"He lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him."
That same cloak, in which but a few days earlier, he had visited Roy in the little hut at Lugo—had laid his kind hand upon the boy's arm—had spoken never to be forgotten words of praise—had smiled upon him—
Roy dared not let himself think of all this. Burning, blinding tears forced their way to his eyes—and not to his only,—as he gazed his last upon that perfect face, in its pale, sublime repose.
Moore was carried by the "Officers of the Family," who would allow no other hands to do for him these last sad services. The Burial Service was read by the Chaplain. And what was in the hearts of them all has been told, in words that cannot be improved upon, by that noble Elegy which is Moore's best monument:—
"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 let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him."
"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
Every man in the Army had lost a friend that day; and many a one besides Roy felt with passionate grief that the world, without John Moore in it, would be for him a changed place thenceforward.
Hard things were spoken of him after he was gone; and upbraidings indeed were uttered—not by the 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 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?
¹ By the Rev. C. Wolfe, about 1817.
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?