“The division had to file across a very narrow bridge to the attack under a fire from the castle and the troops in the covered way. It was ordered to commence at ten o’clock, but by means of fire-balls the formation of our troops at the head of the trench was discovered by the French, who opened a heavy fire on them, and the attack was commenced from necessity nearly half an hour before the time ordered. I was severely wounded in the foot on the glacis after passing the Rivillas almost at the commencement of the attack in the trenches, and met Picton coming to the front on my being carried to the rear. If the attack had not commenced till the hour ordered, he, I have no doubt, would have been on the spot to direct in person the commencement of the operations. I have no personal knowledge of what took place afterwards, but I was informed that after surmounting the most formidable difficulties, the escalade was effected by means of two ladders only in the first instance in the middle of the night, and there can be no question that Picton was present in the assault. In giving an account of this operation, pray bear in mind that he commanded the division, and to him and the enthusiastic valour and determination of the troops ought its success alone to be attributed.
“Yours, &c.
“James Kempt.”
“Colonel Napier, &c.”
The other point to which I would allude is the battle of Salamanca. Mr. Robinson, with his baton of military criticism, belabours the unfortunate Marmont unmercifully, and with an unhappy minuteness of detail, first places general Foy’s troops on the left of the French army and then destroys them by the bayonets of the third division, although the poor man and his unlucky soldiers were all the time on the right of the French army, and were never engaged with the third division at all. This is however but a slight blemish for Mr. Robinson’s book, and his competence to criticise Marmont’s movements is no whit impaired thereby. I wish however to assure him that the expression put into the mouth of the late sir Edward Pakenham is “né vero né ben trovato.” Vulgar swaggering was no part of that amiable man’s character, which was composed of as much gentleness, as much generosity, as much frankness, and as much spirit as ever commingled in a noble mind. Alas! that he should have fallen so soon and so sadly!! His answer to lord Wellington, when the latter ordered him to attack, was not, “I will, my lord, by God!” With the bearing of a gallant gentleman who had resolved to win or perish, he replied, “Yes, if you will give me one grasp of that conquering right hand.” But these finer lines do not suit Mr. Robinson’s carving of a hero; his manner is more after the coarse menacing idols of the South-Sea Islands, than the delicate gracious forms of Greece.
Advice to authors is generally thrown away, yet Mr. Robinson would do well to rewrite his book with fewer inaccuracies, and fewer military disquisitions, avoiding to swell its bulk with such long extracts from my work, and remembering also that English commissaries are not “feræ naturæ” to be hanged, or otherwise destroyed at the pleasure of divisional generals. This will save him the trouble of attributing to sir Thomas Picton all the standard jokes and smart sayings, for the scaring of those gentry, which have been current ever since the American war, and which have probably come down to us from the Greeks. The reduction of bulk, which an attention to these matters will produce, may be compensated by giving us more information of Picton’s real services, towards which I contribute the following information. Picton in his youth served as a marine, troops being then used in that capacity, and it is believed he was in one of the great naval victories. Mr. Robinson has not mentioned this, and it would be well also, if he were to learn and set forth some of the general’s generous actions towards the widows of officers who fell under his command: they are to be discovered, and would do more honour to his memory than a thousand blustering anecdotes. With these changes and improvements, the life of sir Thomas Picton may perhaps, in future, escape the equivocal compliment of the newspaper puffers, namely, that it is “a military romance.”
Quarterly Review.—This is but a sorry attack to repel. “Le jeu ne vaut pas la chandelle,” but “rats and mice and such small deer have been Tom’s food for many a year.”
The reviewer does not like my work, and he invokes the vinous vagaries of Mr. Coleridge in aid of his own spleen. I do not like his work, or Mr. Coleridge either, and I console myself with a maxim of the late eccentric general Meadows, who being displeased to see his officers wear their cocked hats awry, issued an order beginning thus:—“All men have fancy, few have taste.” Let that pass. I am ready to acknowledge real errors, and to give my authorities for disputed facts.
1º. I admit that the road which leads over the Pyrennees to Pampeluna does not unite at that town with the royal causeway; yet the error was typographical, not topographical, because the course of the royal causeway was shewn, just before, to be through towns very distant from Pampeluna. The true reading should be “united with the first by a branch road commencing at Pampeluna.”