“Few and short were the prayers we said, And we spoke not a word of sorrow, But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead, And we bitterly thought of the morrow. We thought as we hollowed his narrow bed, And smoothed down his lonely pillow, That the foe and the stranger would tread o’er his head, And we far away on the billow. Lightly they’ll talk of the spirit that’s gone, And o’er his cold ashes upbraid him; But little he’ll reck, if they’ll let him sleep on, In the grave where a Briton has laid him. But half of our heavy task was done, When the clock struck the hour for retiring, And we heard the distant and random gun That the foe was sullenly firing. Slowly and sadly we laid him down, From the field of his fame fresh and gory, We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone, But we left him alone with his glory.”[1] For every man in the Army had lost a friend that day; and many a one felt with passionate grief that the world, without John Moore in it, would be for him a changed world thenceforward. Hard things were spoken of him after he was gone, and upbraidings, indeed, were uttered—_not_ by his brave foe, who honoured Moore, and wished to raise a stone to his memory—but by an ungrateful section of his own countrymen, because, forsooth, with an Army of only twenty-three thousand men he had not met and crushed two hundred thousand. We know better now! In the cold clear light of history, such fogs are driven away. Yet, even in these later days, have we made enough of the name of John Moore? Have we thought enough of the man of whom Napoleon in the zenith of his fame could declare that he was the only General left fit to contend with himself, and against whose twenty-three thousand men he counted it needful to bring in a fierce rush over eighty thousand, failing even then in his purpose? Have we thought enough of the man under whom the future Wellington wished nothing better than to serve?—and about whose “towering fame” the sober historian of the Peninsular War wrote in terms of unstinted praise? Have we thought enough of the man who, while the bravest of the brave, was also the most blameless and the most beloved of men, against whom Detraction had no word to utter, save that he stood up almost too strenuously for his country’s honour, and that he did not accomplish impossibilities? If not, it is surely time that his countrymen should begin to “do him justice!” But for that fatal cannon-ball—who can say?—would Wellington have become the foremost man in Europe, or would he have been second to Moore? It might have been Moore, not Wellington, who turned the tide of Napoleon’s success.[2] It was Moore who stemmed that tide, with his spirited countermarch and splendid retreat, drawing the Enemy after him, until he stood at bay upon the coast, and hurled back the onset of the flower of Buonaparte’s Army.