eve_:
what put an extinguisher upon our project was the entrance of Napoleon
into Spain, his immediate advance upon Madrid, and the wretched
catastrophe of the expedition so miserably misconducted under Sir John
Moore. The _prestige_ of French generalship was at that time a
nightmare upon the courage and spirit of hopeful exertion throughout
Europe; and the earliest dawn was only then beginning to arise of that
glorious experience which was for ever to dissolve it. Sir J. Moore,
and through him his gallant but unfortunate army, was the last
conspicuous victim to the mere sound and _humbug_ (if you will excuse
a coarse expression) of the words _Napoleon Bonaparte_. What he fled
from was precisely those two words. And the timid policy, adopted by
Sir John on that memorable occasion, would--among other greater and
national consequences--have had this little collateral interest to us
unfortunate travellers, had our movements been as speedy as we had
anticipated, that it would have cost us our heads. A certain bulletin,
issued by Bonaparte at that time, sufficiently apprised us of that
little truth. In this bulletin Bonaparte proclaimed with a careless
air, but making at the same time somewhat of a boast of it, that
having happened to meet a party of sixteen British travellers--persons
of whom he had ascertained nothing at all but that they did not bear a
military character--he had issued a summary order that they should all
be strung up without loss of time by the neck. In this little
facetious anecdote, as Bonaparte seemed to think it, we read the fate
that we had escaped. Had nothing occurred to retard our departure from
this country, we calculated that the route we had laid down for our
daily motions would have brought us to Guadarama (or what was the name
of the pass?) just in time to be hanged. Having a British general at
our backs with an army of more than thirty thousand effective men, we
should certainly have roamed in advance with perfect reliance upon the
old British policy of fighting, for which we could never have allowed
ourselves to dream of such a substitute as a flight through all the
passes of Gallicia on the principle of '_the D---- take the
hindmost_.' Infallibly also we should have been surprised by the
extraordinary rapidity at that time of the French movements; our
miserable shambling mules, with their accursed tempers, would have
made but a shabby attempt at flight before a squadron of light
cavalry;