History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France from A.D. 1807 to A.D. 1814. By MAJOR-GENERAL SIR W.F.P.  NAPIER, K.C.B., etc.  In Five Volumes, with Portraits and Plans.  New York:  W.J.  Widdleton.

A new edition of the great military history of Sir William Napier, printed in the approved luxurious style which the good examples of the Cambridge University Press have made a necessity with all intelligent book-purchasers, calls at the present time for a special word of recognition.  Of the merits and character of the work itself it is scarcely required that we should speak.  An observer of, and participant in, the deeds which he describes, cautious, deliberate, keen-sighted, candid, and unsparing, General Napier’s book has qualities seldom united in a single production.  Southey wrote an eloquent history of the War in the Peninsula, perhaps as good a history as an author well-trained in compositions of the kind could be expected to produce at a distance.  But that was its defect.  It lacked that knowledge and judgment of a complicated series of events which could be acquired only on the field and by one possessed of consummate military training.  On the other hand, we can seldom look for any laborious work of authorship from a general in active service.  Men of action exhaust their energies in doing, and are usually impatient of the slow process of unwinding the tangled skein of events which at the moment they had been compelled to cut with the sword.  It is by no means every campaign which furnishes the Commentaries of its Caesar.  To Sir William Napier, however, we are indebted for a work which has taken its place as a model history of modern campaigning.  The protracted struggle of the Peninsular War through six full years of skilful operations, conducted by the greatest masters of military science, in a country whose topographical features called out the rarest resources of the art of war, at a time when the military system of Napoleon was at its height, summing up the experience of a quarter of a century in France of active military pursuits,—­the story of sieges, marches, countermarches, lines of retreat and defence, followed by the most energetic assaults, blended with the disturbing political elements of the day at home and the contrarieties of the battle-field amidst a population foreign to both armies,—­certainly presented a subject or series of subjects calculated to tax the powers of a conscientious writer to the uttermost.  To furnish such a narrative was the work undertaken by General Napier.  Sixteen years of unintermitted toil were given by him to the task.  He spared no labor of research.  Materials were placed at his disposal by the generals of both armies, by Soult and Wellington.  The correspondence left behind in Spain by Joseph Bonaparte, written in three languages and partly in cipher of which the key had to be discovered, was patiently arranged, translated, and at length deciphered by Lady Napier, who also