Through a casual circumstance, it is said that full praise was not publicly given, at the time, to the regiment commanded by Sir John Colborne, the 52nd, for the particular service rendered by it at the battle of Waterloo. By the independent direction of their leader, the 52nd made a sudden flank movement at the crisis of the fight and initiated the final discomfiture of which the Guards got the sole praise. At the close of the day, when the Duke of Wellington was rapidly constructing his despatch, Colonel Colborne was inquired for by him, and could not, for the moment, be found. The information, evidently desired, was thus not to be had; and the document was completed and sent off without a special mention of the 52nd's deed of "derring do." During the life-time of the great Duke there was much reticence among the military authorities in regard to the Battle of Waterloo from the fact that the Duke himself did not encourage discussion on the subject. All was well that had ended well, appeared to have been his doctrine. He once checked an incipient dispute in regard to the great event of the 18th of June between two friends, in his presence, by the command, half-jocose, half-earnest: "You leave the Battle of Waterloo alone!" He gave £60 for a private letter written by himself to a friend on the eve of the battle, and was heard to say, as he threw the document into the fire, "What a fool was I, when I wrote that!" Since the death of the Duke, an officer of the 52nd, subsequently in Holy Orders,--the Rev. William Leeke--has devoted two volumes to the history of "the 52nd or Lord Seaton's Regiment;" in which its movements on the field of Waterloo are fully detailed. And Colonel Chesney in his "Waterloo Lectures; a Study of the Campaign of 1815" has set the great battle in a new light, and has demolished several English and French traditions in relation to it, bringing out into great prominence the services rendered by Blucher and the Prussians. The Duke's personal sensitiveness to criticism was shewn on another occasion: when Colonel Gurwood suddenly died, he, through the police, took possession of the Colonel's papers, and especially of a Manuscript of Table Talk and other _ana_, designed for publication, and which, had it not been on the instant ruthlessly destroyed, would have been as interesting probably as Boswell's.