resolution even to the death; of gladness in the embrace of death; of weeping over the graves of the slain, by those who had not been so happy as to die; of resignation under the worst final doom; of glory, and triumph, and punishment.  This was the language which we heard—­this was the devout hymn that was chaunted; and the responses, with which our country bore a part in the solemn service, were from her soul and from the depths of her soul.

O sorrow!  O misery for England, the Land of liberty and courage and peace; the Land trustworthy and long approved; the home of lofty example and benign precept; the central orb to which, as to a fountain, the nations of the earth ’ought to repair, and in their golden urns draw light;’—­O sorrow and shame for our country; for the grass which is upon her fields, and the dust which is in her graves;—­for her good men who now look upon the day;—­and her long train of deliverers and defenders, her Alfred, her Sidneys, and her Milton; whose voice yet speaketh for our reproach; and whose actions survive in memory to confound us, or to redeem!

For what hath been done? look at it:  we have looked at it:  we have handled it:  we have pondered it steadily:  we have tried it by the principles of absolute and eternal justice; by the sentiments of high-minded honour, both with reference to their general nature, and to their especial exaltation under present circumstances; by the rules of expedience; by the maxims of prudence, civil and military:  we have weighed it in the balance of all these, and found it wanting; in that, which is most excellent, most wanting.

Our country placed herself by the side of Spain, and her fellow Nation; she sent an honourable portion of her sons to aid a suffering people to subjugate or destroy an army—­but I degrade the word—­a banded multitude of perfidious oppressors, of robbers and assassins, who had outlawed themselves from society in the wantonness of power; who were abominable for their own crimes, and on account of the crimes of him whom they served—­to subjugate or destroy these; not exacting that it should be done within a limited time; admitting even that they might effect their purpose or not; she could have borne either issue, she was prepared for either; but she was not prepared for such a deliverance as hath been accomplished; not a deliverance of Portugal from French oppression, but of the oppressor from the anger and power (at least from the animating efforts) of the Peninsula:  she was not prepared to stand between her Allies, and their worthiest hopes:  that, when chastisement could not be inflicted, honour—­as much as bad men could receive—­should be conferred:  that them, whom her own hands had humbled, the same hands and no other should exalt:  that finally the sovereign of this horde of devastators, himself the destroyer of the hopes of good men, should have to say, through the mouth of his minister, and for the hearing of all Europe, that his army of Portugal had ’DICTATED THE TERMS OF ITS GLORIOUS RETREAT.’