The man has the bad fortune to meet with good fortune everywhere, and wherever the greatest men in the world were unfortunate; and that excites us, and makes him hateful. We see in him only the victory of stupidity over genius--Arthur Wellington triumphant where Napoleon Bonaparte is overwhelmed! Never was a man more ironically gifted by Fortune, and it seems as though she would exhibit his empty littleness by raising him high on the shield of victory. Fortune is a woman, and perhaps in womanly wise she cherishes a secret grudge against the man who overthrew her former darling, though the very overthrow came from her own will. Now she lets him conquer again on the Catholic Emancipation question--yes, in the very fight in which George Canning was destroyed. It is possible that he might have been loved had the wretched Londonderry been his predecessor in the Ministry; but it happens that he is the successor of the noble Canning--of the much-wept, adored, great Canning--and he conquers where Canning was overwhelmed. Without such an adversity of prosperity, Wellington would perhaps pass for a great man; people would not hate him, would not measure him too accurately, at least not with the heroic measure with which a Napoleon and a Canning are measured, and consequently it would never have been discovered how small he is as man. He is a small man, and smaller than small at that. The French could say nothing more sarcastic of Polignac than that he was a Wellington without celebrity. In fact, what remains when we strip from a Wellington the field-marshal's uniform of celebrity? I have here given the best apology for Lord Wellington--in the English sense of the word. My readers will be astonished when I honorably confess that I once praised this hero--and clapped on all sail in so doing. It is a good story, and I will tell it here: My barber in London was a Radical, named Mr. White--poor little man in a shabby black dress, worn until it almost shone white again; he was so lean that even his full face looked like a profile, and the sighs in his bosom were visible ere they rose. These sighs were caused by the misfortunes of Old England--by the impossibility of paying the National Debt.