The intimacy which had existed from boyhood between General Richard Grenville, military tutor to the Duke of York, and Lord Cornwallis, and the correspondence which took place between them, to which we have now access, afford ample means of judging of the real capacity of that royal soldier, to whose charge the military destinies of England, both at home and abroad, were intrusted by the king at such a critical moment. At seventeen years of age the duke became, _per saltum_, as the usage is with royal personages, a colonel in the British army. After attending for two or three years the great Prussian reviews, by way of studying his profession, he was, on attaining his majority, raised to the rank of general, and appointed colonel of the Coldstream Guards. Various notices of H. R. H. are to be found in the numerous confidential letters which passed about that time between Cornwallis and Grenville. They were both warmly attached to him; both most anxious for his own sake, and for that of their profession, that he should turn out well. They describe H. R. H. as brave, good-humoured, and weak; utterly destitute of military talent, incapable of attending to business, much given to drink, and more to dice, hopelessly insolvent, and steeped in debauchery and extravagance of all kinds. In 1790, Grenville writes to Cornwallis in India: “The conduct of a certain great personage, who has so cruelly disappointed both you and myself, still continues to give me great uneasiness; more especially as I see no hopes of amendment.” The duke was at that date twenty-seven years of age. In 1791, the Duke of York married, and but two years afterwards Lord Cornwallis, on his return from India, actually found his friend Grenville’s unpromising pupil in Flanders, at the head of a considerable English force, acting in conjunction with the Austrians, Russians, and Dutch, against the French. His utter want of military talent, his inexperience, his idleness, and his vices had not prevented his being intrusted by his royal parent with the lives of a large body of brave men, and with the honour of England. Great difficulties soon arose in this allied army, its chiefs mutually accusing each other, possibly not without good reason, of incapacity. At last, a person, whose name is not even now divulged, but who possessed the entire confidence of both Pitt and Cornwallis, wrote as follows, from the British head-quarters at Arnheim, on the 11th Nov. 1794:--