The admirers of the Duke of Wellington may not call this a surprise; will they tell us in what it differs from one?

On the 17th, such of the British as were in a body made a retrograde movement; the remainder of the Anglo-Belgic forces were concentrating as fast as possible. On the 18th, the French found us in line on the heights of Mont St. Jean; the greater part of the army was then assembled, although not wholly so, since both artillery and infantry joined the following day. It would be useless here to describe the battle which for ever fixed the fate of Napoleon; it was manfully contested and nobly won, but the loss of lives was immense. Thousands of our men fought under the same disadvantages, on this glorious day, as numbers of them had been forced to do on a former. Many officers, known to the author of these pages, have declared to him that, whenever. the least opportunity offered, they found it impossible to prevent sleep from overcoming them, so completely were they worn out. During the conflict the Duke of Wellington had repeated applications made to him by colonels of regiments to permit of their men resting, even were it for a few minutes, but these solicitations could not be attended to. An artless historian, one who

* The day frequently bore a very serious, and even alarming, aspect; our troops were tried even beyond the strength

bore a firelock, but who, had a kinder fortune prevailed, would have done honour to the epaulette,— decribes the situation of his comrades in faithful colours :

"We were quartered," states the veteran, "on the 16th of June, in the neighbourhood of Antwerp, and were proceeding to our customary morning's exercise, when suddenly we were ordered back to prepare for immediate march, and, in a few hours after, found ourselves on the road to Waterloo. We proceeded the whole of the day without halting, and about one o'clock of the morning of the 17th, hungry and weary, entered a village which had just been quitted by brigade of Brunswickers, whose quarters we occupied; here, for a short while, we rested, when we were again put in motion, and finally, late in the evening, reached the spot destined to witness our success, but so completely overcome with fatigue, that when, on the 18th, our regiment was ordered to lie down in front of a brae, many of our men dropped into a deep sleep, and, in this condition, some sixty or seventy of them found an eternal rest through the enemy's shot*."

of man; a moment's relief for refreshment could not be granted when it was asked, for the scanty survivors of the almost destroyed Thirty-Third Regiment.-Paris Revisited: Scott.

* Journal of a Soldier of 71st Regiment, pp. 216, 217, and following.

This was the state of the gallant Glasgow regiment, and it was also that of more than half the army. On the road by which Napoleon approached, there is one advantageous field of battle, -it is that of Waterloo, the very position occupied by the British; that past, the forest of Soignies commences, and scarcely room is then found to wheel a single brigade between the wood and Bruxelles. Supposing Napoleon had entered Bruxelles much about the time that the lords and ladies were bidding adieu to their patrician hostesses' fête, would not that have been a surprise? Supposing Napoleon's rapid advance had prevented Wellington from assembling his army before Bruxelles, would not that have been a surprise? Supposing the duke could not have assembled it in a fit position for fighting, would not that have been a surprise? Supposing a fit position could only have been obtained at the cost of all the mental and physical energies of his soldiers, would not that again have been a surprise? We may be told that none of these events happened, -that the results of the 16th and 18th belie our suppositions: victory, we know, obliterates many a fault, but how near was the British cause to ruin, and who can say whether that cause would not have been still more complete,—still more triumphant, would not have been sooner won,—would not have been gained with less suffering,—with a

less waste of lives, if the British commander, sooner informed of events, had been sooner able to collect his army, and had directed it at something less than a gallop to the quarter for the signalization of its prowess? That this was not the case causes our surprise, and we have not hitherto seen, either in the columns of the New Times journal, or in the pages of any other author who has written concerning the operations of 1815, any reasoning that, on this head, can in the least diminish the extent of our wonderment. We may be dull of comprehension; we hope we are not prejudiced. Whenever our observations are satisfactorily answered, we shall be ready to own our error,-until then we say once more we must rank ourselves with the simpletons who echo "surprised."

CHAP. X.

NEY.

"THE reviewer (Edinburgh) seems to take a tender interest in the fall of this same Ney, whom all the world knows to have been the blackest of traitors. There is no disputing about tastes, but to talk about any feelings respecting Ney's death being awakened, does appear to us to be as like cant as possible. If M. Ney was not justly executed, we should like to know who ever was?"-New Times, September, 1822.

WITHOUT much hesitation we shall take upon ourselves to answer this query for the Editor of the New Times. John Bellingham, executed in 1812 for the murder of the Right Honourable Spencer Percival, was justly compelled to pay the forfeit of his life to the offended laws of his country; but was Ney's guilt equally clear with Bellingham's, and was the sentence passed on him equally fair? We expect satisfactorily to prove the contrary.

Michael Ney entered young into the French army, and, from a subaltern, became a marshal, a duke, a prince, and a peer of France. When, in 1814, the fortunes of Napoleon vanished, Ney