The fall of Wolfe was noble indeed. He received a wound in the head, but covered it from his soldiers with his handkerchief. A second ball struck him in the belly: that too he dissembled. A third hitting him in the breast, he sunk under the anguish, and was carried behind the ranks. Yet, fast as life ebbed out, his whole anxiety centred on the fortune of the day. He begged to be borne nearer to the action; but his sight being dimmed by the approach of death, he entreated to be told what they who supported him saw: he was answered that the enemy gave ground. He eagerly repeated the question, heard the enemy was totally routed, cried “I am satisfied”--and expired. In five days the town capitulated. Wolfe dead, and Monckton disabled, General Townshend signed the articles. He, and his friends for him, even attempted to ravish the honour of the conquest from Wolfe. Townshend’s first letter said nothing in praise of him. In one to the Speaker of the House of Commons he went so far as indirectly to assume the glory of the last effort. The words were these, “We determined on the 13th of September to do what we ought to have done in the beginning: but in military operations it is never too late to reform.” In other more private dispatches Townshend was still more explicit. These he ordered to be shown to the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Newcastle, and Mr. Pitt. From the first he received great assurances of countenance--but the passion of gratitude with which the nation was transported towards Wolfe’s memory overbore all attempts to lessen his fame. It was not by surviving him that he could be eclipsed. Monsieur de Vaudreuil, Governor of the province, had appeared at the close of the engagement, but, seeing his countrymen defeated, retired to Montreal. Had he fallen into our hands, our men were determined to scalp him, he having been the chief and blackest author of the cruelties exercised on our countrymen. Some of his letters were taken, in which he explicitly and basely said, that “Peace was the best time for making war on the English.” Such perfidy, and such barbarism as was contained in the dispatches of Marshal Belleisle, mentioned before, affix a stain on a nation which it requires an age of generous heroism to wash out. The cruelties exercised in the Palatinate by Louis XIV. conjured up that storm which overwhelmed the end of his reign, and enjoined the humiliating proposal of obliging him to concur in dethroning his own grandson. When ambition is inhuman, and tyranny insolent, they double the bitterness of a reverse of fortune by having given a precedent of wanton indignities.