Grattan’s other weakness was a tendency to fly off at a tangent in the middle of a piece of interesting narrative, in order to controvert the statements of writers with whom he disagreed. He had one special foe—Robinson, the biographer of Sir Thomas Picton, on whom he wasted many an objurgatory paragraph. These small controversial points, on which he turns aside, break the thread of his discourse in the most hopeless fashion, and are now of little interest. I have often, though not always, thought it well to leave out such divagations. At the end of the work, in a similar fashion, a long criticism on a certain speech of the Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords has been omitted. It deals with the story of the long-delayed issue of the war-medal for the Peninsula. The whole point of Grattan’s remarks (caustic but well justified in most respects) was removed when the medal was at last actually distributed, a few months after he had made his complaint. The present volume stops short at the end of the Peninsular war. Grattan’s pen travelled farther. Encouraged by the success of his first book, he issued two supplementary volumes: these are of very inferior interest, being mainly concerned with the doings of the 88th in their early campaigns, before the author had joined them. There is much about Buenos Ayres, the Low Countries, and Talavera. The rest is composed of amusing but very rambling reminiscences of garrison life in Canada in 1814, and in France in 1815–1816, and of character sketches of some of Grattan’s contemporaries, such as the unfortunate Simon Fairfield, concerning whom the reader will find certain information on pages 130–1 and 324 of this reprint. The whole of these two volumes consists of mere _disjecta membra_, much inferior in interest to the first two which the author had produced.