y by a dashing advance against
the redoubts on the French right. Having carried these he swept along
the ridge, which became untenable, and Soult withdrew his army within
his second line of defences. Two days later, seeing that Hill menaced
Toulouse on the other side, and fearing that if defeated again he would
lose his only line of retreat along the Carcassonne road, he evacuated
Toulouse by that route, leaving his magazines and hospitals in the hands
of the British army. By so doing he left to Wellington the honour and
prize of victory, but few victories have been so dearly bought, and the
loss in killed and wounded was actually greater on the side of the
victors than on that of the vanquished.

Toulouse received Wellington on the 12th with open arms, and as news
reached him on the same day announcing the proclamation of Louis XVIII.
at Paris, he no longer hesitated to assume the white cockade. Soult
loyally declined to accept the intelligence until it was officially
confirmed, when a military convention was made on the 18th, whereby a
boundary line was established between the two armies. Suchet had already
withdrawn from Spain, and at last recalled the garrisons from those
Spanish fortresses in which Napoleon had so obstinately locked up picked
troops which he sorely needed in his dire extremity. But on the 14th, a
week after Napoleon's abdication, the famous "sortie from Bayonne" took
place, in which each side lost 800 or 900 men, and Hope, wounded in two
places, was made prisoner. For this waste of life the governor of
Bayonne must be held responsible, since he was informed of the events at
Paris by Hope, and instead of awaiting official confirmation, like
Soult, chose to risk the issue of a night combat, which must needs be
deadly and could not be decisive.

Thus ended the Peninsular war. This war on the British side has seldom
been surpassed in the steady adherence to a settled purpose, through
years of discouragement and failure, maintained by the general whose
name it has made immortal. Neither his strategy nor his tactical skill
was always faultless; and afterwards in comparing himself with Soult, he
is reported to have said, that he often got into scrapes, but was
extricated by the valour of his army, whereas Soult, when he got into a
scrape, had no such men to get him out of it. However this might be,
Wellington's foresight in appreciating the place to be filled by the
Peninsular war in the overthrow of Nap