tion could he induce them to make. When Sir William was so
unwise as to run a course of pointed pens with "Junius," that free
lancer, who upset men of all degrees as easily as Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe
unhorsed the knights-challengers in the lists at Ashby, brought up the
Manila business, and, with his usual hardihood, charged his antagonist
with having most dishonorably given up the ransom, and with having sold
his comrades. Sir William, who had volunteered in defence of his friend,
Lord Granby, (the same gentleman who used to figure on sign-boards, and
whose name was then as much in English mouths as General Meade's is on
American tongues to-day,) soon had to fight in his own defence, and he
made a very poor figure in the contest. In a letter from Clifton, to the
printer of the "Public Advertiser," he wrote,--"I here most solemnly
declare, that I never received either from the East India Company, or
from the Spaniards, directly or indirectly, any present or gratification
or any circumstance of emolument whatsoever, to the amount of five
shillings, during the whole course of the expedition, or afterwards, my
legal prize-money excepted. The Spaniards know that I refused the sum of
fifty thousand pounds offered me by the Archbishop, to mitigate the
terms of the ransom, and to reduce it to half a million, instead of a
whole one; so that, had I been disposed to have basely sold the partners
of my victory, Avarice herself could not have wished for a richer
opportunity." Sir William's language is valuable, as showing what sort
of prizes were then in the wheel of Fortune, with military men only to
take tickets. More than one British house of high consideration owes its
affluence to the good luck of some ancestor in the noble art of pillage.
Yet how often do we come across, in English books, denunciations of the
deeds of plunder done by the French in Spain and Portugal! Shall we ever
hear the last of Marechal Soult's Murillos? It was but yesterday that
the Koh-i-Noor was stolen by the English, and added to the crown-jewels
of Great Britain; and it was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851,
where it must have been regarded as a proof of the skill of the
_Chevaliers d'Industrie_. Why it should be lawful and honorable to seize
diamonds, and unlawful and improper to seize pictures, we cannot say;
but Mr. Stirling, in his "Annals of the Artists of Spain," says, "Soult
at Seville, and Sebastiani at Granada, collected with unerring taste