rsto France; "but now,
Monseigneur, that you are informed about them, I feel no anxiety,
and I am sure that the King will receive no impression from them
without acquainting himself with their truth or falsity."

Vaudreuil's anxiety was natural; and so was the action of
Montcalm in making known to the Court the outrageous abuses that
threatened the King's service with ruin. His doing so was necessary
both for his own justification and for the public good; and afterwards,
when Vaudreuil and others were brought to trial at Paris, and when
one of the counselfor the defence charged the late general with
slanderously accusing his clients, the Court ordered the charge to
be struck from the record.[812] The papers the existence of which, if they
did exist, so terrified Vaudreuil, have thus far escaped research.
But the correspondence of the two rivals with the chiefs of the
departments on which they severally depended is in large measure
preserved; and while that of the Governor is filled with defamation
of Montcalm and praise of himself, that of the General is neither
egotistic nor abusive. The faults of Montcalm have sufficiently appeared.
They were those of an impetuous, excitable, and impatient nature, by
no means free from either ambition or vanity; but they were
never inconsistent with the character of a man of honor. His
impulsive utterances, reported by retainers and sycophants,
kept Vaudreuil in a state of chronic rage; and, void as he
was of all magnanimity, gnawed with undying jealousy, and
mortally in dread of being compromised by the knaveries to
which he had lent his countenance, he could not contain
himself within the bounds of decency or sense. In another
letter he had the baseness to say that Montcalm met his death
in trying to escape from the English.

[Footnote 812: _Proces de Bigot, Cadet, et autres._]

Among the Governor's charges are some which cannot be
flatly denied. When he accuses his rival of haste and precipitation
in attacking the English army, he touches a fair subject
of criticism; but, as a whole, he is as false in his detraction
of Montcalm as in his praises of Bigot and Cadet.

The letter which Wolfe sent to Pitt a few days before his
death, written in what may be called a spirit of resolute
despair, and representing success as almost hopeless, filled
England with a dejection that found utterance in loud grumblings
against the Ministry. Horace Walpole wrote the bad news to his friend
Ma