26th Lord Wellington received the thanks of Parliament for its liberation.

On the 3rd of May, Lord Wellington gained a brilliant victory at Fuentes d'Onoro. By this time he had also triumphed over his English opponents. Many of the leading members of the lower house repudiated, without hesitation, their previously expressed sentiments; and Mr. Whitbread had the magnanimity to write a recantation of his former errors to Lord Wellington himself. Thanks were voted by both houses to his lordship, and his opinion now began to have its just weight, not only with the ministers, but with the English people at large.

He was soon after the siege of Cuidad Roderigo, raised to the Earldom of Wellington, with an increased grant of £2,000. a year.

66 was

The next achievement of the English General was Bajadoz. "When the extent of the night's havoc," says Napier, made known to Lord Wellington, the firmness of his nature gave way for a moment, and the pride of conquest yielded to a passionate burst of grief for the loss of his gallant soldiers.”

Wellington received the thanks of Parliament for this service.

Other triumphs followed-great victories as they are called by an ex parte conventionalism that sinks the murder and the loss-and Wellington received more honor than would have satisfied the most greedy, though he had to contend with more real difficulties than would have confounded the most hardheaded statesman. His army was bankrupt, and his supplies were in constant danger of being cut off by cruisers. The Spanish and Portuguese governments acted with folly and inefficiency, their absurd conduct offering continual obstacles to the prosecution of Lord Wellington's designs. On the 18th of August he was advanced in the peerage by the title of Marquis of Wellington. On the 3rd of the following December he received the thanks of Parliament for the battle of Salamanca, and on the 7th £100,000., to be laid out in the purchase of lands to that value, was voted to him as a reward for his services, and to enable him to support the dignity of his peerage.

On the 1st of January, 1813, he was gazetted to the Coloneley

of the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards, and on the 4th of March was elected a Knight of the Garter.

His subsequent success in France was equally signal. At the close he embarked for England, and arrived at Dover on the 23rd May, 1814. On the 28th he took his seat in the House of Peers for the first time..

On the 12th of the same month, it was moved in the House of Commons, that the sum of £10,000. be annually paid out of the Consolidated Fund for the use of the Duke of Wellington, to be at any time commuted for the sum of £300,000., to be laid out in the purchase of an estate. At the suggestion of Mr. Whitbread, Mr. Ponsonby, and Mr. Canning, the proposed sum was unanimously increased to £400,000., making, in all, half a million granted to his grace..

The peace of Paris was concluded on the 30th, but one more victory remained yet in store for our hero, his antagonist being no other than Napoleon..

The circumstances immediately preceding the memorable battle of Waterloo are familiar to all, from the well known lines of Byron, commencing

"There was a sound of revelry by night."

The crisis of the battle had arrived, and victory seemed almost in the hands of the enemy. The duke was observed to look anxiously at his watch and ejaculated a wish that Blucher would come up with aid. And well he might, for during one whole hour a portion of his army had stood the unabated fire of a park of artillery. At 5 o'clock Bulow arrived with a portion of his corps, which Napoleon quickly cut off from the English army, and at half-past six, on the appearance of forty six thousand men to reinforce the Prussians, Napoleon, still sanguine, threw back half his right wing to keep them in check, and leading 15,000 men to the foot of the hill, he exclaimed to the guards, while his uplifted hand pointed to the English lines," That, gentlemen, is the way to Brussels!" A hearty "Vive l'empereur" was the response, and they mounted the hill to the summit, when they were received by the duke, who in a voice of thunder shouted to the foot guards who were lying down to avoid the fire, "Up guards and at

them!" The effect was electrical, they poured down a volley that swept all before it, and the sun which had just then shone out for the first time, soon sank, and with it Napoleon's fame: his sun had set for ever.

Sincerely do we hope that ghastly sun-smile was prophetic of better things to come. The earthquake, and the fire, and the great and strong wind, are now, we trust, for ever to give way to the small still voice of Peace. England has been mercifully spared the horrors of war for many, many years; and our task is now the far more pleasing one of tracing this great general through other scenes of equal, but more innocent, interest.

Time would fail to tell of all the honors heaped upon the conqueror. Suffice it to say that England proved worthy of herself, on this as on every similar occasion.

The Iron Duke now figures as a statesmen. Born to assume a commanding position wherever he might be placed, his tact and ability in directing the peaceful councils of the nation, were not less eminent than on the field of battle. The earnest straightforward, common-sense, business-like habits of the Duke of Wellington, rendered him exceedingly valuable as a statesman, especially in the Upper House of Parliament, where such peculiar talent is exceedingly rare.

In 1825, when a mania for joint-stock companies seized the public mind, his grace exerted himself greatly to restrain the infatuation of the English capitalists; and, as an acknowledgment of his public services in this respect alone, he was invited to a splendid banquet, and presented with a magnificent silver vase, worth £1,000.

In 1826 the reaction attendant upon this commercial infatuation burst upon the country. The distress was of the severest description. On the 4th of March, the Gazette contained 93 bankrupts. At the Duke's suggestion, small notes were reissued at the Bank of England, and this, joined to the large amount of new coin minted, at last put a stop to the embarrassment.

One of the reforms, with which the Duke of Wellington's name is indissolubly connected, is the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which he triumphantly carried during the

session of 1828, in spite of fierce opposition. Another measure of a similar nature was the Roman Catholic Relief Bill. Having lost office in 1830, he was recalled on the 15th of November, 1832, and at once recommended the appointment of Sir Robert Peel to the premiership.

From this time, without being a member of the Government, his aid was understood to be ever available for ministerial councils. Although not by office one of Her Majesty's advisers, it is an incontrovertible fact that no public character in our history was ever so frequently summoned to give counsel to royalty in cases of emergency.

His death took place at Walmer, at a very advanced age, and his memory will be long cherished by a grateful country. Whether that country has yet arrived at a correct estimate of true greatness, is another question upon which we are not just now prepared to enter. Our feelings are solemnized by this event; and we would rather turn it to account by making it a text from which to preach the weakness of our common humanity and preparedness for our own change, than hang upon it, the peculiar, and perhaps narrow, opinions we may hold upon such subjects.

NATURE AND REVELATION.

Our liability to punishment is discoverable by human wisdom, but the possibility of our escaping it, not without heavenly; and hence there is no life-giving power in the former. It is nothing to me, ye men of science, that ye are ready to instruct me in the motions of stars, that ye will take me with you into the laboratories of nature, and there show me the processes of her mysterious chemistry. I dread to look upon the stars; for I feel that I have made their architect mine enemy: I shrink from the wonders of nature, for I know that I have provoked the mighty Being who controls them. It is nothing, that ye offer to instruct me in the relations of substances; in the connection of cause and effect; in the events of other days; in the principles of jurisprudence. I am a dying creature, yet an immortal; sinful, and nevertheless accountable; and if ye cannot tell me how I may prepare for futurity, how meet death

with composure, and enter eternity with hope, miserable instructors are ye all! And ye cannot tell me. I must turn to a higher teacher, and seek wisdom at a purer source. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," He hath revealed a method of reconciliation, and offers his Spirit to assist us in the availing ourselves of what He hath done for the world. Sunk by nature in a death of "trespasses and sins,” we are both invited and enabled to “walk in newness of life.”

For the wisdom which the Holy Ghost continually imparts to such as submit to his influence, is, from first to last, a quickening, vivifying thing. It makes the believer alive, in the sense of being energetic for God and for truth; alive, as feeling himself immortal; or alive as having thrown off the bondage of corruption; alive as knowing himself "begotten again” "to an inheritance that fadeth not away." I "live,” said the great Apostle, "yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." And life indeed it is, when a man is made "wise unto salvation;" when having been brought to a consciousness of his state as a rebel against God, he has committed his cause unto Christ, "who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification," It is not life, it deserves not the name, merely to have power of moving to and fro on this earth, beholding the light, and drinking in the air. It may be life to the brute, but not to man,-man who is deathless, man who belongs to two worlds; the citizen of immensity; the heir of Eternity. But it is life to spend the few years of earthly pilgrimage in the full hope and certain expectation of everlasting blessedness; to be able to regard sin as a forgiven thing, and death as abolished; to anticipate the future with its glories, the judgment with its terrors, and to know assuredly that He who shall sit upon the throne, and gather all nations before Him, reserves for us a place in those "many mansions,” which He reared and opened through his great work of mediation. It is life to live for eternity; it is life to live for God; it is life to have fellowship with what the eye hath not seen and the ear hath not heard. And there is not one amongst us who may not thus live. There is needed only that, renouncing all wisdom of our own, we come unto God to be taught, and we shall receive the gift of the Spirit, that Spirit which is breath to the soul,