You have at last appeared in print without any disguise. Had you done so at first it might have spared us both some trouble. I should have paid more deference to your argument and would willingly have corrected any error fairly pointed out. Now having virtually acknowledged yourself the author of the two publications entitled “Strictures” and “Further Strictures,” &c. I will not suffer you to have the advantage of using two kinds of weapons, without making you also feel their inconvenience. I will treat your present publication as a mere continuation of your former two, and then my lord, how will you stand in this controversy?
Starting anonymously you wrote with all the scurrility that bad taste and mortified vanity could suggest to damage an opponent, because in the fair exercise of his judgement he had ventured to deny your claim to the title of a great commander: and you coupled this with such fulsome adulation of yourself that even in a dependent’s mouth it would have been sickening. Now when you have suffered defeat, when all the errors misquotations and misrepresentations of your anonymous publications have been detected and exposed, you come forward in your own name as if a new and unexceptionable party had appeared, and you expect to be allowed all the advantage of fresh statements and arguments and fresh assertions, without the least reference to your former damaged evidence. You expect that I should have that deference for you, which your age, your rank, your services, and your authority under other circumstances might have fairly claimed at my hands; that I should acknowledge by my silence how much I was in error, or that I should defend myself by another tedious dissection and exposition of your production. My lord, you will be disappointed. I have neither time nor inclination to enter for the third time upon such a task; and yet I will not suffer you to claim a victory which you have not gained. I deny the strength of your arguments, I will expose some prominent inconsistencies, and as an answer to those which I do not notice I will refer to your former publications to show, that in this controversy, I am now entitled to disregard any thing you may choose to advance, and that I am in justice exonerated from the necessity of producing any more proofs.
You have published above six hundred pages at three different periods, and you have taken above a year to digest and arrange the arguments and evidence contained in your present work; a few lines will suffice for the answer. The object of your literary labours is to convince the world that at Campo Mayor you proved yourself an excellent general, and that at Albuera you were superlatively great! Greater even than Cæsar! My lord, the duke of Wellington did not take a much longer time to establish his European reputation by driving the French from the Peninsula; and methinks if your exploits vouch not for themselves your writings will scarcely do it for them. At all events, a plain simple statement at first, having your name affixed, would have been more effectual with the public, and would certainly have been more dignified than the anonymous publications with which you endeavoured to feel your way. Why should not all the main points contained in the laboured pleadings of your Further Strictures, and the still more laboured pleadings of your present work, have been condensed and published at once with your name? if indeed it was necessary to publish at all! Was it that by anonymous abuse of your opponent and anonymous praise of yourself you hoped to create a favourable impression on the public before you appeared in person? This, my lord, seems very like a consciousness of weakness. And then how is it that so few of the arguments and evidences now adduced should have been thought of before? It is a strange thing that in the first defence of your generalship, for one short campaign, you should have neglected proofs and arguments sufficient to form a second defence of two hundred pages.
You tell us, that you disdained to notice my “Reply to various Opponents,” because you knew the good sense of the public would never be misled by a production containing such numerous contradictions and palpable inconsistencies, and that your friends’ advice confirmed you in this view of the matter. There were nevertheless some things in that work which required an answer even though the greatest part of it had been weak; and it is a pity your friends did not tell you that an affected contempt for an adversary who has hit hard only makes the bystanders laugh. Having condescended to an anonymous attack it would have been wiser to refute the proofs offered of your own inaccuracy than to shrink with mock grandeur from a contest which you had yourself provoked. My friends, my lord, gave me the same advice with respect to your anonymous publications, and with more reason, because they were anonymous; but I had the proofs of your weakness in my hands, I preferred writing an answer, and if you had been provided in the same manner you would like me have neglected your friends’ advice.
My lord, I shall now proceed with my task in the manner I have before alluded to. You have indeed left me no room for that refined courtesy with which I could have wished to soften the asperities of this controversy, but I must request of you to be assured, and I say it in all sincerity, that I attribute the errors to which I must revert, not to any wilful perversion or wilful suppression of facts, but entirely to a natural weakness of memory, and the irritation of a mind confused by the working of wounded vanity. I acknowledge that it is a hard trial to have long-settled habits of self satisfaction suddenly disturbed,—
“Cursed be my harp and broke be every chord,
If I forget thy worth, victorious Beresford.”
It was thus the flattering muse of poetry lulled you with her sweet strains into a happy dream of glory, and none can wonder at your irritation when the muse of history awakened you with the solemn clangour of her trumpet to the painful reality that you were only an ordinary person. My lord, it would have been wiser to have preserved your equanimity, there would have been some greatness in that.
In your first Strictures you began by asserting that I knew nothing whatever of you or your services; and that I was actuated entirely by vulgar political rancour when I denied your talents as a general. To this I replied that I was not ignorant of your exploits. That I knew something of your proceedings at Buenos Ayres, at Madeira, and at Coruña; and in proof thereof I offered to enter into the details of the first, if you desired it. To this I have received no answer.
You affirmed that your perfect knowledge of the Portuguese language was one of your principal claims to be commander of the Portuguese army. In reply I quoted from your own letter to lord Wellington, your confession, that, such was your ignorance of that language at the time you could not even read the communication from the regency, relative to your own appointment.