deemed _any_
Convention necessary or expedient upon the grounds stated in his letter,
are more deeply criminated. But grant, (for the sake of looking at a
different part of the subject,) grant a case infinitely stronger than
Sir Hew Dalrymple has even hinted at;--why was not the taste of some of
those evils, in apprehension so terrible, actually tried? It would not
have been the first time that Britons had faced hunger and tempests, had
endured the worst of such enmity, and upon a call, under an obligation,
how faint and feeble, compared with that which the brave men of that
army must have felt upon the present occasion! In the proclamation
quoted before, addressed to the Portugueze, and signed Charles Cotton
and Arthur Wellesley, they were told, that the objects, for which they
contended, 'could only be attained by distinguished examples of
fortitude and constancy.' Where were the fortitude and constancy of the
teachers? When Sir Hew Dalrymple had been so busy in taking the measure
of his own weakness, and feeding his own fears, how came it to escape
him, that General Junot must also have had _his_ weaknesses and _his_
fears? Was it nothing to have been defeated in the open field, where he
himself had been the assailant? Was it nothing that so proud a man, the
servant of so proud a man, had stooped to send a General Officer to
treat concerning the evacuation of the country? Was the hatred and
abhorrence of the Portugueze and Spanish Nations nothing? the people of
a large metropolis under his eye--detesting him, and stung almost to
madness, nothing? The composition of his own army made up of men of
different nations and languages, and forced into the service,--was there
no cause of mistrust in this? And, finally, among the many unsound
places which, had his mind been as active in this sort of inquiry as Sir
Hew Dalrymple's was, he must have found in his constitution, could a bad
cause have been missed--a worse cause than ever confounded the mind of a
soldier when boldly pressed upon, or gave courage and animation to a
righteous assailant? But alas! in Sir Hew Dalrymple and his brethren, we
had Generals who had a power of sight only for the strength of their
enemies and their own weakness.

Let me not be misunderstood. While I am thus forced to repeat things,
which were uttered or thought of these men in reference to their
military conduct, as heads of that army, it is needless to add, that
their personal courage is in n