To encourage themselves in the extravagance of their voluntary delusions, they are as prodigal of titles of honour as the college of heralds, and erect a standard of military fame, with all the authority, but not with the impartiality of history. Lord Wellington is ‘the great commander,’ and ‘the unconquered general,’ while ‘the little captain,’ and ‘the hero’ or ‘the deserter of Smorgonne,’ are the only qualifications of Bonaparte. If such are the true denominations and relative proportions of these two generals, then it is quite right to give to each of them the honour due;—if they are not, then it is quite wrong to stake the welfare of nations on a turn of expression—to put little equivocal scraps of paper into false scales, and decide the fate of Europe by nicknames. The scales in which Sir Humphrey Davy weighs the 500th part of a drachm, are not so slight nor insignificant as those in which his vilifiers, _The Times_, balance the destinies of the world. ‘What,’ it is asked with a certain air of profundity and mystery, ‘What if the army opposed to him [Lord Wellington] should resolve to exchange the bloody tyranny of Bonaparte for the paternal sway of a Bourbon!’ Why, if the French wish to shake off the galling yoke of a military Usurper, we say, let them do it in God’s name. Let them, whenever they please, imitate us in our recal of the Stuarts; and, whenever they please, in our banishment of them thirty years afterwards. But let them not, in the name of honour or of manhood, receive the royal boon of liberty at the point of the bayonet. It would be setting a bad precedent—it would be breaking in upon a great principle—it would be making a gap in the general feeling of national independence. For we are to observe, that this rational, popular, patriotic preference of the mild paternal sway of the Bourbons is to be enforced upon them by the powerful co-operation of the unconquered Wellington and his formidable legions. This is, in fact, returning to the original ground of the whole quarrel, and the question for them to consider, is whether all the evils and miseries which they may have endured in resisting these forcible appeals from foreign powers, are the strongest reasons why they should at length gratefully resign themselves to that tender concern for their sufferings, which so much persevering kindness, and disinterested preference of their interests to our own unequivocally proves. The impression produced by these formidable emissaries of mild paternity must, indeed, be only that of filial love and reverence. The constant _role_ of these same Bourbons, now recognized, now disowned by the surrounding states, now held up as bugbears to frighten, and now brought forward as decoys to allure them, for awhile kept entirely in the back-ground, and then again set over them like puppets, in every reverse of fortune, must excite, one would suppose, some very pleasant associations, and give them some little insight into the nature of the