♦LANGUAGE OF THE FRENCH BULLETINS.♦ The French stated in their bulletin that they had lost upon their march twenty killed, and from thirty to forty wounded, whereas the rebels had left at least three thousand upon the different fields of battle[17]. The character of the intrusive government would be imperfectly understood hereafter, if its language as well as its acts were not faithfully recorded. The bulletin which announced this statement to the Portugueze, and to that great portion of the civilized world in which the events of the war were anxiously observed, proceeded to say, “this is the mournful result of a frenzy which nothing can justify, which nothing can excuse, and which obliges us to multiply the number of victims who excite sorrow and compassion, but upon whom a terrible necessity compels us to inflict the strokes of just vengeance. Thus it is that the Portugueze people, blind instruments of the unfeeling calculations of the British cabinet, destroy with their own hands the happiness which we with all our power were endeavouring to make them enjoy! Thus it is that from the bosom of tranquillity, of good order, and of repose, they draw upon themselves the destructive scourge of war, and bring devastation even upon the very fields where God had given abundance! Thus it is that deluded men, ungrateful children as well as guilty citizens, change all the claims which they had to the benevolence and protection of government, for deserved misfortune and wretchedness, ruin their families, carry desolation, flames, and death, into their dwellings, transform flourishing cities into heaps of ashes and vast tombs, and by their fatal union draw upon the whole country the calamities which they provoke, which they deserve, and from which (weak victims as they are) they cannot escape, covering themselves with shame, and completing her destruction. Thus it is that no other resource remains to them than the clemency of those whom they sought to assassinate, ... a clemency which they do not implore in vain, when, acknowledging their crime, they ask pardon from the French, who, incapable of belying their noble character, are ♦BULLETIN 4. OBSERVADOR PORTUGUEZ, 368.♦ always as full of generosity as of valour.” This was the [18]language of Buonaparte’s governor in Portugal! “To be the victim,” says Mr. Wordsworth, commenting upon these things and words at the time, in that strain of profoundest feeling and philosophy by which his higher compositions are so eminently distinguished, “to be the victim of such bloody-mindedness, is a doleful lot for a nation; and the anguish must have been rendered still more poignant by the scoffs and insults, and by that heinous contempt of the most awful truths, with which the perpetrator of those cruelties has proclaimed them. Merciless ferocity is an evil familiar to our thoughts; but these combinations of malevolence historians have not yet been called upon to record;