courage, and fidelity strong as the grave; which, while it ministers, beyond all philosophy, to the contentment of a private career, and divests the bosom of all eagerness for the trivial and vanishing distinctions of public life, yet lays every man under the responsibility of exerting his best powers for the public good; that book, which, teaching him to be zealous without violence, and aspiring without ambition, and filling his mind with calmer and loftier contemplations than the unsubstantial visions of earth, prepares him to look with composure on the severest sacrifices, solicit no other praise than the testimony of his own conscience, and silently devote himself to the cause of man, and of that mighty Being who will not suffer him to be tempted beyond his power.

CHAPTER XV.

The Regency.

THE Prince of Wales, after a long ietirement from public life, was recalled by an event which created the deepest sorrow throughout the empire. The affliction which, in 1788, had made the king incapable of government, was announced to have returned.*

* October 25, 1810.