My lord, I shall now proceed with my task in the manner I have before alluded to. You have indeed left me no room for that refined courtesy with which I could have wished to soften the asperities of this controversy, but I must request of you to be assured, and I say it in all sincerity, that I attribute the errors to which I must revert, not to any wilful perversion or wilful suppression of facts, but entirely to a natural weakness of memory, and the irritation of a mind confused by the working of wounded vanity. I acknowledge that it is a hard trial to have long-settled habits of self satisfaction suddenly disturbed,— “Cursed be my harp and broke be every chord, If I forget thy worth, _victorious Beresford_.” It was thus the flattering muse of poetry lulled you with her sweet strains into a happy dream of glory, and none can wonder at your irritation when the muse of history awakened you with the solemn clangour of her trumpet to the painful reality that you were only an ordinary person. My lord, it would have been wiser to have preserved your equanimity, there would have been some greatness in that. In your first Strictures you began by asserting that I knew nothing whatever of you or your services; and that I was actuated entirely by vulgar political rancour when I denied your talents as a general. To this I replied that I was not ignorant of your exploits. That I knew something of your proceedings at Buenos Ayres, at Madeira, and at Coruña; and in proof thereof I offered to enter into the details of the first, if you desired it. To this I have received no answer. You affirmed that your perfect knowledge of the Portuguese language was one of your principal claims to be commander of the Portuguese army. In reply I quoted from your own letter to lord Wellington, your confession, that, such was your ignorance of that language at the time you could not even read the communication from the regency, relative to your own appointment. You asserted that no officer, save sir John Murray, objected at the first moment to your sudden elevation of rank. In answer I published sir John Sherbroke’s letter to sir J. Cradock complaining of it. You said the stores (which the Cabildo of Ciudad Rodrigo refused to let you have in 1809) had not been formed by lord Wellington. In reply I published lord Wellington’s declaration that they had been formed by him. You denied that you had ever written a letter to the junta of Badajos, and this not doubtfully or hastily, but positively and accompanied with much scorn and ridicule of my assertion to that effect. You harped upon the new and surprising information I had obtained relative to your actions, and were, in truth, very facetious upon the subject. In answer I published your own letter to that junta! So much for your first Strictures.