This is not the place for a review of the character and career of our great warrior: in truth, a volume would be too short for the task.

With fine poetic insight, Lord Tennyson has noted in his funeral Ode the qualities that enabled him to overcome the unexampled difficulties caused by our own incompetent Government and by jealous, exacting, and slipshod allies: "Mourn for the man of long-enduring blood, The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute, Whole in himself, a common good." Glory and vexation were soon to be his.

On the 17th he drove the French vanguard from Rolica; and when, four days later, Junot hurried up with all his force, the British inflicted on that presumptuous leader a signal defeat at Vimiero.

So bad were Junot's tactics that his whole force would have been cut off from Torres Vedras, had not Wellesley's senior officer, Sir Harry Burrard, arrived just in time to take over the command and stop the pursuit.

Thereupon Wellesley sarcastically exclaimed to his staff: "Gentlemen, nothing now remains to us but to go and shoot red-legged partridges." The peculiarities of our war administration were further seen in the supersession of Burrard by Sir Hew Dalrymple, whose chief title to fame is his signing of the Convention of Cintra.
By this strange compact the whole of Junot's force was to be conveyed from Portugal to France on British ships, while the Russian squadron blockaded in the Tagus was to be held by us in pledge till the peace, the crews being sent on to Russia.