The idea of the night-sortie in this canto is taken from the following passage in Napier:--“In the night of the 27th, about 3 o’clock, the French sallied against the new battery on the isthmus; but as Col. Cameron of the ninth regiment met them on the very edge of the trenches with the bayonet, the attempt failed, yet it delayed the arming of the battery.” (_Hist. War in the Penins._ xxii. 1.) I have made honourable mention of Cameron’s achievement in my first canto, but without specifying that the sortie took place by night. The attack in the real incident was so speedily repelled that it afforded no room for poetical description. I have therefore worked up separately here the idea of a sortie with the numerous picturesque additions incident to its occurrence by night, and have taken some of these incidents from the sortie which took place from Bayonne, then invested by Sir John Hope, on the night of the 13th April 1814--three days after the Battle of Toulouse--being therefore the last event of the Peninsular War, in which Sir John Hope was made prisoner, and great loss of life occurred owing to the French governor’s incredulity as to the abdication of Napoléon. It is described in Napier’s last chapter but one, and still more minutely in Capt. Batty’s _Campaign of the Left Wing of the Allied Army_, &c. Though Sir Thomas Graham was intrusted with the conduct of the siege of San Sebastian, and though at the period of the assault Wellington was engaged with the allies, as described in a succeeding canto, at some distance from the town, I am warranted in making him superintend the defence of this sortie, he having visited the works frequently during their progress, and having actually visited them on the day (the 28th August) on which this sortie took place. The present is almost the only instance throughout the poem, where there is exaggeration of the actual amount of fighting and its consequences. The French in desolating the fields of Spain, and sweeping off their sheep and cattle by thousands, professed that they did it for the people’s good, treating them, doubtless, as Sir Thomas More makes the Utopians treat their useless members in his Happy Republic: “Wrought on by these persuasions, they do either starve themselves of their own accord, or they take opium, and so they die without pain.” (_Utopia_, book ii.) According to Hobbes’s philosophy, this could be doing them no injury, “for he who consents to any thing, cannot consider himself injured.” (_De Cive._ 1. i. c. iii.) This voluntarily inflicted suicide Bishop Burnet in his preface more justly characterises as “a rough and fierce philosophy.” Still fiercer was the “philosophy” of Republican France. V. “What were thy mural crowns, bellipotent Rome?”