e met a stern and effectual dike to their
torrent of headlong aggression. Upon the happy selection and able
defence of those celebrated positions, were based the salvation of the
Peninsula and the subsequent glorious progress of the British arms.
Whilst referring to them, Mr Grattan seizes the opportunity to enumerate
the services rendered by the army in Spain. "The invincible men," he
says, "who defended those lines, aided no doubt by Portuguese and
Spanish soldiers, afterwards fought for a period of four years, during
which time they never suffered one defeat; and from the first
commencement of this gigantic war to its final and victorious
termination, the Peninsular army fought and won nineteen pitched
battles, and innumerable combats; they made or sustained ten sieges,
took four great fortresses, twice expelled the French from Portugal,
preserved Alicant, Carthagena, Cadiz, and Lisbon; they killed, wounded,
and took about _two hundred thousand enemies_, and the bones of forty
thousand British soldiers lie scattered on the plains and mountains of
the Peninsula." And thereupon our friend, the Connaughter, bursts out
into indignation that warriors who did such deeds, and, on _fifteen_
different occasions received the thanks of parliament, should have been
denied a medal for their services. Certainly, when men who went through
the whole, or the greater part, of those terrible campaigns, which they
began as commissioned officers, are now seen holding no higher than a
lieutenant's rank, one cannot but recognise their title to some
additional recompense, and marvel that the modest and well-merited badge
they claim should so long have been refused them. Mr Grattan puts much
of the blame of such refusal at the door of the Duke of Wellington. Not
that he is usually a depreciator of his former leader, of whose military
genius and great achievements he ever speaks with respect amounting to
veneration. But he does not hesitate to accuse him of having sacrificed
his old followers and friends to his own vanity, which petty feeling, he
maintains, made the Duke desire that the only medal granted for the war
against Napoleon, should be given for the only victory in which he beat
the Emperor in person. We believe that many Peninsular officers, puzzled
to account for the constant and seemingly causeless refusal of the
coveted decoration, hold the same opinion with Mr Grattan. We esteem it
rather plausible than sound. The names Of WELLING