SIR HERBERT MAXWELL tells us in the preface to his Life of Wellington how it occurred to him what a delightful task it would be, "To tell the story of such a life, to trace out the sources of such splendid success, and to make plain the effect upon the British Army and on public life of such a conspicuous example." The modesty of the author has led him to describe his task by an adjective which calls attention to the pleasure it gave him, rather than to the toil. Had Sir Herbert chosen he might fairly have laid claim to the honour of having undertaken one of the heaviest pieces of work which any writer could assail. To execute

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satisfactory sketch of of the Duke's life, though by no means easy, is no heroic feat. The writer knows that he must leave out a great deal, and if he has some critical faculty he can easily distinguish between those parts which he must master thoroughly because he has to expound them clearly, and those which he need only know in a general way for his own guidance, because he must needs pass them over in silence. It is when the life has to be told at

length that the difficulty assumes gigantic proportions.

In one of our oddities of selfdepreciation we, or, to be strictly correct, some of us, had come of late years to think of the career of the Duke of Wellington as colourless, and of him as commonplace. English soldiers have been found to speak of him as little more than a kind of

resolute serjeant, who, if he did win the battle of Salamanca in a superior way, owed his victory to mere luck and the incredible blundering of Marmont. The judgment is igno

minious to human nature. It is painful to think of the stupidity which must lie in our fellow-man, when it is possible for any one to speak in this fashion. There have been lives as full and as varied as Wellington's, perhaps as many as three or even four in the whole history of the world; but in modern times he has had no rival in the scope of his experience and his triumphs-not even in Frederick the Great or in Napoleon. He was a soldier, a civil administrator, a diplomatist, and the pilot of England through a revolution. He served in Holland, in Ireland, in India, in Denmark, in Spain, in France, and in Belgium. As Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Occupation after Waterloo he held France in his hand, and it depended on him, more than on any other man living, to decide whether a great cycle of wars was to be wound up by peace or broken by a mere truce. From the day when his task in Paris was concluded he returned to take his place, "the first by the throne," and to keep it through a series of revolutionary changes which, though bloodless, were not less sweeping than those which fill the years between 1639 and 1688. That they were bloodless was largely due to him and to him as much at least as to any contemporary Englishman it was

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due that we rescued all that could be saved of the ancient constitution. He was never a mere soldier. To him the soldier was one servant of the State with others, and war a means to an end. Whatever he put his hand to he not only did it with all his might, but he did it generally with full success, and never without some measure of victory. It is not creditable to the sober sense on which we pride ourselves that his noble figure has ever appeared to Englishmen to be small beside the melodramatic braggadocio of Napoleon. He cared little enough for the applause of mankind, and therefore did not go about to win it. Larpent has described how he startled all spectators by appearing at a great review after the Emperor's abdication, in the company of foreign generals who were blazing in gold lace and plated with decorations, in his plain blue frock-coat and round black hat. The JudgeAdvocate-General thought this simplicity was deliberate, and that Wellington came unadorned because he knew he could not excel Suchet and the other marshals who were laced even to the seams of their coats. If the Duke thought that to be simple and genuine was the way to win the admiration of mankind he was in error; but he assuredly made no such mistake.

times thirty-four volumes of the memoirs and correspondence of others who are necessary witnesses. His part in the diplomacy of the Holy Alliance, which is but a subordinate passage in his life, cannot be judged without a sound knowledge of European politics. Even his fighting in the Peninsula cannot be estimated by itself; there is need for constant reference to the difficulties created for him by the Regency in Portugal and by the anarchy in Spain, which was passing through the throes of a revolution while, and largely because, foreign invading armies were on her soil. Sir Herbert has been compelled

to omit much. He could not have told all without turning what was meant for a biography of Wellington into a history of contemporary Europe. But he has written by far the most complete biography yet published. He has avoided a mistake which it would have been easy for him to commit, and has not allowed the Duke's fighting to occupy too much place to the detriment of his work as administrator, statesman, and diplomatist. The wars are done with very early in the second volume, and we do not find Wellington's share in the government of England and of Europe dismissed as if it had been the insignificant appendage to his labours as a soldier. Sir Herbert has also the indispensable, and the by no means common, merit of understanding exactly what constitutes a biography; that it is the life of a man, of the working of his mind and character, of his action on others, and of the reaction of surrounding men and circumstances on him. He has very

wisely drawn much on the unpublished correspondence of the Duke with the Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury. Lady Salisbury, if one may judge from Sir Herbert's quotations, was an abler woman than her much

vaunted contemporary the Princess Lieven, and unlike that meddlesome Russian was not a busy woman, a class which Wellington, as well as His Majesty King Charles the Second, did naturally detest. Unlike the King he also avoided them; but when women were clever, and were not consumed with a passion for exercising influence, the Duke would be their very good friend, and would talk to them very freely. Some of the quotations from the Marchioness's papers are among the best of the Duke's sayings.

The reader who comes to this book under the influence of the strange belief that the Duke of Wellington was a commonplace man will be singularly dense if he does not form a different opinion before he lays it down. He will soon be convinced that Arthur Wellesley was one of the most capable Englishmen who ever lived, and then, on comparing our leader with his enemies, that he was distinguished by an extraordinary sanity of genius. Sanity, indeed, is the word which applies most exactly to Wellington, and describes best the sources of his strength. The sane man is he who endeavours above all to see the thing as it is, who measures exactly the conditions of the problem with which he has to deal, and who never strives obstinately for ends which are not attainable. There have been very brilliant men of fine qualities who have wasted themselves on the pursuit of mere delusions. Louis the Fourteenth, with his schemes of universal dominion, was one, and the less famous, but not less clever Marshal Belleisle of the last century, with his plan for parcelling Germany out into four small States to be dominated by France, was another. But the most signal example was Wellington's great opponent Napoleon. Men of that stamp invariably achieve

failure. Louis killed the old French Monarchy; Belleisle ended in the condition of an extinct volcano ; Napoleon died at St. Helena. Belleisle is all but completely forgotten, but the other two continue to impress the world by virtue of the violence which is commonly mistaken for strength. The strong sane men of the order of Wellington do what they aim at because they never attempt the impossible. They may differ by all the wide interval which separates Wellington morally from Frederick the Great, but they have this in common that they chose for their object something which can be reached, and which when acquired can be retained.

The Duke of Wellington defined his own qualities with considerable precision in a phrase which another of his biographers, the Rev. George Gleig, often heard him use. He said that his special talent was rapid and correct calculation, and that if circumstances had not made him a soldier, he probably would have become distinguished as a financier. The rapid and correct calculator, even when he has only to overcome the comparatively easy task of summing up figures, must be a careful observer and have an honest intellect, which need not be extensive, but must be sound. When the factors to be calculated are so complex as are the actions, the motives, and the capacities of men, the intellect required is very great, and the honesty needed is of a far finer quality. "Doth any man doubt," asks Bacon in his Essay on Truth, "that if there were taken out of men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor, shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to them

selves?" These obstacles to the enjoying of truth were never absent from Napoleon's mind, and in the end they were his ruin. On Wellington they never had any hold, and therefore he won because he was in harmony with the nature of things.

The Count de Marcellus, who was in this country as chargé d'affaires at the time when France was about to intervene in Spain for the purpose of releasing Ferdinand the Seventh from the hands of the Cortes, tells a story which illustrates very well the Duke's ingrained habit of looking strictly at facts. The English Ministers of the day, Canning and Liverpool, were very reluctant to allow the intervention, but were not sure that the country was disposed to go to war on such a quarrel. They would willingly have frightened the French Government if they could. Marcellus records that they invited him to a meeting at the Foreign Office, and endeavoured to impress him with the peril of his adventure. One of the methods they adopted was to point out to him that the majority in the French Chamber, in favour of intervention, was dangerously small. The Duke listened with no great attention to their arguments, and to the replies of the Frenchman. At last he laid his hand on the shoulder of Marcellus, and said: "I am not so strong on Parliamentary figures as my colleagues, but I know Spain better than they. on, without delays, without hesitation, and you will succeed. The best majority, take my word for it, is cannon and a good army." Upon this he took up his hat and walked out. Lord Liverpool thought it was the saying of a soldier and not of a statesman; but it was the Duke who was the statesman in that room. Liverpool and Canning, thorough Parliament men, both of them, looked to a majority as the true proof of strength for a government. Wellington knew

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that it mattered little by how many votes the intervention was approved. When once the army was in motion the success of the enterprise would depend on its intrinsic strength and the amount of resistance it was likely to meet. His long familiarity with Spain taught him that the sympathies of the mass of the people were with the King, and not with the Cortes, which owed its predominance to a mutinous army of the worst quality. The French had only to act with vigour, and the power of the Cortes would go down as easily as a castle of cards. So it proved, and the statesmanship of the Duke was vindicated. He looked to the facts

of the case. Canning and Liverpool, going by the rule that the strength of a constitutional government depends on its majority, judged like pedants. They were the victims of false valuations and imaginations as one would. The Duke's was the honest intellect, which saw the thing as it was.

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Wellington's political career home has often been called a failure, and there are those who, though ranking him very high among great Englishmen, have thought it mischievous. But we must distinguish. It is true that he did not succeed in doing what he wished, which was to keep the body politic as he had known it in his youth, unchanged. It is also true that he occasionally acted in a fashion calling for all the justification it can get from his honesty of purpose. His doctrine that the members of a party have only to follow their leaders, and that those leaders are fully entitled to carry on the King's Government by doing the exact reverse of what they had undertaken to do, was manifestly capable of dangerous application, and we have seen it scandalously applied. There was in the history of the course he followed with Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill enough, and maybe more than enough, to

bear out the joker who said that he managed the House of Lords by saying: "My Lords, attention! right about face! quick march!" But the joker is not bound to concern himself with more than the surface. To judge the Duke fairly we must remember that he was the last example among us of the King's servant. His theory of government was essentially the same as Strafford's. He did not think that power ought to come from the people. He was as convinced as Strafford that the people ought to be well governed, but that they were not the best judges of what constituted good government. His view was excellently well expressed by Joseph de Maistre in the FOUR LETTERS ON RUSSIA. The business of government ought to be in the hands of the wellborn and well-trained. The common man is entitled to protection in the pursuit of his business, and to equal justice in the Law Courts, but not to have a voice in the choice of his rulers. The modern Liberal answers that the common man will not get either protection or justice if the wellborn are to give him only what they consider is good for him, and in order that he may be protected against the selfishness of others he must be endowed with the power to rule. Wellington would never have accepted that theory. He would have repressed opposition by force, would have whipped the opposers back to obedience as readily as Strafford, and like him would have thought it a pity if the rod were not so used that it smarted. But he was the wiser man of the two. Strafford held that the King represented the supreme power of every State which in time of peril is entitled to act free from the restraint of law, legibus solutus, as he put it in the phrase he borrowed from the theorists. Because he believed the King ought to have that power,

the great Lord Deputy, being, vehement and able man as he was, something of a pedant, was prepared to act as if the facts of the case were in

harmony with the doctrine. They were not; and Strafford's creed led him to the block, and helped to bring England to the Civil War.

The great Reform agitation passed off peacefully, and it is difficult for us to realise now that within the memory of a few men still living this country was on the very verge of a conflict as violent as the great strife which tore it asunder two hundred years earlier. We have to thank the Duke, not alone but chiefly, that we escaped from what would assuredly have been a disaster. Once more he was saved, and helped to save us, by the sanity of his intellect. Everybody has heard how he said to Croker that he had passed his life in guessing what men were doing on the other side of a hill, and how all the business of life consists in reasoning from what you know to what you do not know. To do that work correctly requires something other than cleverness. It calls for the absolute honesty of mind which allows no false hope, or flattering valuation, or imagination as one would, to colour reality. In 1810 his perfect estimate of the facts enabled him to resist the temptations to fight a battle in order to save Ciudad Rodrigo. They were very strong. Everything that could appeal to the sentiments and to the honour of a gentleman was calling on him to make an effort to save the town and its garrison. Even a very able man of resolute character might have yielded to the pressure of his army, which was eager to fight, and to the fear that he would lose the confidence of his Spanish and Portuguese allies. The Duke felt, as any man of spirit in his position would have felt, how pleasant it would have been to strike