Wellington said of Moore: “I can see but one error; when he advanced to Sahagun, he should have considered it a movement of retreat, and sent officers to the rear to mark and prepare the halting-places for every brigade.” Napoleon asserted that to the talents and firmness of their leader the deliverance of the British army was to be ascribed, and that, if he committed a few trifling errors, they were to be attributed to the peculiarity of his situation. A brother officer said of Moore: “The British army has produced some able men, and many in point of military talent were and are quite his equals; but it cannot, and perhaps never could, boast of one more beloved, not by his personal friends alone, but by every individual that served under him.” And after all it is only just that Moore should receive honour from Spain and from the people of Coruña, for the first purpose of his presence in the Peninsula was to aid the Spaniards in regaining their soil from the great invader--Napoleon. Local writers speak to-day of Moore as one who met with his death while defending Coruña,[184] and the townsfolk delight to stroll with their little ones around the hero’s tomb on cool, fresh summer evenings. There was one thing that puzzled me as I stood beside Sir John Moore’s tomb. How could those wonderful lines on his burial, every one of which throbs with personal feeling, reality, and detail, have been composed years after the event by a young Irish clergyman, who had never left the British Isles? But it was not till just as this chapter was going to the press that I could find any possible solution to the problem. At last light is thrown upon the subject by Mr. R. C. Newick. “There is no poem in the English language,” he writes, “more often quoted in speech or printed in books, no poem about whose authorship there has been more controversy, none which grips more firmly both the mind of a child and the intellect of a cultivated scholar, than the immortal threnody, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore.’” But who wrote it? Was its author the Rev. Charles Wolfe, as the text-books of English literature inform us? No, it appears to have been composed by a soldier who was present at Coruña, and an eye-witness of all that is related in the poem. Mr. Newick claims to have discovered a book which tells us all about the composition of the poem--namely, the _Memoirs of Sergeant Paul Swanston_, published by B. D. Cousins, 18 Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn, with no date, but about 1850. I will take the liberty of quoting the poem as it stands in Mr. Newick’s pamphlet (from the original MS. of the Author, as given to his friend Swanston in February 1809):-- “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot, O’er the grave where our hero was buried.