facetious anecdote, as Bonaparte seemed to think it, we read the fate that we had escaped. Had nothing occurred to retard our departure from this country, we calculated that the route we had laid down for our daily motions would have brought us to Guadarama (or what was the name of the pass?) just in time to be hanged. Having a British general at our backs with an army of more than thirty thousand effective men, we should certainly have roamed in advance with perfect reliance upon the old British policy of fighting, for which we could never have allowed ourselves to dream of such a substitute as a flight through all the passes of Gallicia on the principle of '_the D---- take the hindmost_.' Infallibly also we should have been surprised by the extraordinary rapidity at that time of the French movements; our miserable shambling mules, with their accursed tempers, would have made but a shabby attempt at flight before a squadron of light cavalry; and in short, as I said before, we should have come just in time to be hanged. And hanged we should all have been: though _why_, and upon what principle, it would be difficult to say; and probably that question would have been left to after consideration in some more philosophical age. You will suppose naturally that we rejoiced at our escape; and so undoubtedly we did. Yet for my part I had, among nineteen-twentieths of joy, just one-twentieth of a lingering regret that we had missed the picturesque fate that awaited us. The reason was this: it has been through life an infirmity of Mr. Wilson's (at least in my judgment an infirmity) to think too indulgently of Bonaparte, not merely in an intellectual point of view, but even with reference to his pretensions--hollower, one would think, than the wind--to moral elevation and magnanimity. Such a mistake, about a man who could never in any one instance bring himself to speak generously, or even forbearingly of an enemy, rouses my indignation as often as I recur to it; and in Professor Wilson, I have long satisfied myself that it takes its rise from a more comprehensive weakness, the greatest in fact which besets his mind, viz. a general tendency to bend to the prevailing opinion of the world, and a constitutional predisposition, to sympathise with power and whatsoever is triumphant. Hence, I could not but regret most poignantly the capital opportunity I had forfeited of throwing in a deep and stinging sarcasm at his idol, just at the moment when we should have been waiting to be turned off. I know Professor Wilson well: though a brave man, at twenty-two he enjoyed life with a rapture that few men have ever known, and he would have clung to it with awful tenacity. Horribly he would have abominated the sight of the rope, and ruefully he would have sighed if I had suggested to him on the gallows any thoughts of that beautiful and quiet Elleray which he had left behind in England. Just at that moment I acknowledge that it would have been fiendish,