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where Wordsworth sometime fell; nor, whatever the moral equities require, will a soldier in this connexion be denied as a rule more licence than a poet. But, when it comes to a strict investigation, the difficulty is to know whether one has fallen in with the Recording Angel or Sir Benjamin Backbite. There seems no particular reason, for instance, to surrender the Duke's reputation before the assaults of Harriet Wilson. A woman who paints her face for gain may reasonably be expected to touch up her memoirs for money; and once the devastating reflexion that to claim Wellington for a client was, in those days of his pre-eminence, the best copy in the world, has entered into our calculations, we shall have to admit that Mrs Wilson's allegations have left us as wise and no wiser than we were before.

In the other case most generally put forward to prove the Duke's immoral tendencies his critics are now confronted with an explicit denial in a very well-informed quarter. 'Their intimacy,' says Lady Shelley, with reference to the relations between Wellington and Mrs Arbuthnot, 'may have given gossips an excuse for scandal; but I, who knew them both so well, am convinced that the Duke was not her lover. He admired her very much-for she had a manlike sense-but Mrs Arbuthnot was devoid of womanly passions and was above all a loyal and truthful woman.' This opinion, one may add in passing, is much more easy to reconcile than its opposite with Wellington's known devotion to Arbuthnot himself; and the people who suppose the Duke capable of letting the love of a woman play fast and loose with the love of a friend do more damage to their own reputations than they will ever do to his. For my own part I am content to believe that as regards the general issue, my father, who was in a position in his early days, as these letters indicate, to hear a good deal that was said at the time, both at Hatfield and in military circles, of the Duke's private character, got-to use a convenient modernism-the hang of the business more nearly than studious scavengers. He used to say that Wellington was doubtless a great flirt, and gave one to understand that he did not regard him as convicted of anything worse; and this, I suspect, was the broad truth of the matter.

Every man-killer is potentially a woman-killer, and Wellington's charms in his later life exceeded those of the average officer. The dull young aide-de-camp, whom Lady Aldborough found too tiresome to bring home in her carriage from a picnic, had in truth grown, as the years went on, into an extremely engaging old man with a delicious sense of humour and a rare gift of repartee. 'Ladies, ladies, I don't think much of your defences,' he whispered to the industrious guests who had ineffectually built up a wall of books beside his accustomed seat to protect him from the diligent and importunate Stanhope with his nightly quiverful of queries. Very well, gentlemen,' he returned to the mob which barred his path until he would give a cheer for Queen Caroline, 'have it your own way. Three cheers for Queen Caroline-and may all your wives be like her!' I know of no anecdote of Napoleon so entertaining as the first, nor any repartee of Napoleon's so witty as the second.

Who, indeed, can look at the admirable reproduction in Lady Burghclere's book of a miniature of the Duke among his grand-children and doubt, as he gazes at that beautiful, kindly, intelligent old man's head, that Wellington must have been by the end of his life a very great charmer, or that in a fair field with no favour he would have beaten Napoleon as effectively in the drawing-room as he did at Waterloo? His face evidently possessed all the accumulated beauty of a noble nature, all the lines that tell of a long journey disinterestedly performed. To the Emperor, even in the admired death-mask of Antommarchi, there remained only the cold egotism of a countenance to whose reproductions artist and sculptor had, actually under official instructions, striven to impart the classic conception of imperial features.

But it is more than time to quit this field of comparison for another. How do these two characters fare on the duel ground of patriotism? How indeed! For it is obvious-seldom as we remember it-that Napoleon had no country. Herr Ludwig makes this brutally plain : 'Does this Italian love the country on which he now sets his foot? To him it is nothing more than the fiddle on which he can play a better tune than on any other instrument.' So much for France. What of Italy? Did not the witty woman whom he is said to have challenged

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with the remark Tutti gl' Italiani sono traditori' say all that was necessary about that? Non tutti, Signore, ma Buona Parte.' The crushing retort was fully justified or soon to be so. Venice bartered; the Pope imprisoned; the States of Italy stripped of their rulers and portioned out among a crowd of adventurers among whom his own relations figured prominently; Frenchmen and French interests everywhere dominant-was this the work of an Italian patriot? Corsica remains. Can we call this his country? At first sight it might seem so. The young Bonaparte at starting stood beside Paoli. But, not many months later, his personal interests persuaded him to lead the soldiers of France against the old patriot, entrenched in the Island-citadel. Thus the Corsicans, like the Italians, had reason enough to treat him as a traitor. He was repulsed and outlawed, and his relatives were compelled to flee the place. We must be fair, however, even to one who had borne arms against his country's freedom. Not all the Corsican in him had perished. He retained to the end the taste for a vendetta, and left money in his last will and testament to one who had failed to effect the assassination of Wellington.

A man without a country Napoleon tries, in that last phase of his when he is building up the Napoleonic legend, to make himself out a good European. He had wished, he told his suite, 'to found the kingdom of reason'; he had intended that all this savage tale of blood and iron should end in a European system, a European code of laws, a European court of appeal.' A Jacobin delusion-if he really believed it-worthy of the younger Robespierre, of whom he had once been the friend, or of the sanguine and sanguinary revolutionists who still, even to-day, expect to wade through slaughter to the earthly paradise! He had spoken a truer word at Elba: 'I have always been a soldier and became a king only by chance. . . . Out of my great past I regret naught but my soldiers.' A truer word and to be confirmed in the last snatches of half-delirious speech that reached the world from his death-bed! Just before that last exceeding bitter cry for Josephine which closes all, the listeners caught the words 'Armée. Tête d'armée.' But soldiers call for fighting, and an army

speaks of battle, and war, as Lord Rosebery reminds us, is 'the gambling of the gods.' Here was no lover of Europe nor lover of peace, but a born conqueror who saw men not as individuals but in masses, could squander troops in thousands without a qualm and shoot his prisoners without a shudder.

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How different is Wellington! The tears that poured down his cheeks when the chief-medical-officer made his report on the morrow of Waterloo are a commonplace of history. Less known but not less worthy of notice are the words he addressed, as soon as the battle was fought and won, to the bereaved and sympathetic soul of Aberdeen: 'The glory resulting from such actions .. is no consolation to me; and I cannot suggest it as any to you. . . . Such language discovers the deep sincerity of his lament to Lady Salisbury over a life whose prime was spent in the field. He boasted to her, not of his long tale of victories, but of the fact that his name was appended to more general treaties of peace between nations than any other man's and that even in Cabinet differences he was the minister who effected reconciliations. It was all of a piece with this that he condemns in what is certainly the most striking political judgment that these letters contain the foreign policy of Palmerston. Those who still admire that mixture, not quite, it is true, unadulterated, of bluff and bullying, might do well to reflect upon the opinion it evoked from the greatest of English contemporary soldiers, who had, as it chanced, been much mixed up all his life with diplomacy and for some weeks had actually held the seals of the Foreign Office. There is nothing so inconsistent,' he writes, with the interest and honour of this country as what is called Palmerstonian Policy! which is neither more nor less than the creation of confusion everywhere.' If there were no other justification for the appearance of these letters that sentence alone would be a sufficient defence. So valuable is so plain a verdict from so good a judge!

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But to return! Certainly Wellington was no sentimentalist. He was capable of calling his troops the scum of the earth and of declaring that there was

It is, however, unfair to let the famous criticism of his troops appear without including Wellington's next observation: "It is only wonderful

nothing in the world so stupid as a gallant British officer. Yet in his own unsentimental way he cared for his soldiers. In Bland Burges's memoirs there is an instructive anecdote, resting on unimpeachable evidence, which casts a flood of light upon his real feelings. The incident referred to occurred during the Peninsular War. An officer dining with Lord Wellington happened to remark that, at a post which he had visited, some of the men were lying out sick and exposed to the inclemency of the climate. At the close of the evening the commander-in-chief summoned his aide-de-camp, rode off thirty miles to the place mentioned, satisfied himself that matters were as had been represented, roused the officer in command, and demanded explanations. He was told that there was no accommodation for the sick available. His answer was to examine the officers' quarters, to turn their occupants out and to put the invalids in; and he concluded his visit with a warning that, if any officer thenceforward preferred his own comfort to the requirements of sick soldiers under his command, he would make an example of him. His orders were sulkily received, and he therefore determined to make sure they were executed. The next night he repeated his ride and his inspection. His suspicions were justified. He found that the officers had resumed their covered quarters and the sick their place in the open air. Once more he reversed the conditions, then arrested the offenders, caused them to be tried, and left them to be cashiered.

This little affair, hardly known now except to students, shows with what jealous riders the Duke's belief in privilege was attended. With characteristic common sense he never attacked in principle the inequality which is apparent in every form of life and satisfies the instinctive hope of every parent. But, upon this foundation, he enforced, if necessary with the utmost vigour, the standard of 'noblesse oblige.' Napoleon's surrender, on the other hand, to the hereditary principle by virtue of the revival of a court and creation of a dynasty, although Herr Ludwig is content to treat it as a weakness of the

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that we should be able to make so much out of them afterwards' (Stanhope, Conversations,' p. 14). Cp. also his praise of his Peninsular Army quoted in Maxwell's Life,' 1, p. 238; II, p. 132.

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