those of their common friends to whom he may chuse to communicate the letters.'-p. 3.

From this it is evident that Mr. Warden is addressing a person who had not expected such a communication, and he accounts to him for his motive in commencing a series of letters so different from what might have been expected. All this is very well: but when the second letter, also dated at sea, came to be fabricated, Mr. Warden had forgot his first professions, and writes as if he were answering the inquiries of a person who had entreated him to give. a daily journal of Buonaparte's proceedings:

·

My dear

Irenew my desultory occupation-la tache journaliere, telle que vous la voulez,' (p. 27)- the daily task which you enjoin me.' Mr. Warden did not recollect that between the first letter at sea and the second letter at sea, he could not possibly have had an answer from his correspondent enjoining the daily task.' In a subsequent letter he falls into the same blunder, by calling Buonaparte the object of his friend's inquisitive spirit,' (p. 93)— and he in consequence gives a description of his person.

In another letter, dated from St. Helena, but without a date of time, there is this passage:

I answered Buonaparte, that there was not, I thought, a person in England who received Sir Robert Wilson, or his companions, with a diminution of regard for the part they had taken in La Valette's business. p. 165.

Now this answer to Buonaparte must have been made some time prior to the 10th of May, 1816, for a subsequent letter states itself to be written after the arrival of the fleet from India in which Lady Loudon was embarked, and this fleet arrived at St. Helena at the time we have just mentioned; when Sir R. Wilson, so far from being in London, enjoying the congratulations of his acquaintance for his success in La Valette's escape, was still a prisoner in the Conciergerie; his sentence was pronounced only on the 24th April; and could not, of course, have been known at St. Helena prior to the 10th of May; so that all Mr. Warden's statement, and Buonaparte's subsequent reply, (which conveys an infamous imputation against Sir Robert,) must be wholly and gratuitously false; nay, what makes the matter quite ridiculous, is that Sir Robert did not, we believe, return to England till after the return of Mr. Warden-he returned indeed before these precious letters from St. Helena were concocted; and Mr. Warden, or the person employed by him to forge the Correspondence, mistook the period at which he wrote for that at which he affected to write.

These are minute circumstances, but it is only by such that imposition can be detected; a liar arranges all the great course

of

of his story, and it is only by dates which he omits, and trifles which he records, that he is ever detected. This original imposture throws a general discredit over Mr. Warden's subsequent relations; some of them may be, and we know are, well-founded; but they are to be credited on better grounds than those of Mr. Warden's veracity. In fact we have heard, and we believe, that he brought to England a few sheets of notes, gleaned for the most part from the conversation of his better informed fellow-officers, and that he applied to some manufacturer of correspondence in London to spin them out into Letters from St. Helena;' a task which, it must be allowed, the writer has executed with some talent, and for which we hope (as the labourer is worthy of his hire) Mr. Warden has handsomely rewarded him.

Mr. Warden says, that in publishing these Letters 'he has yielded, rather reluctantly, to become an author, from persuasion he scarce knew how to resist, and to which he had some reasons to suspect resistance might be vain.' (p. vi.) He consented reluctantly to become an author!—if the letters had been written, he was already an author, though his work was unpublished; the fact is, no such Letters existed. We have also reason to believe that he did not yield reluctantly, but that he had, from the first moment, resolved to publish, and that he received with great dissatisfaction some advice which was given him to the contrary. How he could be forced by an irresistible power to publish, is more than we can comprehend, unless, as we shrewdly suspect, that irresistible power was a talismanic paper inscribed with certain figures of pounds, shillings, and pence, which were at once the object and reward of the imposture.

He affects to write colloquial French, and relates with great effrontery his direct conversations with Napoleon and his suite. The fact is, the surgeon is wholly ignorant of that language; and of this we find positive proof in his own book.

In the first place, no man who understood French could have written the words tâche journalière as he has done; in his mode they mean a spot, and not a task.

In the next place, Mr. Warden lets slip the avowal, (page 130,) that he spoke to Buonaparte by an interpreter, and that this interpreter was the veracious Count de las Cases, a kind of secretary and ame damnée of the Ex-emperor, (who is now said to be under arrest for attempting a secret correspondence,) and who seems to be, of the whole suite, the person who is the most careless of truth, and the most ready to say, not what he believes or knows, but what he thinks most convenient at the moment. This worthy person,' says Mr. Warden, interpreted with great aptitude and perspicuity, and afforded me time to arrange my answers.' Notwithstanding

o 2

this

this avowal, Mr. Warden describes himself as conversing with ease and volubility with Buonaparte, whom he represents as speaking English.

The moment his eye met mine, he started up and exclaimed in English, "Ah, Warden, how do you do?" I bowed in return, when he stretched out his hand, saying, "I've got a fever." I expressed,' &c. (page 131.) And so on for a long conversation, in which the interpreter is entirely sunk. When the Doctor replies, he replies, not like a person who wanted time to arrange his answer, but rather quickly,' p. 135.-and is so far encouraged by the easy communicative manners of the Ex-emperor, (not a word of the interpreter,) that he continues to make his observations without reserve. (page 142.) I was resolved (he says) to speak my sentiments with freedom; and you may think I did not balk my resolution.'

Again,

Here Napoleon became very animated, and often raised himself on the sofa where he had hitherto remained in a reclining posture. The interest attached to the subject, and the energy of his delivery, combined to impress the tenor of his narrative so strongly on my mind, that you need not doubt the accuracy of this repetition of it.'-p. 144. and what follows for four pages is placed within inverted commas, as if Mr. Warden wished us to suppose that he gave the very words of the man.

All these are, we admit, only insinuations and equivocations; but in the second letter there is a direct and palpable falsehood.

Buonaparte is represented as inquiring after the health of Madame de Montholon, and attributing her illness to her horror of the idea of St. Helena-Mr. Warden says he repeated to his doctor the quotation of Macbeth in the following manner:

Can a physician minister to a mind diseased,

Or pluck from memory a rooted sorrow?'

At this time Buonaparte could not have pronounced the three first words of this quotation; he could as well have written Macbeth. Nay, in one of his last interviews, Mr. Warden represents his utmost efforts in English to be a stammering attempt to call Madam Bertrand his love, or his friend.-p. 161.

Mr. Warden says, 'that the British Government proscribed Bertrand from accompanying Buonaparte,' and that Lord Keith took on himself the responsibility of including such an attached friend in the number of his attendants.'-p. 20.-This is notoriously false. Again he says,

A delicacy was maintained in communicating to Buonaparte the contents of the English Journals. That truth is not to be spoken, or in any way imparted at all times. is a proverb which was now faithfully adhered to on board the Northumberland,'—p. 26.

Mr.

Mr. Warden here speaks truly as of himself and his French friends; but it is well known that Sir George Cockburn is as much above any such paltry deceit as is here imputed to him, as he is above giving a person in Buonaparte's situation any intentional offence. The truth, we believe, is, that the newspapers, both English and French, were freely sent to Buonaparte; and if the contents of the former were ever kept from him, it must have been by Las Cases, who was his usual interpreter; and upon whose veracity in this office, so much of Mr. Warden's own credit unfortunately depends.

Mr. Warden affects to relate to us the Abbé de Pradt's famous* account of the interview at Warsaw, and lo! the tall figure who enters the Abbé-Ambassador's hotel wrapped up in fur is-not Caulaincourt-but Cambacérès, poor old gentleman! He cannot even write the name of one of Buonaparte's followers, whom he attended in a dangerous illness, and who studied English under him; he an hundred times calls General Gourgaud, General Gourgond; and lest this should appear an error of the press, he varies his orthography and calls him General Gourgon! (p. 46); but never does he call him by his proper name; Maret, Duke of Bassano, he confounds with Marat, (p. 209); Count Erlon he calls Erelon; and Colonel Prontowski is always Piontowski; Doctor Corvisart is Corvesart (pp. 184. 190), and sometimes Covisart (p. 80); the Baron de Kolli, a Swiss, is metamorphosed into the Baron de Colai (p. 70), a Pole; Morbihan is Morbeau; the Duke of Frioul becomes the Duke of Frieuli:-in short, there is no end to these errors, which prove Mr. Warden to be very ignorant or very inaccurate, or, what we believe to be the real state of the case-both.

Such is the blundering, presumptuous and falsifying scribbler, who has dared to speak of the sensible and modest pamphlet of Lieutenant Bowerbank, as trash which he is ashamed to repeat, and which he wonders that this Review' (which we are sorry to find he calls a respectable work) should condescend to notice.'

He takes upon himself even to assert, that some of the facts quoted in our XXVIIth Number from that pamphlet and other authentie sources, are mere silly falsehoods, and he endeavours to represent Buonaparte as concurring in this assertion.-We rather wonder that Buonaparte did not; it would have been but a lie the more, an additional drop to the waters, another grain of sand to the shores of the ocean; but unluckily for Mr. Warden, the ex-emperor did not take his bait, and only said, with that kind of equivocation which is his nearest advance to truth, Your editors are extremely amusing; but is it to be supposed that they believe what they write?'

* Vide Vol. XIV. Art. XXVII. p. 65.

After

After this detailed exposure of Mr. Warden's ignorance and inaccuracy, it now becomes our duty to say, that though his letters are a clumsy fabrication, and therefore unworthy of credit, yet there are some of his reports which are substantially correct, and which, as we before said, Mr. Warden may have heard from those who had at once the opportunities and the means of holding a conversation with Buonaparte, and who were not obliged to put up, like Mr. Warden, with second-hand stories from M. de Bertrand, General Gourgaud, and the Count de las Cases, who seem, in their conversations with Mr. Warden, to have given a more than usual career to their disposition for fabling; and the simplicity with which this gobemouche seems to have swallowed all those fables must have been at once amusing and encouraging to the worthy trio. They evidently saw that the Doctor was a credulous gossip, who would not fail to repeat, if he did not print, all his conversations with them; and they therefore took care to tell him only what they wished to have known-so that even when he means to speak truth, and does actually repeat what he heard, the substance of his story is generally and often grossly false. A few instances of this we shall now offer to our readers.

Count Bertrand is represented as making very pathetic complaints to Mr. Warden on the needless cruelty of their allotment' (lot). He stated that the ex-emperor had thrown himself on the mercy of England, from a full and consoling confidence that he should there find a place of refuge.'

'He asked, what worse fate could have befallen him, had he been taken a prisoner on board an American ship, in which he might have endeavoured to make his escape. He reasoned, for some time, on the probability of success in such an attempt; and they might now, he added, have cause to repent that he had not risqued it. He then proceeded.→ "Could not my royal master, think you, have placed himself at the head of the army of the Loire? and can you persuade yourself that it would not have been proud to range itself under his command? And is it not possible-nay, more than probable, that he would have been joined by numerous adherents from the North, the South, and the East? Nor can it be denied that he might have placed himself in such a position, as to have made far better terms for himself than have now been imposed upon him. It was to save the further effusion of blood that he threw himself into your arms; that he trusted to the honour of a nation famed for its generosity and love of justice; nor would it have been a disgrace to England to have acknowledged Napoleon Buonaparte as a citizen. He demanded to be enrolled among the humblest of them; and wished for little more than the Heavens as a covering, and the soil of England, on which he might tread in safety. Was this too much for such a man to ask?-surely not.'-pp. 13, 14.

Now as this is a point which affects the national character, and

relates