The Press.
London, England, 1857-01-24 00:00:00

lortunt 24, 1857.

does not fairly argue nut the case, and we have
read abler defences of the Duke of Welling-
ton's strategy in the Waterloo campaign.
The following passage, in which Sir F. Head
undertakes to show what Napoleon ought to
have done, is positively ridiculous :
If instead of hurrying on an army of 120,000 men, newly
assembled, unaccustomed to act together, unacquainted
with their officers, and whom he had commanded in person
only one day, to attack a cool and experienced antagonist,
Napoleon had pursued a more cautious plan of defensive
operations ; if, for instance, he had thrown his troops into
the line of frontier fortres"es in his possession, snit if,
instead of risking all by a brilliant coup de-matn, he hail
there patiently awaited the result of that moral, or tospeak
correctly, immoral power within the Parliament of Eng.
land which, though feeble, was boldly and loudly pro.
testing against the injustice of Europe interfering with the
French people in reapp,,inting as their ruler the Demon of
War; no doubt, if Bonaparte had taken such a course as
this. a different result would have ensued. It might have
been a good one—it might have been a bad one ; most
certain it is, however, that no plan could possibly have
ended more fatally for Napoleon's ambition than the one
be voluntarily adopted.

A policy of delay would have been ruinous to
Napoleon. A treaty had been entered into
between England and all the great powers to
destroy Napoleon ; and Sir F Head egre-
giously overrates the force of the Opposition at
that time, which had been weakened by the
defeats of the Grenvilles and Mr. Grattan,
who ardently supported the Liverpool Cabinet
in its determination to crush Bonaparte.
His emphasis about Napoleon commanding
the army "only for one day" is puerile ; and
he forgets that the plea points both ways, for
the Duke of Wellington had never fought a
battle, nor made a previous campaign, with
" the army that fought at Waterloo." They
were new troops, freshly raised, for the Penin-
sular army has been scattered over the globe,
and some of it disbanded. it adds to the
renown of English valour that new troops
could have stood their ground in such glo-
rious style, under the tremendous assaults to
which they were exposed.

We prefer Sir F. Head as a writer of original
books of travel, or of his own personal expe-
riences. As a reviewer or an essayist he is
deficient in circumspectiveness, and his illus•
trations are always to be watched for their
pleasant sophistry. He is extremely clever,
and never fails to entertain ; and be must he
taken for what he really is, one of the most
agreeable light authors who ever catered to a
voracious publia in the "run-and read " age of
literature.

The Letters of Horace lValpole, Earl of Orford.
Edited by Peter Cunningham. Now First
Chronologically Arranged. In Eight Vols.
Vol. I. London : Bentley.
(Second Notice.)

ONE great fault of Mr. Cunningham as an an-
notator is, that he has no fixity of standard
for solving the question as to what he should
cancel or insert. We could give several in-
stances of this fault. Thus (at p. 199) Wal-
pole alludes to " all the blood of all the
" Howards." Upon which we are treated to
the important note:—

A line from Pope.+CUNNINOHAV.
Prodigious ! Surely there need have been
no note, but, if there were, it should be
aorrectly penned. Two feet are wanted before
the quotation could be made " a line from
" Pope," for which the editor should have
written, "from a line of Pope." But mark the
absence of any standard of annotation. In
the last page of the volume Walpole alludes
to Lyttelton's wife, and the annotation runs:—

Lncy Fortescue, sister of Lord Clinton, first wife of Sir
George, afterwards Lord Lyttelton.—W..LeoLs She died
in January, 1747, at the age of twenty nine.—Watnicr.

Au ordinary reader might be far more thankful
if the annotator told him that the lady men-
tioned in the text was the " Lucy " of the
celebrated monody, than ho would bo for the
information that Popo used the phrase about
" all the Howards."

At page 218 Walpole writes, " Shippon was
"in great rage at Murray's apostacy." Mr.
Cunningham subjoins, " From Toryism—
Dov Na." It would have been more correct to
hare written, " From Jacobitism, real or sup-
posed." Shippon himself could scarcely have
becu called a "Tory." He was a Jacobite by