Advice to authors is generally thrown away, yet Mr. Robinson would do well to rewrite his book with fewer inaccuracies, and fewer military disquisitions, avoiding to swell its bulk with such long extracts from my work, and remembering also that English commissaries are not “_feræ naturæ_” to be hanged, or otherwise destroyed at the pleasure of divisional generals. This will save him the trouble of attributing to sir Thomas Picton all the standard jokes and smart sayings, for the scaring of those gentry, which have been current ever since the American war, and which have probably come down to us from the Greeks. The reduction of bulk, which an attention to these matters will produce, may be compensated by giving us more information of Picton’s real services, towards which I contribute the following information. Picton in his youth served as a marine, troops being then used in that capacity, and it is believed he was in one of the great naval victories. Mr. Robinson has not mentioned this, and it would be well also, if he were to learn and set forth some of the general’s generous actions towards the widows of officers who fell under his command: they are to be discovered, and would do more honour to his memory than a thousand blustering anecdotes. With these changes and improvements, the life of sir Thomas Picton may perhaps, in future, escape the equivocal compliment of the newspaper puffers, namely, that it is “a military romance.” _Quarterly Review._—This is but a sorry attack to repel. “_Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle_,” but “rats and mice and such small deer have been Tom’s food for many a year.” The reviewer does not like my work, and he invokes the vinous vagaries of Mr. Coleridge in aid of his own spleen. I do not like his work, or Mr. Coleridge either, and I console myself with a maxim of the late eccentric general Meadows, who being displeased to see his officers wear their cocked hats awry, issued an order beginning thus:—“All men have fancy, few have taste.” Let that pass. I am ready to acknowledge real errors, and to give my authorities for disputed facts. 1º. I admit that the road which leads over the Pyrennees to Pampeluna does not _unite_ at that town with the royal causeway; yet the error was _ty_pographical, not _to_pographical, because the course of the royal causeway was shewn, just before, to be through towns very distant from Pampeluna. The true reading should be “_united with the first by a branch road commencing at Pampeluna_.”