THE

WE must be allowed to commence our present Number with somewhat of a complaint of our correspondents. The materials of this life have not even reached us yet, though the portrait has been sent, and is by this time engraved, and it is now too late to alter it. It is not the first time that this great inconvenience has happened to us, compelling us to give the portrait in one number, and the life in another, or what is still worse, to insert a brief and hasty sketch. We frequently receive letters of the following kind:

SIR-I had the honour of serving as aide-de-camp to General Abercrombie, and I have no doubt that his life will be very acceptable to his old companions in arms. If you will send to you will receive his portrait for your Engraver, and by the 14th of the month I shall have the honour to send you the materials for his life. I am, Sir, &c.

Upon receiving this promise, the portrait is immediately put into the hands of the Engraver, but the 14th, the 20th, and perhaps the 30th comes, and the materials are not sent,—sometimes on the very day only before the publication. The consequence is, that we are compelled to print the biography, perhaps three or four numbers after the portrait, and to insert a mere temporary sketch that the work may not go forth altogether imperfect.

Our correspondents, therefore, will pardon us for stating, that we have now adopted the decided purpose of never giving out any portrait to the Engraver, till we actually have the materials or life, and therefore they are requested to send them together. The portraits we can usually procure ourselves, and therefore if they will send us the materials, they will be inserted always with all possible speed. By the desire of many of our correspondents, the lectures on the Art of War, the Review of Military Books, and the Obituary, Marriages, &c. will be resumed and given in our next; and I will venture to add, that our Obituary in the next number will give universal satisfaction. We have incurred a very great expence in arranging the preparations for it. It will contain every death in the army THROUGH EVERY

PART OF THE WORLD.

Our Gazettes are now printed immediately from the office, and therefore we presume to say, cannot possibly contain any errors or omissions.

2 U

Lord Wellington.

As the Military Chronicle has now advanced to such an extraordinary sale, (three editions having been printed of some of the numbers), and as I cannot but attribute this sale to the aid it has derived from the most accom plished scholars and gentlemen in the country, which has rendered it beyond all doubt the most polite and gentlemanly work of the day, I deem it an act of justice to express my warm gratitude both to them in particular, and to the army in general. When I have the great pride and pleasure of enumerating amongst these correspondents, Lord Woodhousely, Lieutenant-general Crauford, the late Sir William Myers and his most elegant and accomplished family, the most worthy brother of that great and excellent man General Mackinnon, General Robinson, Major Russel, Major B...., the President of the Royal Academy,—and last, though certainly not least, those ornaments of their sex and nation, who, whilst they have had to lament their private loss in husbands, fathers, and brothers, had the virtuous heroism to sympathize in the triumphs and glory of their country, the British ladies,-amongst whom I cannot deny myself the pleasure of naming, Lady D...., Mrs. Blake, Mrs. V...., three ladies, who by the union of masculine understandings, with all the grace, feeling, and delicacy fo their sex, present, as it were, the form which female virtue is accustomed to wear amongst us; thus reviving the characteristic boast of Rome, that even our women are British, and carry their country in their minds and faces-When, I say, the Military Chronicle has to boast such a list as this, and of many others whom (from some private circumstance) we are not allowed to hold forth to the veneration of their countrymen, will any one feel surprised that we sometimes assume a tone of self-congratulation.

As the numbers of the Chronicle are not before me, I have omitted many ac knowledgments from not having the names present in my memory. In the 7th or 8th number, I believe, will be found a letter of Lord Wellington's, addressed to one of our correspondents, and inserted by his distinct permission in the Military Chronicle. In the 2d number is a letter which we believe ourselves to owe to a nobleman whom no one can mistake. The reader will judge from the intrinsic evidence.

LORD WELLINGTON.

THERE are some actions of such thorough and intrinsic worth in their own essential substance, as to render all praise and comment not merely superfluous, but effectually injurious. It is a just rule, therefore, both in painting and poetry, to exhibit great actions in their simplest forms, and not to detract from the nobler admiration of the thing itself, by diverting and distracting the attention by any ostentatious ornaments. The battle of Salamanca is one of this kind. The best praise and comment of the battle is the simple narrative of it: the whole issue and circumstances of it-the foresight-the promptitude-the preparation and instantaneous execution

Lord Wellington.

are so manifestly and so intelligibly great, that the praise of them could be considered only as one of those futile truisms which elaborately prove or assert acknowledged truths. And herein we may see not merely the justice, but even the emphatic elegance of one of the colloquial terms of our language:"His actions are such as to exceed all praise," is the frequent form of expression in speaking of actions undoubtedly great. And what is this but to say, that the action, in its natural and naked form, is too strongly marked and characterized to require any index of its worth, and that it is only ob scured and enveloped by the superfluous praise.

In what we are about to say, therefore, we have no further purpose than that of exhibiting the action itself before the eyes of the reader. We merely call his attention to a brief historic tablet of what history will engrave in her more durable brass.

I have heard it very justly remarked, that the first and most prominent feature in these accounts is the extraordinary ignorance of Marshal Marmont with respect to the strength and purposes of Lord Wellington. It appears, indeed, from all the concurrent accounts, that for some days previous to the battle Marshal Marmont was manoeuvring under this ignorance, some false reports having led him to the belief that the allies were less in number and strength than was their actual condition; that, under this error, he had actually persuaded himself that they were retreating in terror of him, and therefore that he directed all his manœuvres to interpose himself between them and Salamanca.

This error was the first cause which led to all his misfortunes, and it is one of those examples in modern warfare, which should never be absent from the memory of military men; of the most important value is this knowledge of the enemy's force, and of the gross errors which may be made in this respect in the face of circumstances which should have led them to different conclusions. In the last Russian campaign, the Russians believed Buonaparte to be nearly ruined; to be in the act of retiring upon his own frontier; and they took their own movements accordingly. On a sudden, by the interception of a courier, it was discovered, that instead of being in the act of retreat, he was in the act of surrounding the Russian army, and that their false conceptions of his purposes had already greatly facilitated his plan. A similar error, in another state of things, saved the French army at Eylau. The Emperor Alexander had formed au opinion that the enemy greatly exceeded him in strength and numbers after that sanguinary battle, and under this persuasion, added to the apprehension that their purpose was to surround him, he ordered the hasty retreat of the Russians. What, however, was the actual fact? It was briefly, that the French were themselves retreating with great precipitation, and they only stopped this retreat upon learning that the Russans were flying before them.

The next error of Marmont, that of the extension of his front to his left, and the consequent diminution of the strength of his line, in the proportion to the increase of its length, was the consequence of the same erroneous esti