is simply sent forth on its own merits in the hope that there
are yet some, if not indeed many whose hearts are never weary of the
tales of England's glory in the past, and seek to find in them reason
why that glory should be perpetuated. Many an account have we already
had of the victories of the Peninsula and Waterloo, and this but adds
one more to the list: though perhaps it may be regarded in somewhat of
a supplementary light, as treating of the campaigns neither from an
entirely outside and _soi-disant_ unprejudiced standpoint, nor with
the advantages possessed by one who may have had access to the
councils of the authorities, but as they were seen by one who came and
went and did as he was told, and was as it were nothing more than a
single factor in the great military machine that won our country those
battles of which she has so much right to be proud. What criticisms of
the conduct of the war our veteran occasionally does indulge in are of
course chiefly founded on the camp gossip current at the time, and in
reading them it must always be borne in mind that events at the moment
of their happening often do not present the same appearance as when
viewed from the calmer security of after years, and they must be
judged accordingly.

As to the style. Lawrence, though he never betrayed the fact to the
authorities during his whole military career, being possessed of a
wonderful aptitude for mental calculation, and always contriving to
get some assistance in concealing his deficiency when his official
duties necessitated his doing so, and though he has carefully avoided
all direct allusion to it in this work itself, never learnt to write,
and the first form in which his history was committed to paper was
from dictation. The person who took down the words as he spoke them,
one of his fellow-servants, was but imperfectly educated himself, so
that it may be imagined that the result of the narrative of one
illiterate person being written down by another was that the style
was not likely to aspire to any very high degree of literary merit.
Still, to preserve the peculiar character of the book, it has been
thought better to leave it as far as possible in its original shape:
some emendations have perforce had to be made to render it actually
intelligible--for instance, in the original manuscript there is
scarcely any punctuation from beginning to end, with the exception of
at those places where the amanuensis evidently left o