ness before half the work of life was done. Their violence, their ambition, their romantic existence, their reverses, and their crimes, will for ever fascinate the interest of mankind, and constitute the secret of their fame if not of their greatness. To such attractions the life and character of the Duke of Wellington present no analogy. If he rose to scarce inferior renown, it was by none of the passions or the arts which they indulged or employed. Unvanquished in the field, his sword was never drawn for territorial conquest, but for the independence of Europe and the salvation of his country. Raised by the universal gratitude of Europe and of this nation to the highest point of rank and power which a subject of the British monarchy could attain, he wore those dignities and he used that influence within the strictest limits of a subject's duty. No law was ever twisted to his will, no right was ever sacrificed by one hair's breadth for his aggrandizement. There lived not a man, either among his countrymen or his antagonists, who could say that this great Duke had wronged him; for his entire existence was devoted to the cause of legal authority and regulated power. You seek in it in vain for those strokes of audacious enterprise which in other great captains, his rivals in fame, have sometimes won the prize of crowns or turned the fate of nations. But his whole career shines with the steady light of day. It has nothing to conceal; it has nothing to interpret by the flexible organs of history. Everything in it is manly, compact, and clear; shaped to one rule of public duty, animated by one passion-the love of England, and the service of the Crown.

"The Duke of Wellington lived, commanded, and governed in unconscious indifference or disdainful aversion to those common incentives of human action which are derived from the powers of imagination and of sentiment. He held them cheap, both in their weakness and in their strength. The force and weight of his character stooped to no such adventitious influences. He might have kindled more enthusiasm, especially in the early and doubtful days of his peninsular career; but in his successful and triumphant pursuit of glory her name never passed his lips, even in his addresses to his soldiers. His entire nature and character were moulded on reality. He lived to see things as they were. His acute

glance and cool judgment pierced at once through the surface which entangles the imagination or kindles the sympathy of the feelings. Truth, as he loved her, is to be reached by a rougher path and by sterner minds. In war, in politics, and in the common transactions of life, the Duke of Wellington adhered inflexibly to the most precise correctness in word and deed. His temperament abhorred disguises, and despised exaggerations. The fearlessness of his actions was never the result of speculative confidence or foolhardy presumption, but it lay mainly in a just perception of the true relation in which he stood to his antagonists in the field or in the Senate. The greatest exploits of his life, such as the passage of the Douro, followed by the march on Madrid, the battle of Waterloo, and the passing the Catholic Relief Bill, were performed under no circumstances that could inspire enthusiasm. Nothing but the coolness of the player could have won the mighty stakes upon a cast apparently so adverse to his success. Other commanders have attained the highest pitch of glory when they disposed of the colossal resources of empires, and headed armies already flushed with the conquest of the world. The Duke of Wellington found no such encouragement in any part of his career. At no time were the means at his disposal adequate to the ready and certain execution of his designs. His steady progress in the peninsular campaigns went on against the current of fortune, till that current was itself turned by perseverance and resolution. He had a clear and complete perception of the dangers he encountered, but he saw and grasped the latent power which baffled those dangers, and surmounted resistances apparently invincible. That is precisely the highest degree of courage, for it is courage conscious, enlightened, and determined.

"Clearness of discernment, correctness of judgment, and rectitude in action were, without doubt, the principal elements of the Duke's brilliant achievements in war, and of his vast authority in the councils of his country, as well as in the conferences of Europe. They gave to his determinations an originality and vigour akin to that of genius, and sometimes imparted to his language in debate a pith and significance at which more brilliant orators failed to arrive. His mind, equally careless of obstacles and of effect, travelled by the shortest road to its end; and he retained, even in his

latest years, all the precision with which he was wont to handle the subjects that came before him, or had at any time engrossed his attention. This was the secret of that untaught manliness and simplicity of style that pervades the vast collection of his despatches, written as they were amidst the varied cares and emotions of war; and of that lucid and appropriate mode of exposition which never failed to leave a clear impression on the minds of those whom he addressed. Other men have enjoyed, even in this age, more vivid faculties of invention and contrivance, a more extended range of foresight, a more subtle comprehension of the changing laws of society and the world. But the value of these finer perceptions, and of the policy founded upon them, has never been more assured than when it was tried and admitted by the wisdom and patriotism of that venerable mind. His superiority over other men consisted rather in the perfection of those qualities which he pre-eminently possessed, than in the variety or extent of his other faculties.

66 These powers, which were unerring when applied to definite and certain facts, sometimes failed in the appreciation of causes which had not hitherto come under their observation. It is, perhaps, less to be wondered at that the soldier and the stateman of 1815, born and bred in the highest school of Tory politics, should have miscarried in his opinion of those eventful times which followed the accession of William IV., than that the defeated opponent of reform in 1831 should have risen into the patriot senator of 1846 and 1851. Yet the administration of 1828, in which the Duke of Wellington occupied the first and most responsible place, passed the Catholic Emancipation Act, and thereby gave the signal of a rupture in the Tory party, never afterwards entirely healed, and struck the heaviest blow on a system which the growing energies of the nation resented and condemned. Resolute to oppose what he conceived to be popular clamour, no man ever recognised with more fidelity the claims of a free nation to the gradual development of its interests and its rights; nor were his services to the cause of liberty and improvement the less great because they usually consisted in bending the will or disarming the prejudices of their fiercest opponents. Attached by birth, by character, and by opinion to the order

and the cause of the British aristocracy, the Duke of Wellington knew that the true power of that race of nobles lies, in this age of the world, in their inviolable attachment to constitutional principles, and their honest recognition of popular rights. Although his personal resolution and his military experience qualified him better than other men to be the champion of resistance to popular turbulence and sedition, as he showed by his preparations in May 1832, and in April 1848, yet wisdom and forbearance were ever the handmaidens of his courage, and, while most firmly determined to defend, if necessary, the authority of the state, he was the first to set an example of conciliatory sacrifice to the reasonable claims of the nation. He was the Catulus of our senate, after having been our Cæsar in the field; and, if the commonwealth of England had ever saluted one of her citizens with the Roman title of Parens Patriæ, that touching honour would have been added to the peerage and the baton of Arthur Wellesley by the respectful gratitude and faith of the people.

"Though singularly free from every trace of cant, his mind was no stranger to the sublime influence of religious truth, and he was assiduous in the observances of the public ritual of the church of England. At times, even in the extreme period of his age, some accident would betray the deep current of feeling which he never ceased to entertain towards all that was chivalrous and benevolent. His charities were unostentatious but extensive, and he bestowed his interest throughout life upon an incredible number of persons and things which claimed his notice and solicited his aid. Every social duty, every solemnity, every ceremony, every merrymaking, found him ready to take his part in it. He had a smile for the youngest child, a compliment for the prettiest face, an answer to the readiest tongue, and a lively interest every incident of life, which it seemed beyond the power of age to chill. When time had somewhat relaxed the sterner mould of his manhood, its effects were chiefly indicated by an unabated taste for the amusements of fashionable society, incongruous at times with the dignity of extreme old age, and the recollections of so virile a career. But it seemed a part of the Duke's character that everything that presented itself was equally welcome; for he had

in

become a part of everything, and it was foreign to his nature to stand aloof from any occurrence to which his presence could contribute He seems never to have felt the flagging spirit or the reluctant step of indolence or ennui, or to have recoiled from anything that remained to be done; and this complete performance of every duty, however small, as long as life remained, was the same quality which had carried him in triumph through his campaigns, and raised him to be one of the chief ministers of England, and an arbiter of the fate of Europe.

"It has been said that in the most active and illustriout lives there comes at last some inevitable hour of melancholy and of satiety. Upon the Duke of Wellington that hour lefs no impression, and probably it never shed its influence over him; for he never rested on his former achievements or his length of days, but marched onwards to the end, still heading the youthful generations which had sprung into life around him, and scarcely less intent on their pursuits than they are themselves. It was a finely balanced mind to have worn so bravely and so well. When men in after times shall look back to the annals of England for examples of energy and public virtue among those who have raised this country to her station on the earth, no name will remain more conspicuous or more unsullied than that of Arthur Wellesley, the great Duke of Wellington. The actions of his life were extraordinary; but his character was equal to his actions. He was the very type and model of an Engglishman; and, though men are prone to invest the worthies of former ages with a dignity and merit they commonly withhold from their contemporaries, we can select none from the long array of our captains and our nobies who, taken for all in all, can claim a rivalry with him who is gone from amongst us, an inheritor of imperishable fame."

CHAPTER XXVII.

Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington.

WE have avoided, with very few exceptions, the introduction of anecdotes into the body of our narrative, for