The preceding has been but a brief outline of the career, services, and struggles of Blake, whose popularity, by a combination of circumstances over which he had no control, was almost destroyed for ever in Spain. He was accompanied to the Spanish frontier by the Adjutant-General Florestan Pipi, who was then sent to Naples. On entering France he was sent to Paris, and from thence to the strong Chateau de Vincennes, where he remained a close prisoner until the fall of the Imperial Government; but this captivity did not prevent the Cortes from appointing him a Counsellor of State when naming the regency. The triumph of the allies having broken his fetters in 1814, after receiving many marks of favour from the Emperor Alexander, he returned into Spain under the ministry of Ballasteros, and was appointed Director-General of the Corps of Engineers. He occupied this honourable post until the revolution of 1820, when, in exchange, he received a seat in the Council of State. When war was threatened between France and Spain in 1823 he was appointed, on the 7th February, one of the committee of five generals who were ordered to concert measures for defending the kingdom. In the French army which entered Spain in that year, under the Marquis of Lauriston (an officer of _Scottish_ parentage), we find two lieutenant-generals of _Irish_ descent--Count Bourke and Viscount O'Donoughue; the Duke of Angouleme was General-in-Chief, and to him, the Duke of Berwick and Alba, a Spanish grandee of the Stuart blood, gave his adherence. The restoration caused by the French intervention under the Marshal Lauriston was fatal to Blake; for being suspected by the royalists of constitutional principles, he was only able to avoid prosecution by great care and solicitude: but his career was drawing to a close, as he died at Valladolid in 1827, regretted by all the Spanish army, and eulogized by the people in their songs and stories of "the War of Independence." The military men who had borne arms under him, says a French writer, recognised and admitted his positive talent, his great knowledge and perspicacite of tactiques; but agreed that he failed in two essential points--the prompt _coup d'oeil_ which decides at once the fortune of a battle, and that art of manner by which it is necessary to excite the enthusiasm of the soldier. A distinguished branch of the old Celtic sept of O'Donnel has borne a prominent part in the Spanish annals during the last fifty years; but so early as the days of Philip of Anjou and Charles of Spain, we find an O'Donnel fighting in the ranks of their armies.