One of the stock anecdotes about the Duke of Wellington is that when on one occasion some one asked him whether he was surprised at Waterloo, he replied, “No.  I was not surprised then, but I am now.”  We are indebted to Lady Shelley for letting us know what the Duke really thought on this much-debated question.  In a letter written to her on March 22, 1820, he stated, with his usual downright common sense, all that there is to be said on this subject.  “Supposing I was surprised; I won the battle; and what could you have had more, even if I had not been surprised?”

It is known on the authority of his niece, Lady Burghersh, that the Duke “never read poetry,” but his “real love of music,” to which Lady Shelley alludes, will perhaps come as a surprise to many.  Mr. Fortescue, however,[86] has told us that in his youth the Duke learnt to play the violin, and that he only abandoned it, when he was about thirty years old, “because he judged it unseemly or perhaps ill-sounding for a General to be a fiddler.”  The Duke is not the only great soldier who has been a musical performer.  Marshal St. Cyr used to play the violin “in the quiet moments of a campaign,” and Sir Hope Grant was a very fair performer on the violoncello.

It was characteristic of the Duke to keep the fact of his being about to fight a duel with Lord Winchelsea carefully concealed from all his friends.  When it was over, he walked into Lady Shelley’s room while she was at breakfast and said, “Well, what do you think of a gentleman who has been fighting a duel?”

It appears that during the last years of his life the Duke’s great companion-in-arms, Bluecher, was subject to some strange hallucinations.  The following affords a fitting counterpart to those “fears of the brave” which Pope attributed to the dying Marlborough.  On March 17, 1819, Lady Shelley made the following entry in her diary: 

We laughed at poor Bluecher’s strange hallucination, which, though ludicrous, is very sad.  He fancies himself with child by a Frenchman; and deplores that such an event should have happened to him in his old age!  He does not so much mind being with child, but cannot reconcile himself to the thought that he—­of all people in the world—­should be destined to give birth to a Frenchman!  On every other subject Bluecher is said to be quite rational.  This peculiar form of madness shows the bent of his mind; so that while we laugh our hearts reproach us.  The Duke of Wellington assures me that he knows this to be a fact.

Finally, attention may be drawn to a singular and interesting letter from Sir Walter Scott to Shelley, giving some advice which it may be presumed the young poet did not take to heart.  He was “cautioned against enthusiasm, which, while it argued an excellent disposition and a feeling heart, requires to be watched and restrained, though not repressed.”

[Footnote 83:  The Diary of Frances, Lady Shelley (1818-1873).  London:  John Murray. 10s. 6d.]