and there they negotiated a capitulation.  They agreed to ransom their property by paying down two million dollars, and by drawing bills for a like sum upon the Spanish treasury, which bills Draper was green enough to accept.  The Spanish Government refused to pay the bills when they had matured, and though Draper entreated the English Ministers to interpose in behalf of himself and his comrades, no interposition 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 and unexampled rapacity, and, having thus signalized themselves as robbers in war, became no less eminent as picture-dealers in peace.”  Was it more