Love and admiration must push themselves out towards some quarter:  otherwise the moral man is killed.  Collaterally they advance with great vigour to a certain extent—­and they are checked:  in that direction, limits hard to pass are perpetually encountered:  but upwards and downwards, to ancestry and to posterity, they meet with gladsome help and no obstacles; the tract is interminable.—­Perdition to the Tyrant who would wantonly cut off an independent Nation from its inheritance in past ages; turning the tombs and burial-places of the Forefathers into dreaded objects of sorrow, or of shame and reproach, for the Children!  Look upon Scotland and Wales:  though, by the union of these with England under the same Government (which was effected without conquest in one instance), ferocious and desolating wars, and more injurious intrigues, and sapping and disgraceful corruptions, have been prevented; and tranquillity, security, and prosperity, and a thousand interchanges of amity, not otherwise attainable, have followed;—­yet the flashing eye, and the agitated voice, and all the tender recollections, with which the names of Prince Llewellin and William Wallace are to this day pronounced by the fire-side and on the public road, attest that these substantial blessings have not been purchased without the relinquishment of something most salutary to the moral nature of Man:  else the remembrances would not cleave so faithfully to their abiding-place in the human heart.  But, if these affections be of general interest, they are of especial interest to Spain; whose history, written and traditional, is pre-eminently stored with the sustaining food of such affections:  and in no country are they more justly and generally prized, or more feelingly cherished.

In the conduct of this argument I am not speaking to the humbler ranks of society:  it is unnecessary:  they trust in nature, and are safe.  The People of Madrid, and Corunna, and Ferrol, resisted to the last; from an impulse which, in their hearts, was its own justification.  The failure was with those who stood higher in the scale.  In fact; the universal rising of the Peninsula, under the pressure and in the face of the most tremendous military power which ever existed, is evidence which cannot be too much insisted upon; and is decisive upon this subject, as involving a question of virtue and moral sentiment.  All ranks were penetrated with one feeling:  instantaneous and universal was the acknowledgement.  If there have been since individual fallings-off; those have been caused by that kind of after-thoughts which are the bastard offspring of selfishness.  The matter was brought home to Spain; and no Spaniard has offended herein with a still conscience.—­It is to the worldlings of our own country, and to those who think without carrying their thoughts far enough, that I address myself.  Let them know, there is no true wisdom without imagination; no genuine sense;—­that the man, who in this age feels no regret for the ruined