Yet it is capable of proof, that had Mr. Stuart remained, the Austrians would have been slower to negotiate after the battle of Wagram; and the Walcheren expedition would have been turned towards Germany, where a great northern confederation was then ready to take arms against France. The Prussian cabinet in defiance of the king, or rather of the queen, whose fears influenced the king’s resolutions, only waited for these troops, to declare war; and there was every reason to believe that Russia would then also have adopted that side. The misfortunes of Moore’s campaign, the folly and arrogance of the Spaniards, the loss of the great British army which perished in Walcheren, the exhausting of England both of troops and specie, when she most needed both; finally the throwing of Austria entirely into the hands of France, may thus be distinctly traced to Mr. Canning’s incapacity as a statesman. But through the whole of the Napoleonic wars this man was the evil genius of the Peninsula; for passing over the misplaced military powers which he gave to Mr. Villiers’ legation in Portugal, while he neglected the political affairs in that country, it was he who sent lord Strangford to Rio Janeiro whence all manner of mischief flowed. And when Mr. Stuart succeeded Mr. Villiers at Lisbon, Mr. Canning insisted upon having the enormous mass of intelligence, received from different parts of the Peninsula, translated before it was sent home; an act of undisguised indolence, which retarded the real business of the embassy, prevented important information from being transmitted rapidly, and exposed the secrets of the hour to the activity of the enemy’s emissaries at Lisbon. In after times when by a notorious abuse of government he was himself sent ambassador to Lisbon, he complained that there were no archives of the former embassies, and he obliged Mr. Stuart, then minister at the Hague, to employ several hundred soldiers, as clerks, to copy all his papers relating to the previous war; these, at a great public expense, were sent to Lisbon; and there they were to be seen unexamined and unpacked in the year 1826! And while this folly was passing, the interests of Europe in general were neglected, and the particular welfare of Portugal seriously injured by another display of official importance still more culpable.